Jane Addams Jane Addams was twenty-nine years old when she founded Hull House on South Halsted Street in Chicago. Her desire to live among the poor and her insistence that settlement house work benefited educated women such as her as well as her immigrant neighbors marked the distance from philanthropy to progressive reform. Her autobiographical Twenty Years at Hull-House was published in 1910. Photo: Jane Addams Memorial Collection (JAMC _8000_0005_0014), Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago, photographer: Max Platz; Book: Newberry Library, Chicago Illinois, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library.