Social Reformer, Educator, and Author. She is remembered, along with her younger sister, Grace Abbott, as a voice in improving the rights of immigrants and advancing child welfare in the US. The daughter of the first lieutenant governor of Nebraska, she graduated from Brownell Hall in Omaha, Nebraska in 1893 and in 1901 began teaching at the University of Nebraska there. In 1903 she moved to Chicago, Illinois to attend the University of Chicago and graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy Degree two years later. In 1906 she received a Carnegie Fellowship and travelled to England for further study at the University College in London and the London School of Economics where she was influenced by social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb concerning the issue of poverty. While there, she lived for a while in a social reformer's settlement and experienced firsthand the effects of poverty. In 1907 she returned to the US and taught economics for a year at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The following year, she went to Chicago, Illinois to live with her sister, Grace Abbott, at Hull House, a settlement house co-founded in 1889 by social reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. In 1920 she and social reformer Sophonisba Breckinridge assisted in the transfer of the School of Civics and Philanthropy to the University of Chicago, and it was renamed the School of Social Service Administration. In 1924 she became the school's first dean and was the first US woman to become a dean of an American graduate school, serving in that position until 1942. In 1926 she helped to establish the Cook County Bureau of Public Welfare and the following year, she and Breckinridge started the journal "Social Service Review." From 1929 to 1931 she chaired the Committee on Crime and the Foreign Born of the Wickersham National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. 1935 she, along with her sister Grace, helped to draft the Social Security Act which became law in August of that year and was a special consultant to Harry Hopkins, an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A prolific writer, she wrote over 100 books on a variety of topics during her life and published research on several social issues, including "Women in Industry" (1910) and "The Real Jail Problem" (1915). With Breckenridge, she published the studies "The Delinquent Child and Home" (1912) and "Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools" (1917).