December 28, 1907  The Mary Crane Nursery on Ewing Street between Halsted Street and Blue Island Avenue is dedicated and Addams joins in the celebration with Hull-House trustee Louise de Koven Bowen; philanthropist Richard T. Crane; Juvenile Court Judge Julian W. Mack; and officials of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society.

March 1908  The Ladies’ Home Journal declares Addams as “America’s foremost living woman.”

June 1908  Addams serves as second vice president of the newly formed League for the Protection of Immigrants, directed by Hull-House resident Grace Abbott.  The League continues the work begun by a committee of the Chicago W.T.U.L. branch which called for protective measures to assure the safety immigrant girls and women making their way from Ellis Island to Chicago.  The I.P.L. shares space with the Juvenile Protective Association at the corner of Halsted Street and Gilpin Place in the Hull-House complex.

June 14, 1909  Addams is elected first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (subsequently known as the National Conference of Social Work).

November 1909  The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, published by Macmillan, confirms Addams’s reputation as a social thinker who understands the attractions—and drawbacks—of urban life for children and young adults.

1909  Addams writes a fundraising appeal, asking the public for financial support to aid the nine thousand men, women, and children who “avail themselves of the educational, civic and social advantages of Hull-House” each week.  In its twentieth year, there are 45 self-supporting residents and 200 volunteer assistants who travel to the settlement each week from other Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs.

November 14, 1909  George Bowman Haldeman dies at the age of 48.  A near recluse in Cedarville, his life was filled with failure, from his student days at Johns Hopkins and Leipzig, to his unsuccessful attempts to marry his stepsister, Jane Addams.

March—December 1910  Addams organizes relief efforts for workers during the Garment Strike called by Sidney Hillman against Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, and attempts to plead their cause to owners Joseph Schaffner and Harry Marx, generous contributors to Hull-House.

June 22, 1910  Addams becomes the first woman awarded an honorary degree in the history of Yale University.  However, while railroad magnate James J. Hill receives the Ph.D., Addams receives a Master of Arts degree, prompting the Boston Transcript to assert that she deserved a doctorate.  John de Koven Bowen, son of Hull-House trustee Louise deKoven Bowen, is a member of the Yale class of 1910.

October 5, 1910  Addams receives an honorary L.L.D. degree from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

November  1910  Macmillan Company publishes Twenty Years at Hull-House With Autobiographical Notes, which quickly becomes an American classic that has never gone out of print.  Addams’s memoir includes drawings by Norah Hamilton, sister of Hull-House resident Dr. Alice Hamilton. Nationally acclaimed photographer Lewis Hine provides images for the American Magazine installments of Addams’s autobiography that appear between April and September 1910.

1911—1914  Addams serves as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and conducts speaking tours throughout the United States, especially along the East Coast, to promote woman suffrage.

January 14, 1912  Addams, a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), presides at a meeting at Hull-House to organize the Chicago chapter.  The N.A.A.C.P. delegates are photographed at the settlement on April 30, 1912, during the fourth annual convention in Chicago.

February 4, 1912  A fire at Bowen Hall (the Woman’s Club) attracts a crowd of Hull-House Neighbors worried about Addams’s safety.  She learns of the blaze while at Mary Rozet Smith’s home on Walton Street, where she has been residing.

April 1912  One year after the Vice Commission of Chicago released its report and recommendations for combating “The Social Evil in Chicago,” Addams publishes A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil.

April 17, 1912  Hull-House resident Julia Lathrop becomes the first woman ever appointed to direct a federal agency, the newly created Children’s Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor.  The high point of her career is the drafting and passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act in November 1921, the first social welfare legislation ever passed in the United States.

June 22, 1912  Addams presides at the opening of the 78-acre Hull-House Bowen Country Club summer camp near Waukegan, Illinois, established through the financial support of Louise de Koven Bowen.

August 7, 1912  Addams seconds Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for President of the United States at the newly formed Progressive Party convention at the Chicago Coliseum.  She writes and campaigns vigorously for the Progressive Party and the cause of woman suffrage.

February 18—July 2, 1913  Addams departs New York aboard the Adriatic, travels extensively in the Middle East and Europe with Mary Rozet Smith, and returns home on the Olympic.

June 17, 1913  Addams delivers a major speech, “The Need of Woman’s Vote,” at the Seventh Congress of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Budapest, Hungary.  While the conference is in session, Addams receives three cablegrams announcing that the state of Illinois has granted suffrage to women, becoming the first state east of the Mississippi to extend the franchise to females.

May 1, 1914  Addams and Smith move into their summer home that they have purchased together at Hull’s Cove near Bar Harbor, Maine, to which they return almost every summer until they sell it in 1932.

January 10, 1915  As the war in Europe rages, Addams and a group of 3,000 women adopt a Women’s Peace Party platform, calling for neutral nations to engage in “continuous mediation.” Addams is elected president of the group.

March 19, 1915  The death of Sarah Alice Haldeman leaves Addams and her brother, John Weber, as the only surviving Addams siblings.

