Addams, Jane (1860-1935)

Feminist pragmatist, social settlement leader, and Nobel laureate, Jane Addams was a charismatic world leader with an innovative intellectual and political legacy. She is one of the most important women in American history. From 1890 to 1935, she led dozens of women in sociology, although after 1920, most of these women were forced out of sociology and into other fields, especially social work.

Addams was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. She was profoundly influenced by her father, John Addams, a Hicksite Quaker and state senator, but her mother, Sarah Weber, died when Addams was 2 years old. In 1877, Addams entered Rockford Female Seminary, in Rockford, Illinois. Graduating in 1881, she entered the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, but she fell ill and returned home. In 1883, she traveled to Europe but remained frustrated until she returned in 1887 with her college friend Ellen Gates Starr. After visiting the social settlement Toynbee Hall in London, they found a direction for their lives, and in 1889, they cofounded their social settlement, Hull House, in Chicago.

Addams became a significant figure in an international social movement organized to bring together all classes; social groups; ages, especially the young and the elderly; and the oppressed to form a democratic community of individuals able to articulate and enact their ideals and needs. She powerfully described life in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930). Hull House residents published a groundbreaking sociological text, Hull House Maps and Papers in 1895, predating and establishing the interests of Chicago sociologists, especially in urban sociology.

Addams's combined thought and practice is called feminist pragmatism: an American theory uniting liberal values and a belief in a rational public with a cooperative, nurturing, and liberating model of the self, the other, and the community. In this view, education and democracy are significant mechanisms to organize and improve society, to learn about one's community, participate in group decisions, and become a “citizen.” Women in public life utilize their cooperative worldview to implement democracy. The female world is based on the unity of the female self, the home, the family, and face-to-face interactions with neighbors. Women can lead a new “social consciousness” organized through “social movements in labor, social science, and women,” usually in the modern city. Because women are not full members of the male world, they can, ideally, “challenge war, disturb conventions, integrate industry, react to life, and transform the past.” The modern woman's family claim is built on a “consumer role” that should critique and change industry. These concepts were discussed in several books, including Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). Addams's ideas were implemented through social organizing, protests, and legislation, resulting in the feminist pragmatist state.

After World War I started in Europe in 1914, Addams publicly chose nonviolence over other values and was publicly shunned. The culmination of her ostracism occurred in 1919, when she was targeted by the U.S. government as the most dangerous person in America.

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