As low wages, long hours, and wretched living conditions became increasingly the norm for America's urban industrial workers in the late nineteenth century, many began to see the specter of a permanently oppressed proletariat ruled by a privileged elite. Among those disturbed by this vision was Jane Addams, the daughter of an Illinois banker. In 1889, convinced that the situation demanded more than mere alms-giving, she took up residence in the heart of Chicago's immigrant slums to begin her career as a pioneer in America's settlement movement. Within a decade, her Hull-House establishment was the hub of its community, offering the city's poor a myriad of opportunities for practical and cultural education. Equally important, Hull-House had become a primary instrument for reforms, ranging everywhere from urban sanitation improvements to legal protections for labor.

Sympathetic to many of Addams's causes, George de Forest Brush is thought to have painted this likeness in 1906. Another version of the portrait hangs today at Hull-House, which is now a museum.