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