Born in Grand Island, Nebraska, on November 17, 1878, Grace Abbott graduated from Grand Island College in 1898 and for eight years thereafter taught high school in her native town. During that period she undertook graduate studies at the University of Nebraska in 1902 and at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1904. In 1907 she moved to Chicago and the next year became a resident of Jane Addams╒s Hull-House settlement. She was awarded a Ph.M. degree in political science by the University of Chicago in 1909.
By then she was devoting herself to the work of the Immigrants╒ Protective League, which she helped Sophonisba Breckinridge and others organize in 1908 and of which she became director at that time. Her work with the League led to her involvement in securing protective legislation; to her studies of conditions at Ellis Island (the main point of entry for immigrants, in New York harbor), in Massachusetts, and in 1911 in eastern Europe; to her testimony before Congress against immigration restrictions; and to numerous published articles, a report on The Immigrant in Massachusetts, 1915, and a book The Immigrant and the Community, 1917. During 1910╨1917 she was also on the faculty of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (later the University of Chicago╒s Graduate School of Social Service Administration). In 1917 Abbott joined the staff of the federal Children╒s Bureau at the invitation of its head, Julia Lathrop. She was responsible for enforcement of the Child Labor Act of 1916 until it was declared unconstitutional in 1918. As an adviser to the War Labor Policies Board during World War I, she succeeded in having clauses prohibiting child labor written into all government war contracts even after the federal law was struck down. In October 1919 she returned to Illinois as director of the new Illinois State Immigrants╒ Commission.
The commission was allowed to lapse in 1921, and in August of that year she was named by President Warren G. Harding to succeed Lathrop as head of the Children╒s Bureau. Her major concern during her first years in that post was the administration of the Sheppard╨Towner Act, passed in November 1921, which extended federal aid to states for programs in maternal and infant health care. The aid program was ended by Congress in 1929. Following the declaration of a second federal child-labor law as unconstitutional in 1922, she worked for the adoption of a constitutional amendment on the subject. From 1922 to 1934 she was also an unofficial representative of the United States at the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children. In 1934 Abbott resigned from the Children╒s Bureau and was appointed a professor in the University of Chicago╒s School of Social Service Administration, of which her sister Edith was dean. In 1934╨1935 she helped plan the Social Security system as a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt╒s Council on Economic Security, and she was U.S. delegate to the International Labor Organization in 1935 and 1937. During 1934╨1939 she was editor of The Social Service Review, and in 1938 she published her two-volume work on The Child and the State. Grace Abbott died in Chicago on June 19, 1939. A collection of her papers appeared as From Relief to Social Security in 1941.
