Jane Addams was a soft-spoken woman from a prosperous family in 1889 she established the nation's first settlement house in a poor Chicago neighborhood in doing so she launched a philanthropic movement that continues to this day Adams and other settlement house founders lived in the house as they found it they taught English provided childcare for working mothers and counseled poor immigrants who were struggling to adapt to city life in a new country the idea behind the settlement house was it was not a charity which was a big departure from previous work by middle-class white women very much like Jane Addams is mother's generation people who started settlement houses thought of the of the people surrounding them as their neighbors not as their beneficiaries the slogan was neighboring with the poor that is instead of this noblesse oblige approach to philanthropy where people with money would go down to poor neighborhoods and sort of tell people what to do the settlement workers decided to live in the neighborhoods of the people they were seeking to help jane addams grew up in rural Illinois her mother died when she was two and she was brought up by her father a prosperous businessman with strong quaker values when she graduated from college she was part of this group of women born in the 1860s and 70s who were called new women who were college educated and at the same time didn't really have careers to go into so Adams made her career helping others she began by acquiring a decaying mansion called Hull House and a neighborhood mainly populated by poor immigrants they come to the United States really with nothing and had moved into conditions that was so different from the mostly rural areas that they we used to whole house offered neighborhood residents an art gallery coffee house gym public kitchen at a music school but Adams realized these social and cultural services had to be supplemented by political activism to truly help the poor she worked to improve education and workplace conditions so the settlement house saw itself as advocating for social change in 1893 Adams her activist friend Florence Kelly and a number of other reformers in Chicago successfully pressed for a law that protected sweatshop workers and banned child labor in Illinois Adam's reform work earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 her success inspired other middle-class college-educated women to found hundreds of settlement houses across the nation their work laid the foundation for the professional field of Social Work in the United States