Who was the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize?

Jane Addams was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the second woman in the history of the award to receive it. She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, and worked for many years to get the great powers to disarm and conclude peace agreements.

In the U.S., Addams worked to help the poor and to stop the use of children as industrial laborers. She ran Hull House in Chicago, a center which helped immigrants in particular.

During World War I, she chaired a women's conference for peace held in the Hague in the Netherlands, and tried in vain to get President Woodrow Wilson to mediate peace between the warring countries. When the U.S. entered the war instead, Jane Addams spoke out loudly against America's involvement. She was consequently stamped a dangerous radical and a danger to U.S. national security.

Addams was critical of the peace treaty that was forced on Germany in 1919, maintaining that it was so humiliating that it would lead to a German war of revenge. At the end of her life, Jane Addams was honored by the American government for all of her peace efforts.