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On Jane Addams’s Feminist Pragmatism: Finding Modern Value in Recovering the Sentimental Myth of the Devil Baby

Kristen Renzi

in American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity

What power did Jane Addams see in a group of elderly female Hull-House clients who came searching in 1913 for a purported “Devil Baby”? Kristen Renzi argues that Addams uses the tale as a catalyst ... More

What power did Jane Addams see in a group of elderly female Hull-House clients who came searching in 1913 for a purported “Devil Baby”? Kristen Renzi argues that Addams uses the tale as a catalyst for her depictions of cultures that explicitly challenge the modern tendency to discount the past in the name of progress. Temporally and ideologically, Addams can be situated at modernity’s threshold, for her work exhibits ties to both nineteenth-century femininity and twentieth-century public intellectualism. Through The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916), Addams not only overtly analyzes the ways in which women experience, remember, and give meaning to their gendered realities, but also uses the Devil-baby tale to query her own “threshold” position. Her equal investment in both modern possibilities for women and traditional, explicitly feminine forms of knowledge provides a model of considering a feminist recovery that, far from objectifying relics of the past, demonstrates the contemporary socio-political needs and possibilities that can only be understood through a pragmatic turning backward.Less

Responsible Speech: Rights in a Culture of Obligation

Christopher Capozzola

in Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen

This chapter focuses on civil liberties during World War I. It shows that during America's first world war, a broad but tentative and fragmented coalition developed around the concept of civil ... More

This chapter focuses on civil liberties during World War I. It shows that during America's first world war, a broad but tentative and fragmented coalition developed around the concept of civil liberties, using rights as a weapon of defense. Americans resisted obligation's coercive aspects and gave voice to a politics that imagined the citizen first and foremost as an individual and as a bearer of rights. They formed social networks, voluntary associations, and political institutions dedicated to realizing this vision. Out of this wartime effort emerged the American Civil Liberties Union, modern First Amendment jurisprudence, and understandings of individual rights in popular political culture that would transform American politics in the 20th century. The trial of Jane Addams, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and the Nonpartisan League are discussed.Less

Three Mothers 1860–73

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Jane Addams views herself as a typical child, sharing, for example, the expected tales of how her father helped her in her moments of embarrassment and moral perplexity. But her stories also provide ... More

Jane Addams views herself as a typical child, sharing, for example, the expected tales of how her father helped her in her moments of embarrassment and moral perplexity. But her stories also provide glimpses of the unexpected—most significantly, of the unusual depth of her feelings of inadequacy and of her intense fear of, and fascination with, death. Like every child, Jane Addams had a particular childhood whose influence on her would ramify down the years. The way she treats her parents is also hardly typical. Although she writes a good deal in the book's early chapters about her conversations with her father, she writes nothing at all about her relations with her mother. Her dilemma, in part, was that she had three. In addition to her deceased mother, she had a temporary mother in her oldest sister Mary and, beginning when she was eight, a new permanent mother in her stepmother, Anna Hostetter Haldeman Addams. Her failure to write about her mothers leaves one to puzzle about what she might have said and to consider the possibility that her silence embodied the profoundest truth of all—that she felt motherless most of her life.Less

Fellowship 1892

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Jane Addams's two lectures amounted to the most ambitious writing project she had ever undertaken. She had organized them around the Kantian-Comtean distinction also favored by the author of her ... More

Jane Addams's two lectures amounted to the most ambitious writing project she had ever undertaken. She had organized them around the Kantian-Comtean distinction also favored by the author of her seminary rhetoric textbook, Alexander Bain, between the subjective and the objective. In “The Subjective Necessity of a Social Settlement” she described why she wanted to start a settlement house. In “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement” she treated the facts of the case: what the neighborhood was like and what the settlement did. Although the titles were cumbersome, the distinction they made brought a useful structure to the ideas in “Outgrowths” and her Sunset Club remarks, both of which she borrowed in writing the new speeches. Addams also linked democracy to Christianity. When Christians revealed their love for humanity through their actions, she said, a “wonderful fellowship, that true democracy of the early Church,” arose. In the mid-1880s, reading Mazzini had reminded her of the connection, and he was hardly original in his insight. American Protestant reformers and social thinkers had been pointing out the close ties between democracy and Christianity throughout the nineteenth century.Less

