Jane Addams

Jane Addams, c1912. Template:Photo

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a pioneer American settlement worker and founder of Hull House in Chicago, author, pacifist and woman's leader. She was the most prominent woman of the Progressive Era and helped turn the nation to issues of social justice.

Early career

Addams was born in the village of Cedarville, in northern Illinois, on Sept. 6, 1860; her father, a Yankee, was a prominent Republican politician and supporter of Abraham Lincoln. She early on displayed ambition, a charismatic personality, and a strong sense of moral duty. At nearby Rockford Seminary, which she attended from 1877 to 1881, the conscientiousness tinged with rebellion that characterized her career began to appear. Valedictorian and president of her class, she played a leading part in transforming the Congregational finishing school school into a degree-conferring college. She was a voracious reader in history and philosophy, and tried to start an oratory program for women, but it was not welcomed by the men who controlled oratory and debate. Elshtain (2002) emphasizes her religiosity, showing that Addams was influenced by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and tried to imitate Christ through a service ethic.

In 1881 her father died. Eight restless and unhappy years followed in which she underwent painful operations to correct a spinal curvature. In 1883-1888 Addams traveled in Europe seeking a purpose in life. The idea of founding a settlement house for the underprivileged came to her in Spain in 1888. In England she visited Toynbee Hall, London's famous settlement house, and consulted the head resident, Canon Samuel A. Barnett.

Hull House

In September 1889, Addams and a friend, Ellen Gates Starr, moved into an 1850s mansion built by banker Charles Hull, but located in a neighborhood that had become a crowded multi-ethnic slum on the near West Side of Chicago controlled by local political bosses. At one point she ran for Alderman against the local boss, Johnnie Powers, and lost. Hull House, as Jane Addams called it, became America's best known settlement house. Addams used Hull House to generate system-directed change--to keep families safe, community and societal conditions must be improved. Starr and Addams developed three "ethical principles" for social settlements: "to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines." Hull House therefore offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world, in including William Lyon MacKenzie King, a graduate student from Harvard who later became prime minister of Canada. In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology (pioneering in statistical mapping) to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city- and state-wide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women. Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world, and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. Some of the Hull House residents were socialists, but Addams was committed to capitalism and its reform. In 1912 she helped found the Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, even though his platform called for building more battleships.

Emphasis on children

Hull House stressed the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, and fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth. Addams feared that cities and factories were killing the spirit of youth; recreation and play were healthy mediums to channel the spirit of youth. Hull-House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with public baths, a free-speech atmosphere, a gymnasium, a labor museum and playground. They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation and collective action and downplay individualism. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws in Illinois. Addams and her colleagues documented the geography of typhoid fever and reported that poor workers bore the brunt of illness. She identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes. Linking environmental justice and municipal reform, she eventually defeated the bosses and fostered a more equitable distribution of city services and modernized inspection practices. Addams spoke of the "undoubted powers of public recreation to bring together the classes of a community in the modern city unhappily so full of devices for keeping them apart." Addams worked with the Chicago Board of Health and served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America.

World Peace

Addams was a major synthesizing figure in the domestic and international peace movements, serving as both a figurehead and leading theoretician; she was influenced especially by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Addams became an anti-war activist from 1899, as part of the anti-imperialist movement that followed the Spanish-American War. Her book Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) reshaped the peace movement worldwide to include ideals of social justice. She recruited social justice reformers like Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Emily Balch to join her in the new international women's peace movement after 1914. Addams's work came to fruition after World War I, when major institutional bodies began to link peace with social justice and probe the underlying causes of war and conflict. After 1915 Addams, who never married, centered her interests in the peace movement. She was a leader at the International Congress of Women at The Hague, Holland, in 1915 and presided at the first meeting of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1919, which she served as president. She damned war as a cataclysm that undermined human kindness, solidarity, civic friendship, and caused families across the world to struggle. Her In turn her views were denounced by patriotic groups during World War I (1917-18). The WILPF's program of peace and disarmament was characterized by opponents as radical, Communist-influenced, unpatriotic, and unfeminine. Young veterans in the American Legion, supported by some members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the League of Women Voters, confronted the older, better-educated, more financially secure and nationally famous women of the WILPF. The Legion's efforts to portray the WILPF members as dangerously naive females were ultimately successful to working class audiences, but President Calvin Coolidge and the middle classes supported Addams and her WILPF efforts to prohibit poison gas and outlaw war. After 1920, however, she was widely regarded as the greatest woman of the Progressive Era. In 1931 she won the Nobel Peace prize.

