Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life

 In honor of Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 - May 21, 1935), the world's "best-loved woman."


Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life
by Jean Bethke Elshtain
(Basic Books, 328 pages, $28.00)


Jane Addams was once celebrated as one of America’s greatest women and foremost public citizens. For years, however, this turn-of-the-century pioneer of the settlement house movement, social reformer who influenced every major social improvement between 1890 and 1925, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1931) has been pigeonholed in historical memory as mainly a social worker. A limiting categorization, as Jean Bethke Elshtain asserts in her profound and interpretive Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy.
     Using Addams’s vast and vivid writings—she authored 12 books and more than 500 essays—Elshtain constructs a life of extraordinary vision and accomplishment formed by Addams’s incisive social theory convictions and lifelong practice of “sympathetic understanding.” Elshtain also tracks in detailed, contextualized prose Addams’s pilgrimage to cultural icon of international acclaim, a progression likened to that of her hero, Abraham Lincoln. 
     Born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, Addams, a “morally earnest” schoolgirl, devoured George Eliot’s literature and sought human experience by “ ‘drugging’ ” herself with opium. Later in life her suffragism, pacifistic stance during World War I, and social feminism, which held that “the centrality of family and children in women’s lives”—whether women be married or, like Addams, unmarried—“was … a springboard into wider civic life rather than an inhibition,” led to worldwide veneration and vilification.
     Addams’s groundbreaking achievement as co-founder, with Ellen Gates Starr, of Hull-House in 1889—a Chicago settlement that served as an indispensable communal, cultural, and civic center to its mostly immigrant neighborhood—aimed at shaping a democratic social culture, in which “strong citizens” were created and the full potential of the human being was realized without hegemony and with respect for diversity.
     As Elshtain contends, Addams believed that egalitarian civic society was enriched and lasting social reform was fostered when yearnings for “opportunity” and “solidarity” were satisfied and citizens lived purposeful lives within the community. To that end, Hull-House residents and community members availed themselves of foreign-language interpretation services, the lending library, theater, the “well-baby” clinic, public baths (Chicago’s first), and lectures on art, science, and philosophy, and they found a “ ‘friendly roof’ ” for union organizing.
     Elshtain’s wide-ranging, psychologized rendering awakens readers to the “tough-minded” progressive social thinker and time-and-again self-doubting Jane Addams. Elshtain rekindles Addams’s diverse reputation and grants her her due. Accordingly, a remarkable life is revealed.

                                                                                            – Amy O'Loughlin



(This book review was originally published in American History, June 2002,Vol. 37 Issue 2, p66.)  

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