Self-Reliance 1822–60

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

This chapter describes Jane Addams's formative years and how her initial experiences and contemporary developments shaped her future course of actions. Jane Addams was born on September 6, in 1860 ... More

This chapter describes Jane Addams's formative years and how her initial experiences and contemporary developments shaped her future course of actions. Jane Addams was born on September 6, in 1860 Cedarville, Illinois. A small child in a small town in rural Illinois in the 1860s did not need to concern herself with women's rights, African American rights, or immigrant rights. Still, in the future she would need to answer the questions that underlay the argument for such rights. What was a good (female) citizen? Was it someone who was a politician like her father or a good neighbor like her mother? Was it a self-sufficient person or a person committed to a life of dependence and self-sacrifice? Was it someone who knew better than “the masses” or was it someone who thought class standing irrelevant to a person's right to have a public voice? Was it someone of Anglo-Germanic origins or were race and ethnicity irrelevant? The facts of Jane Addams's birth did not portend her fate so much as establish the questions that she would need to answer in her life.Less

Dreams 1873–77

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

This chapter describes how various life events are reflected in Jane Addams's books. The early chapters of Twenty Years at Hull-House are filled with Jane Addams's childhood delight with heroes of a ... More

This chapter describes how various life events are reflected in Jane Addams's books. The early chapters of Twenty Years at Hull-House are filled with Jane Addams's childhood delight with heroes of a certain kind. Caught up in the enthusiasms of her day, she was fascinated by political heroes. Political heroes were heavily featured in the books John Addams paid Jane to read. Indeed, his own political career brought the ideal to life. These were reasons enough for Jane's fascination. Deeper reasons are hinted at in the wheel dream. There was, of course, the problem that most of the political heroes she knew about, whether real or fictitious, were male and she was female. Beneath this gender difference, but linked to it, was the question of whether heroism could only be pursued in the (male) public realm or whether women's private lot of suffering and self-sacrifice was also heroic.Less

Ambition 1877–81

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Jane Addams was clearly worried about how her sex would affect her ability to fulfill her ambition. She believed that women should claim a place for themselves in the “busy, active world” but she ... More

Jane Addams was clearly worried about how her sex would affect her ability to fulfill her ambition. She believed that women should claim a place for themselves in the “busy, active world” but she also worried that being a woman was a liability in that effort. To achieve authority, she argued, woman should add reason, logic, and facts to her resources and study science. Such study would make her a more accurate thinker and more independent. It would also teach her silence and self-denial (revealingly, her logic here is obscure). Most of all, it would allow her “to attain what the ancients called, in Latin, auctoritas, the right of the speaker to make [himself ] heard.” Auctoritas, Addams knew from having read Cicero, was the word ancient Romans used to refer to the respect given to civic leaders. Part of the appeal of the medical degree, it now became clear, was that it would allow her to acquire auctoritas.Less

Culture 1883–86

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Jane Addams's ideas were inspiring her but also blocking her. When she thought of herself as a human being, as the individual whom Mazzini and Tolstoy urged should put “humanity” first, she felt ... More

Jane Addams's ideas were inspiring her but also blocking her. When she thought of herself as a human being, as the individual whom Mazzini and Tolstoy urged should put “humanity” first, she felt eager to pursue her dreams. But when she thought of herself as a woman, the iron curtain of convention closed off her horizon. She needed to understand how convention—her gender role—was holding her back before she could act. There are people who can act instinctively, impulsively, without a rationale, solely on the basis of strong feeling, but Jane Addams was not one of them or, at least, not when she was young. She lacked the strong feelings, for one thing. She needed her mind to motivate her. But she also had a particular relation to ideas. To her they were major forces, either obstacles that stood in her path or resources that fueled her courage.Less