Addams' ideals

Addams and her colleagues originally intended Hull House as a transmission device to bring the values of the college-educated high culture to the masses, including the Efficiency Movement. However, over time the focus of Hull House changed from bringing art and culture to the neighborhood (as evidenced in the construction of the Butler Building) to responding to the needs of the community by providing childcare, educational opportunities, and large meeting spaces. Hull-House became more than simply a proving ground for the new generation of college-educated, professional women - it also became part of the community in which it was founded, and its development reveals a shared history. Addams stressed that women--especially middle class women with leisure and energy, as well as rich philanthropists-- had a civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of "civic housekeeping." Addams thereby enlarged the concept of civic duty as part of republicanism to include roles for women beyond republican motherhood (which involved child rearing).

Women's lives revolved around "responsibility, care, and obligation," and this area represented the source of women's power. This notion provided the foundation for the municipal or civil housekeeping role that Addams defined, and gave added weight to the woman suffrage movement that Addams supported. Addams argued that women, as opposed to men, are trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and need to build upon their traditional roles of housekeeping to be civic housekeepers. Enlarged housekeeping duties involved reform efforts regarding poisonous sewage, impure milk (which often carried tuberculosis), smoke-laden air, and unsafe factory conditions. Addams led the "garbage wars"; in 1894 she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of the Chicago 19th ward. With the help of the Hull-House Women's Club, within a year over 1000 health department violations were reported to city counsel and garbage collection reduced death and disease.

Addams had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism, with an emphasis more on duty and less on rights. The two leading perspectives that distinguished Addams and her coalition from the modernizers more concerned with efficiency were the need to extend to social and economic life the democratic structures and practices that had been limited to the political sphere, as in Addams' programmatic support of trade unions; and second, their call for a new social ethic to supplant the individualist outlook as being no longer adequate in modern society.

Addams' construction of womanhood involved daughterhood, sexuality, wifehood, and motherhood. In both of her autobiographical volumes, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), Addams's gender constructions parallel the Progressive-Era ideology she championed. In A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) she dissected the social pathology of sex slavery, prostitution and other sexual behaviors, among working class women in American industrial centers during 1890-1910. Addams's autobiographical persona manifests her ideology and supports her popularized public activist persona as the "Mother of Social Work," in the sense that she represents herself as a celibate matron, who served the suffering immigrant masses through Hull-House, as if they were her own children. Although not a mother herself, Addams became the "mother to the nation," identified with motherhood in the sense of protective care of her people.

Legacy

Addams died on May 21, 1935, in Chicago. Her 12 books include Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), as well as two influential autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930). She wrote over 500 essays, speeches, and other works; A letterpress edition of Addams' letters and publications is underway. Her achievements are commemorated by the Jane Addams College of Social Work, a unit of the University of Illinois, Chicago. Hull House is a museum, located on the university campus. Her reputation declined after 1960 as critics portrayed her an unoriginal racist determined to civilize helpless immigrants. After 1990 the pendulum swung in her favor and numerous favorable biographies have appeared.

Bibliography

Scholarly biographies

• Brown, Victoria Bissell. Title: The Education of Jane Addams: Politics and Culture in Modern America. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 421 pp.
• Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Oxford U. Press, 1973), 339pp, solid scholarship but tends toward debunking
• Diliberto, Gioia. A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams. Scribner, 1999. 318 pp.
• Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life Basic Books: 2002 online edition
• Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. U. of Chicago Press, 2005. 582 pp.; biography to 1899
• Joslin, Katherine. Jane Addams: A Writer's Life. U. of Illinois Press, 2004. 306 pp.
• Linn, James W. Jane Addams: A biography. (1935) 457 pp, by her admiring nephew

