Wednesday, December 1
Book Reviews: Jane Addams
Jane Addams:Spirit in Action
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010
By Louise W. Knight
Most social workers who live, went to school,and work in Illinois can probably rattle off some quick facts about Jane Addams. She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, a town just northwest of Rockford, attended the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College), has a tollway named after her (Jane Addams Memorial Tollway,a section of I-90 which stretches from the Tri-State Tollway (I-294) to Rockton Road),and was the founder of Hull House in Chicago.What most of us were not aware of were a range of events during her childhood in Cedarville that shaped the Jane Addams which our profession holds in such high esteem: the death of her mother,Sarah Webber Addams,when Jane was just aged two-and-a-half; the influence of her politician and industrialist father, John Huy Addams, a state senator from 1854–1870; and her brother Weber’s struggle with mental illness. These are events that Louise W. Knightdiscusses in her new biography, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action. This is Knight’s second book on Jane Addams, which chronicles her life from a privileged—albeit tragedy-filled—childhoodto her becoming one of the major symbols of social reform in our profession through her establishment of Hull House as well as a leading female political activist on behalf of women’s suffrage, peace, and other social justice issues.
As Knight notes, for women of Jane Addams’ generation, family duty commonly trumped personal ambitions, which explains why Addam’s original goal of attending medical school was derailed. Nonetheless, using the oratory and organizing skills she learned at Rockford Female Seminary, Addams channeled her ambitions to a life of service.
The perception of Jane Addams usually is one of a very confident, professional woman. The perception was in most cases the reality, but as Knight indicates, Addams struggled as a young women with a great deal of self doubt. In fact, Addams herself describes an early back ailment as a “moral defeat.” It wasn’t until she had an opportunity to travel to Europe, following her father’s death 1n 1881, and became influenced most notably by the writings of Leo Tolstoy and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzani, that she overcame these feelings of self doubt. It was Tolstoy’s book My Religion that introduced her to the idea of nonresistance and helped solidify her conversion to Christianity. Addams subscribed to Mazzini’s argument, “that serving humanity was a morally higher duty than serving one’s family or one’s country that it was a particularly Christian duty to serve humanity….”
The social work profession strongly identifies with Addams’ settlement house work, as well as efforts on the behalf of peace, social justice, and women’s suffrage. What she witnessed in Europe, especially at Toynbee Hall Settlement House in London, enchanted her. Knight notes, “Here was a way to live among the poor that was Christian in motive, did not require her to abandon either gracious living or her love of culture, yet offered ‘universal and democratic fellowship’ of the kind she longed to enjoy.”
Addams related this enchantment to her good friend in Chicago, Ellen Gates Starr, and in 1889 moved to Chicago to launch the plan borrowed and adapted from Toynbee Hall. The plan, namely that “young people with backgrounds like their own would pay rent and board to live at the settlement house for a time , thus becoming settlement residents. As neighbors they would form social ties with working people in the neighborhood, and along with other nonresident volunteers from across the city, would organize classes in their spare time.“ The two purposes of cofounding the settlement house were to: 1) Provide women and men of their generation, overcultured and isolated in their classs, with a way to live up to the high ideals they had been taught, and 2) To repair the damage done to egalitarian social relations by massive industrialization and immigration. Knight’s biography aptly notes that the success of the establishment of Hull House was also enhanced by Addams’s personal wealth, namely an inheritance from her late father. She used much of that wealth to establish Hull House.
Knight illustrates that the settlement house movement was a springboard for Addams’s national, and eventually international, social justice activities. This began with the support of workers in the Pullman Strike of 1893 in Chicago, and lead to support of the first sweatshop law in Illinois, creation of a national body to coordinate work on state labor laws, the organization of women workers, formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, the campaign for women’s sufferage, and Addams’s peace work.
It is really unbelievable to think that much of Jane Addams’s activism took place when the majority of women in the United States did not have the right to vote in most states and no right to vote federally. Although Addams never ran for political office, she was very involved with the 1912 Progressive Campaign of Teddy Roosevelt. The Progressives did not win, but Addams’s foray into formal politics should not have surprised anyone. She inherited the political DNA from her father. If Roosevelt had won, her name had been discussed as a good choice for Roosevelt’s cabinet.
In the last third of the book, Knight sheds light on Addams’ peace activism, her opposition to World War I, and the Women’s Peace Party delegation to the International Congress of Women, which eventually became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. It was this activism that led the United States government to suspect some of her activities. In fact, Knight notes, “Hull House struggled to hold itself together during the war years. The government suspected that some of its immigrant neighbors from Central Power countries were spies…. Many donors were less tolerant and stopped giving because they equated Addams with Hull House.” Addams herself had less income, her unpopularity due to the anti-war activities thus reducing her lecture, magazine article, and book income considerably. Despite her unpopularity during the war years, her view did not change and she eventually won the Noble Price for Peace in 1931.
Addams was challenged by many health problems. In fact, she was unable to travel to Norway to give her Nobel lecture in 1932. She died in Chicago in 1935. Addams advised seven presidents and was the “mother” of a proud and enduring profession. Her life spanned the end of the Civil War, the industrialization of America, the influx of immigrants from central and eastern Europe, one full World War, and the rumblings of the next one.
Knight’s book is a valuable addition and resource to social welfare history. It is also a reminder about the importance of social action and advocacy in our profession. Knight includes a section at the end of the book, “For Further Reading,” and a list of the ten books that Jane Addams authored during her life.
Joel L. Rubin, MSW, CAE, has served as executive director of the 7,000 member Illinois Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) since October 1999. He has over twenty-five years of nonprofit management and fundraising experience including extensive work with boards of directors, committees and volunteers, and advocacy around a wide variety of social work, human service, and international political issues. Joel is a graduate of the Wexner Heritage Fellowship Leadership Program and a current adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Jane Addams College of Social Work as well as Loyola University Chicago School of Social Work.
