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 ne ...