Pioneer of the settlement house movement, co-founder of Chicago's famous Hull House, one of the nation's first secular nonprofits; first female American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize; pacifist; feminist; humanitarian; and apostle of tolerance - Jane Addams led a life of stunning generosity and courage in troubled times. This half-life biography, covering the years from her birth in 1860 in rural northern Illinois to the end of her first decade at Hull House, in 1899, tells the story of how a sheltered, educated, wealthy young woman converted her despair over her general uselessness to the world into a life of civic action. Choosing to go beyond family duties, private pleasures and the strict morality of her upbringing, she struggled in her new settlement life to work out responses to issues of the 1890s with many echoes today - the self-absoprtion of the middle class, the widening income gap between rich and poor, the unjust employment conditions faced by working people, the political marginalization of women, the contending values in multicultural neighborhoods, and a presidentially-initiated imperial war. The continuous thread was her interest in the meaning of democracy. The profoundest change was in her relationship to political reform: the book traces her development from an outsider to an activist, from a naive observer to a skilled practitioner, and from theorist about democracy to pragmatist about it's deepest relevance to daily life - in short, her transformation into a citizen.