Episode Details

Imagine becoming the most admired woman in America, winning a Nobel Peace Prize, and then being booed off the stage at Carnegie Hall, expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and branded a traitor in the national press. That whiplash is the real story of Jane Addams, usually flattened into the dusty "mother of social work" but actually a radical pragmatist who moved into the slums of 19th-century Chicago to fight poverty face to face.

This episode follows the privileged, sickly childhood and the breakdown that closed the door on medicine, the moral crisis at a Madrid bullfight, and the London settlement house that rewired her thinking. It traces how Hull House grew from one decaying mansion into a complex serving 2,000 people a week, treated like a responsive organism that built nurseries and bathhouses as the neighborhood needed them, and it doesn't flinch from the uncomfortable contradiction of her later embrace of eugenics.

• From Lincoln's letter to a lifelong limp: the privilege and pain that shaped her
• Gifted-kid burnout, Victorian-style: the collapse that ended her medical dream
• Toynbee Hall as a startup model: importing the settlement-house idea to Chicago's 19th Ward
• Radical pragmatism: how Hull House pivoted from art lectures to day nurseries and public baths
• The uncomfortable contradiction: her eugenics involvement, and the activist-from-a-distance question it raises today