Specialized studies

• Alonso, Harriet Hyman. "Nobel Peace Laureates, Jane Addams And Emily Greene Balch: Two Women Of The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom." Journal Of Women's History 1995 7(2): 6-26. Issn: 1042-7961 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Beer, Janet and Joslin, Katherine. "Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil And Selected Short Stories By Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Journal Of American Studies 1999 33(1): 1-18. Issn: 0021-8758 Fulltext: Cambridge journals
• Bryan, Mary Linn McCree, and Allen F. Davis. One Hundred Years at Hull-House (1990), a history of the programs there
• Carson, Minal. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930 (1990)
• Chansky, Dorothy. "Re-visioning Reform," American Quarterly vol 55 #3 (2003) 515-523 online at Project Muse
• Danielson, Caroline Page. "Citizen Acts: Citizenship and Political Agency in the Works of Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Emma Goldman." PhD dissertation U. of Michigan 1996. 331 pp. DAI 1996 57(6): 2651-A. DA9635502 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Dawley, Alan. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003)
• Deegan, M. J. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. (1988)
• Donovan, Brian. White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887-1917. U of Illinois Press. 2006. 186 pp.
• Grimm, Robert Thornton, Jr. "Forerunners For A Domestic Revolution: Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, And The Ideology Of Childhood, 1900-1916." Illinois Historical Journal 1997 90(1): 47-64. Issn: 0748-8149
• Hansen, Jonathan M. "Fighting Words: The Transnational Patriotism of Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and W. E. B. Du Bois." PhD dissertation Boston U. 1997. 286 pp. DAI 1997 57(10): 4511-A. DA9710148 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Jackson, Shannon. Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity U. of Michigan Press, 2000. 384 pp.
• Louise W. Knight, "An Authoritative Voice: Jane Addams and the Oratorical Tradition." Gender & History 1998 10(2): 217-251. Issn: 0953-5233 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Knight, Louise W. "Biography's Window on Social Change: Benevolence and Justice in Jane Addams's 'A Modern Lear.'" Journal Of Women's History 1997 9(1): 111-138. Issn: 1042-7961 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Lissak, R. S. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull-House and the New Immigrants. (1989)
• Ostman, Heather Elaine. "Social Activist Visions: Constructions of Womanhood in the Autobiographies of Jane Addams and Emma Goldman." PhD dissertation Fordham U. 2004. 240 pp. DAI 2004 65(3): 934-A. DA3125022 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Philpott, Thomas. L. The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880-1930. (1991).
• Platt, Harold. "Jane Addams And The Ward Boss Revisited: Class, Politics, And Public Health In Chicago, 1890-1930." Environmental History 2000 5(2): 194-222. Issn: 1084-5453
• Sargent, David Kevin. "Jane Addams's Rhetorical Ethic." PhD dissertation Northwestern U. 1996. 275 pp. DAI 1997 57(11): 4597-A. DA9714673 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Scherman, Rosemarie Redlich. "Jane Addams and the Chicago Social Justice Movement, 1889-1912." PhD dissertation City U. of New York 1999. 337 pp. DAI 1999 60(4): 1297-A. DA9924849 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Schott, Linda. "Jane Addams and William James on Alternatives to War." Journal Of The History Of Ideas 1993 54(2): 241-254. Issn: 0022-5037 Fulltext: Jstor
• Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "'Some of us who deal with the Social Fabric': Jane Addams Blends Peace and Social Justice, 1907-1919." Journal Of The Gilded Age And Progressive Era 2003 2(1): 80-96. Issn: 1537-7814 Fulltext: History Cooperative
• Stebner, E. J. The Women of Hull-House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship. (1997).
• Toft, Jessica and Abrams, Laura S. "Progressive Maternalists and the Citizenship Status of Low-Income Single Mothers." Social Service Review 2004 78(3): 447-465. ISSN: 0037-7961 Fulltext: Ebsco

Primary sources

• Addams, Jane. The subjective value of a social settlement (1892) online
• Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) online at books.google.com online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. Child labor 1905 Harvard Library online
• Addams, Jane. The operation of the Illinois child labor law, (1906) online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. Newer Ideals of Peace (1906) online at books.google.com
• Addams, Jane. National protection for children 1907 online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) online at books.google.com, online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes, 1910 online at books.google.com online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. A new conscience and an ancient evil (1912) online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane; Balch, Emily Greene; and Hamilton, Alice. Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results. (1915) reprint ed by Harriet Hyman Alonso, U. of Illinois Press, 2003. 91 pp. online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916) online at books.google.com online at Harvard Library, also reprint U. of Illinois Press, 2002. 84 pp.
• Addams, Jane. Peace and Bread in Time of War 1922 online edition, online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. My Friend, Julia Lathrop. (1935; reprint U. of Illinois Press, 2004) 166 pp.
• Addams, Jane. Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (1960) online edition
• Elshtain, Jean B. ed. The Jane Addams Reader (2002), 488pp
• Lasch, Christopher, ed. The Social Thought of Jane Addams. (1965).

External links

• film from Library of Congress

---

---