April 28—May 1, 1915  Despite submarine threats, Addams and a party of peace activists travel to The Hague for the International Congress of Women where women representing twelve countries meet in support of world peace.  She is selected as the leader of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, the organization founded at the gathering to actively pursue the peace platform known as the Manifesto that the women from the warring and the neutral countries gathered there produced.

May—June 1915  As an envoy from the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, Addams travels to London, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Rome, Berne, and Paris, presenting the Manifesto and trying to persuade prime ministers, government officials, academics, and ordinary men and women that a conference of neutral nations could bring an end to the war.

July 9, 1915  Addams is hailed as a peacemaker by a crowd of several thousand men and women in New York’s Carnegie Hall.  She tells the audience that hundreds of soldiers now fighting in trenches in Europe are there “against their own will and conscience.”  War correspondent Richard Harding Davis refutes her assertion that French and English soldiers are given liquor before bayonet charges and despite clarifications of her statement, Addams is unable to persuade the American public that the United States “must lead the fight for peace and disarmament.”

November 1915  Addams co-authors Women at the Hague with Emily Greene Balch and Alice Hamilton, recounting the resolutions passed by the International Congress of Women and her travels through war-torn Europe.

January 1916  Addams is treated for tuberculosis of the kidney with diabetic complications.

October 1916  Drawing on her recent travels in Egypt and ideas about the afterlife, Addams publishes The Long Road of Woman’s Memory.  The book includes “The Devil Baby on Halsted Street,” one of the enduring myths she encountered among Italian and Jewish women living in the Hull-House neighborhood.

1917-1918  At the request of the U.S. Food Administration, Addams lectures throughout the United States on food conservation.

April 12 and 14, 1917  Addams gives a statement on conscription and on the Espionage Bill during Congressional hearings by the Committee on Military Affairs and the Judiciary Committee.

June  1917  In speeches delivered in Chicago weeks after the United States declares war against Germany, Addams maintains her convictions as a pacifist—and patriot. However, the Survey refuses to publish her address and she is stung by the loss of support from former Hull-House friends and residents.

March 6, 1918  Addams’s last sibling, John Weber Addams, dies of dementia and chronic nephritis in the Illinois Hospital for the Insane in Watertown, Illinois, where he had been a patient since 1906.

January 1919  Archibald Stevenson includes Addams as a “Racial and Pacifist” on the “Traitors List” he presents to the Overman  Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee investigating German propaganda during the World War.

April 23, 1919  Addams’s stepmother, Anna Hostetter Haldeman Addams, dies at the age of 91.

May 12-19, 1919  The International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace meet in Zurich, Switzerland, and form the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (W.I.L.P.F.).  Addams is elected president by 150 women from sixteen countries and helps negotiate resolutions denouncing the proposed treaty of Versailles and demanding an end to the blockade of Europe, with immediate relief measures for Europe.  However, her attempt to personally present President Woodrow Wilson with the Zurich resolutions fails. When Addams returns home after investigating food conditions in Germany, she faces more criticism from the American public and press.

December 1919—November 1920  Addams testifies before the Chicago Commission on Race Relations about heightened racial and ethnic tensions in the Hull-House neighborhood in the aftermath of the July 1919 Race Riot on the city’s South Side.

January 1920  Addams becomes a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

January 22, 1920  In Chicago, Addams defends the rights of aliens and radicals who are being arrested and deported by the United States government because of their political opinions.  In a  letter to the Chicago Tribune published on February 24, 1920, she challenges the “flagrant misrepresentation” of her views, questioning the arrest of aliens—but not the arrest of men in Chicago who had planted bombs “in order to destroy the homes of colored people or of white men who had rented houses to colored people.”

December 21, 1921  In a scathing editorial, the Chicago Tribune asserts that Addams’s public involvement with W.I.L.P.F. has “spoiled a great humanitarian to become a rather indifferent statesman.”

1922-1923  On her world tour through Asia, large crowds turn out to greet Addams for her role as a peace advocate.

February 1922  In writing Peace and Bread in Time of War, published by Macmillan, Addams explains her pacifism and the backlash she experienced between the time the United States Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917 and the Armistice of November 11, 1918.

June 1923  Addams has a mastectomy in Tokyo, Japan.

April 30, 1924  In welcoming delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams apologizes to women from Europe who might experience “certain currents of intolerance” on the streets of Washington, D.C. Invoking her father, Addams reminds the group assembled that she was raised “in the belief that [Abraham] Lincoln’s kindliness and tolerance and understanding of all men, including his official enemies, represented the highest point of achievement on the American continent.”

1924  Addams supports Progressive Party candidate, Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.,  for

president.

March-April 1925  Addams and Mary Rozet Smith travel in Mexico.

August 1926  Addams has first known angina attack after presiding at the fifth Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Congress, Dublin, Ireland.

January 20, 1927  Chicago civic and religious leaders hail Jane Addams as the “First  Citizen” and Mayor William E. Dever asserts that, “She has done more to promote the real welfare of Chicago than all our political organizations.”

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