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“Justice for all children is the high ideal in a democracy… We must emancipate children from the industrial load that was put upon their shoulders.”
– Grace Abbott

Grace Abbott’s Story

Grace Abbottwas born in Grand Island, Nebraska on November 17, 1878. Her parents were activists who were involved with the Underground Railroad and active in the women’s suffrage movement. After attending the University of Nebraska and teaching in her hometown, Abbott moved to Chicago, and lived and worked at Hull House, a settlement house founded in 1889 by social reformer Jane Addams. Living among poor immigrant residents of the community, Abbott became an influential advocate for immigrant rights, and served as director of the Immigrants’ Protective League from 1908 to 1917, where she defended asylum seekers from deportation, and lobbied against restrictive immigration policies that excluded non-English speaking immigrants. She was also the official U.S. representative on the League of Nations’ advisory committee on the trafficking of women.

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Abbott, Grace

in: Children's Bureau, Organizations, People

Grace Abbott (1878 – 1939) – Social Work Pioneer, Reformer, Hull House Resident and Chief of the Children’s Bureau

by John Sorensen, Founding Director of the Abbott Sisters Project

“Some ask, ‘Why should anyone seek a part in the struggle to end the injustice and ugliness of our modern life? Why choose the strenuous life?’

“They are the lotus-eaters, who prefer to live in a gray twilight in which there is neither victory nor defeat. It is impossible for them to understand: that to have had a part in the struggle — to have done what one could — is in itself the reward of effort and the comfort in defeat.”
— Grace Abbott, 1930

“To me there was something about Grace Abbott which always suggested Joan of Arc.”
— U.S. Representative Edward Keating, 1939

An Introduction: A Life Among the Shock Troops

During World War I, American newspaper writers coined a provocative expression: “the shock troops.” The term designated those elite soldiers who were being ordered into t

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ABBOTT, GRACE (1878-1939)

Grace Abbott

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Grace Abbott was perhaps the greatest champion of children's rights in American history. She was born (November 17, 1878) and raised in Grand Island, Nebraska. Abbott was part of an accomplished pioneer family. Her father was the first lieutenant governor of Nebraska, her mother was a leader of the early Plains women's suffrage movement, and her sister, Edith, was the first woman in American history to become the dean of a major university graduate school, the University of Chicago. Grace Abbott herself was the first woman nominated for a presidential cabinet post, secretary of labor for Herbert Hoover, and the first person sent to represent the United States at a committee of the League of Nations.

As chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau from 1921 to 1934, Abbott was the highest ranking and most powerful woman in the U.S. government when the Depression hit. She was the only trained social worker at the top political levels in Washington, DC in those disaster-filled days. Accordingly, she exerted a crucial influence on the mome