Halsted Street 1889–91

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Jane Addams's distaste for materialism was usually a subtle subtext in her speeches, but it sometimes erupted in uncharacteristically passionate jeremiads. One occurred in 1903, when she declared ... More

Jane Addams's distaste for materialism was usually a subtle subtext in her speeches, but it sometimes erupted in uncharacteristically passionate jeremiads. One occurred in 1903, when she declared materialism to be “a great menace” to the nation and urged others to “arouse high-minded youth of this country against this spirit of materialism.” She penned another in 1904, when she wrote that Chicago's materialism “sometimes makes one obsessed…. One is almost driven to go out upon the street fairly shouting that, after all, life does not consist in wealth, … in enterprise, … in success.” Mostly, however, these feelings operated below the surface, shaping her positions but not her explicit arguments.Less

Claims 1894

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Throughout the fall of 1894, as Addams coped with Hull House's shaky finances, edited Maps, polished her essay on the labor movement and tried to start an essay on the Pullman Strike, she and the ... More

Throughout the fall of 1894, as Addams coped with Hull House's shaky finances, edited Maps, polished her essay on the labor movement and tried to start an essay on the Pullman Strike, she and the rest of the Civic Federation's Industrial Committee organized the arbitration conference. It convened on November 13 of that year at the Woman's Temple Building as the Congress on Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration. The conference was a landmark in the history of the American arbitration movement. In her address to the conference, Addams expressed the same complex assessment of the labor movement, and by implication, the strike, that she had expressed in “The Settlement as a Factor.” She both embraced the Pullman Strike as “a [working people's] revolution” and declared strikes a “belated method of warfare.” Then, grasping the burr of the class divide, she eviscerated it with a bold rhetorical flourish. “We do not believe that the world can be divided into capitalists and laboring men. We are all bound together in a solidarity towards this larger movement which shall enfranchise all of us and give us all our place in the national existence.” This was Addams in her prophetic mode, as she had been with Dewey. In the wake of the Pullman crisis, she was stalwart in her belief in the possibility of unity.Less

Justice 1895

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Writing a speech had focused Jane Addams's mind and helped her complete an intellectual revolution that had long been brewing. Cordelia, the daughter who defied her father, was the key. Able to ... More

Writing a speech had focused Jane Addams's mind and helped her complete an intellectual revolution that had long been brewing. Cordelia, the daughter who defied her father, was the key. Able to identify fully with her, Addams was able to identify fully with the oppressed workers and to see that the ethic of benevolence, whether in its filial, philanthropic, or industrial form, was out-of-date. Having gained a new perspective as one of the oppressed, Addams came to see power everywhere. In “A Modern Lear” she equates the power of the employer with the power of a king, calls the benevolent philanthropist powerful, and describes the father as a dictator. She who had been raised to trust power now saw power's cruel, unjust side. For Jane Addams, the Pullman Strike and the act of writing about it were major milestones on the road to becoming a citizen.Less

THE GENERATIVE ADULT

Dan P. McAdams

in The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By

This chapter describes the psychological concept of generativity and its place in the human life course. Introduced to psychology through the writings of Erik H. Erikson, generativity is an adult's ... More

This chapter describes the psychological concept of generativity and its place in the human life course. Introduced to psychology through the writings of Erik H. Erikson, generativity is an adult's concern for or commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations through parenting, teaching, mentoring, leadership, and engaging in a wide range of behaviors aimed at leaving a positive legacy of the self for future generations. The extensive research literature on generativity is reviewed, and an extensive case study of the life story of one especially generative midlife woman — a mother and nurse — is provided. The woman's life story illustrates six key themes in the redemptive self, themes that are also apparent in aspects of the life stories of American social reformer Jane Addams and former American President Jimmy Carter, as well as in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.Less

