Jane Elizabeth Robbins

Jane Elizabeth Robbins (1860–1946) was an American physician and social worker. She was a pioneer in the settlement house movement, founding the Rivington Street Settlement with Jean Gurney Fine in 1889. Robbins advocated for civic reform and on behalf of residents of tenement housing and immigrant families. She graduated from Smith College and taught obstetrics at the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. She headed settlement houses in New York's Lower East Side, Cleveland, and Baltimore. She worked with the Red Cross and served as a nurse in the Spanish–American War and World War I, later working in Italy and Greece.

Early life and education Jane Elizabeth Robbins was born on December 28, 1860, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, to Harriet (née Welles) and Richard Austin Robbins. Robbins graduated from Smith College in 1883 before moving to New York City to study medicine.

Career Robbins was a pioneer in the settlement house movement in the U.S. She advocated for tenements, civic reform, labor issues, education, and public parks. By September 1889, they had established College Settlement (later known as the Rivington Street Settlement) in a brick building at 95 Rivington Street, just north of the Neighborhood Guild. Robbins served as the settlement's physician-in-residence. Fine served as director of College Settlement until 1892, when Robbins succeeded her, staying in the role of director for five years.

Robbins started her own medical practice in Little Italy around 1891. During the 1894 tailors' strike in New York, Robbins served as a representative of the tailors' interests alongside Josephine Shaw Lowell. She was a nurse during the Spanish–American War in 1898. She worked at the Alta House in Cleveland.

Robbins was part of an influential group of social progressives who argued that public schools should be involved in welfare work. She "wrote that it was necessary for the school to assume a parental role because under modern conditions it was not possible for the poor to protect the young adequately." In 1911, she worked in Brooklyn at the Little Italy Settlement. In 1914, she worked at the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement.

After World War I, Robbins worked with the Red Cross in Italy and in Greece where she assisted in the organization of temporary hospitals. Following the uprising against Turkey, she returned to Greece in 1927 where she helped refugees until 1929.

Robbins died on August 16, 1946, in Hartford, Connecticut.