Failure 1881–83

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Jane Addams presents her father's decision about how Jane ought to spend her time after 1881 as simply a practical one involving her health, but John Addams also believed that each question of ... More

Jane Addams presents her father's decision about how Jane ought to spend her time after 1881 as simply a practical one involving her health, but John Addams also believed that each question of behavior had a moral dimension. In addressing the subject of how Jane ought to spend the coming year, he had available to him the most powerful argument a father could make to a daughter against pursuing something she desired—that to do so would be selfish, would be caring more for her own happiness than for her family's. Did her father make this second argument? It appears that he did. In the 1890s, after Jane Addams moved to Chicago, she gave a series of speeches at women's colleges about the woman graduate whose family opposed her future plans and who charged her with selfishness for wanting to pursue her dreams. These speeches, searing in their frank portrayal of the graduate's and her family's pain, are too vivid to leave much doubt that she was speaking from first-hand experience.Less

Chicago 1889

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

In February 1889 Jane Addams came to Chicago to join Ellen, who was teaching at the Kirkland School. The previous April they had discussed starting a settlement house; now, ten months later, they ... More

In February 1889 Jane Addams came to Chicago to join Ellen, who was teaching at the Kirkland School. The previous April they had discussed starting a settlement house; now, ten months later, they were doing it. Addams's mood may be gauged from the letters she was sending her sisters, Alice and Mary. She did not step back to comment on the momentous nature of the new undertaking or share her fears or doubts. Instead she filled her correspondence with news of past and future meetings and the names of people she met and the organizations she visited. Already she was fully absorbed in the work. The plan had become more specific. She and Ellen wanted Toynbee Hall, with its classes and clubs, to be their model, and they had embraced the Barnetts' theory that the classes could benefit each other. But they had also decided that their settlement would be “very unlike its English prototype” in certain ways. Three differences were already obvious, all of them adaptations due to circumstance.Less

Character’s Conduct: Spaces of Interethnic Emulation in Jane Addams’s “Charitable Effort”

James B. Salazar

in Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

This chapter takes up the problems of emulation and exemplification in the reform of character by examining Jane Addams's critique and rearticulation of the character-forming effects of the class ... More

This chapter takes up the problems of emulation and exemplification in the reform of character by examining Jane Addams's critique and rearticulation of the character-forming effects of the class contact experienced in traditional charity work. In challenging the gendered assumptions of women's work as philanthropic “stewards of character” and exemplars of middle-class character, Addams was able to capitalize on the power of the charity relation as a scene of interclass and interethnic contact while also extricating it from its emulatory function of character building and from the assimilationist practices of “Americanization” being enacted on Native American reservations, boarding schools, and in the overseas territories of the United States after the Spanish–American War. Addams also stages her critique, forwarded in such works as Democracy and Social Ethics, through a complex refiguring of the literary dimension of her own autobiographical character in Twenty Years at Hull-House. In striking a performative middle ground between an understanding of character as either social inscription or radical self-determination, Addams makes a counterhierarchical notion of interclass and interethnic identification essential to a “Progressive” realization of a pluralist, democratic civic sphere.Less

Democracy 1896–98

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

The place of democracy in Jane Addams's thought during her early years on Halsted Street was, in one sense, constant. She had been referring to the idea in her speeches since 1890—and had always done ... More

The place of democracy in Jane Addams's thought during her early years on Halsted Street was, in one sense, constant. She had been referring to the idea in her speeches since 1890—and had always done so in a way that showed it was centrally important to her. But this constancy was not the whole story. During the same period her thinking about democracy became more complex. At the beginning she had stressed its social side and called Christian fellowship “true democracy”; in 1895, without abandoning her commitment to social democracy, she started to give equal stress to democracy's political side. Although she did not use the word in “A Modern Lear,” she spoke there of the need for the leader to “insist upon consent” and “move with the people” and called for “the emancipation of the worker.” These observations confirm that her concept of democracy now included the workers' understanding of the meaning of social justice and their belief that their political power, both in the workplace and more broadly, was key to its achievement.Less

Room of One's Own

in The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920

Concern for the fate of individual agency and creativity in the emergent corporate political economy as presented by William James is shared by cosmopolitan patriots. During the late nineteenth ... More

Concern for the fate of individual agency and creativity in the emergent corporate political economy as presented by William James is shared by cosmopolitan patriots. During the late nineteenth century, disenfranchised women, African Americans, immigrants, and laborers suffered the brunt of the social and economic shocks wreaked by the nation's industrial transformation. The experience of three cosmopolitan patriots: Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of them who grew up on the margins of Victorian-era America and who, having successfully secured their own economic and political agency, identified their callings in defending their compatriots' freedom to aspire, is examined in this chapter. According to their viewpoints, aspiration did not imply a repudiation of family claims and social stricture; in fact, their public-mindedness rose from their sense of gratitude and indebtedness to their progenitors.Less

The Urban Milieu: Evolutionary Theory and Social Reform in Progressive Chicago

Etienne S. Benson

in Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

This chapter describes the adoption of the concept of environment by urban reformers in the United States between the 1890s and the 1920s. It shows how Jane Addams and other leaders of the settlement ... More

This chapter describes the adoption of the concept of environment by urban reformers in the United States between the 1890s and the 1920s. It shows how Jane Addams and other leaders of the settlement movement drew on the work of theorists of environment such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and on new ideas about biological evolution to develop their own framework for social reform during the heyday of the Progressive movement. The chapter focuses on Addams’s Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago that sought to improve the environments of working-class immigrants. It shows how Addams and her colleagues used the method of the social survey to make manifest the links between the social organism and its environment. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the emergence of the Chicago School of Sociology, which borrowed some of the settlement movement’s methods but rejected its pragmatic combination of reform and research. Chicago School sociologists such as Robert Park, the chapter argues, retained environment as a critical concept but redefined it so as to separate their research on the social environment both from political concerns and from research on the built and natural environments.Less

Crisis 1886–88

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Settlement life reinforced Jane Addams's familiar sense of herself even as it stretched her social horizons. It offered her a way to cross over into a new world while keeping a foot in the old one. ... More

Settlement life reinforced Jane Addams's familiar sense of herself even as it stretched her social horizons. It offered her a way to cross over into a new world while keeping a foot in the old one. The aspect of Toynbee Hall that likely startled Addams the most was its involvement with the trade union movement and its materialistic reform agenda of higher wages and improved working conditions. The Barnetts believed that there was a connection between ending a man's poverty and developing his human potential. As Henrietta Barnett put it in 1884, “Can a man live the highest life when the preservation of his … body occupies all his thoughts—from whose life pleasure is crushed out by ever-wearying work…?” Addams knew little about trade unions and strikes before visiting Toynbee Hall, her main source of information being the generally antistrike stories in newspapers and magazines. That summer she experienced union organizing firsthand when a major strike erupted in the East End.Less

Baptism 1893

in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Between 1892, when she first emerged on the national stage, and 1898, Jane Addams would become increasingly engaged in shaping governmental policy. In retrospect, Addams saw this broadening of her ... More

Between 1892, when she first emerged on the national stage, and 1898, Jane Addams would become increasingly engaged in shaping governmental policy. In retrospect, Addams saw this broadening of her agenda as an inevitable consequence of the times. In Twenty Years at Hull-House she presents herself as “the personality upon whom various social and industrial movements in Chicago reacted.” When she was sixty-nine she recalled the urgency she and others felt. “There was something in [those years],” she wrote, “that was very overwhelming. I am sure if it caught us again it would make us do what we could moment by moment because we felt under pressure to do something.”Less