SOURCE: "The Education of Jane Addams," in History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 14, Spring, 1974, pp. 49-67.

Perhaps as a final tribute to a nineteenth century individualism soon to be extinguished by the New Deal, Americans of the late twenties and early thirties frequently amused themselves in endless polls and competitions to find America's greatest men and women. The definitive order of greatness was never discovered, but in every poll Jane Addams did well. Included in Mark Howe's list of six outstanding Americans, she received Good Housekeeping's seal of approval as the greatest living American woman. But in 1933 the National Council of Women failed her. They declared her the second greatest American Women. First was Mary Baker Eddy.¹ Jane Addams, who treasured such symbols such of fame, well have felt considerable pique at being so linked with the founding mother of Christian Science. The two women certainly appear very different types. Where Mrs. Eddy achieved power through establishing a church, Jane Addams, except for one brief episode, was never involved in organised religion; where Mrs. Eddy exploited the world of the spirit, Jane Addams consciously entered the grubby world of the slum; where Mrs. Eddy sought to cure bodies through faith, Jane Addams' solution was better housing, higher wages, and better garbage disposal. Later historians have reinforced the contrast. Some have viewed Jane Addams as an energetic feminist, which Mrs. Eddy decidedly was not; Christopher Lasch, in the most widely accepted interpretation, has seen Jane Addams as the first of a new class, the intellectuals, whose animus was a revolt against middle class gentility and particularly against the constrictive atmosphere of the 19th century family.² Mrs. Eddy for all her interest in the mind, was no modern intellectual, nor did she reject the family.

It is against such interpretations that this paper is leveled. In my view the National Council of Women may have spoken truer than they realized by joining Mrs. Eddy and Jane Addams. For Jane Addams' career was shaped by the same problem that impelled Mrs. Eddy: How did an ambitious egotistical woman in 19th century America break through the incredibly limited bounds which the domestic piety tradition had established for women. Woman's sphere was the home and family, but achievement could only be won in the society outside; woman's nature was to be self-sacrificing, where achievement seemed to require self-assertion; and woman was seen as the keeper of things spiritual, while achievement apparently had to be won in the material world. Mrs. Eddy's solution was to elevate the religious definition of women and create her own church. For Jane Addams that option was out. Not only had Mrs. Eddy already fashioned a monopoly in the field, but Darwin and the growing secularisation of society made a competing spiritual enterprise increasingly less viable. Jane Addams had to find an alternative outlet for her ambition, and the solution which she found goes a long way to explain the position of women in 20th century America. For, as the National Council of Women unwittingly revealed, it was a solution that bore haunting similarities with that of Mary Baker Eddy.

The problem as faced by Jane Addams involved three determining forces. The first was the traditional definition of woman, the ideology of domestic piety. Here her conditioning was early and severe. Born in Illinois in 1860, she was sent at the age of 17 to Rockford Seminary in her home state. Rockford was begun in 1847 by Congregational and Presbyterian pastors as a female seminary distinct from the degree-giving men's college of Beloit. Its conservative religious aims were solidly instituted by its first head, Anna P. Sill, who had come west after an awakening in the New York revivals of 1831 to sacrifice herself for Christian service. Rockford conceived of its aim as "to develop moral and religious character in accordance with right principles, that it may send out cultivated Christian women in the various fields of usefulness." Those fields were clearly prescribed. Rock-ford girls were to be "Christian Mothers and Missionaries for the Evangelization of the World." Christian instruction and worship was frequent and intense; and an ethic of "self-denying benevolence toward all" was firmly in-stilled. For those who would become mothers and wives rather than missionaries, special skills were needed. The curriculum aimed "to combine, to a limited extent, domestic and industrial training with the intellectual culture imparted by classical and literary study; realizing that the chief end of women's education is not simply to shine in society, but to elevate and purify and adorn the home." The dominant ethos of Rockford Seminary then was the domestic piety tradition. Most of Jane Addams' classmates did indeed become either mothers or missionaries; and the emotional core of its ideology—the belief in a missionary spirit of self-sacrificing altruism, the praise of motherhood and family became one of the defining terms of her future life.³

The second determinative influence of her life, and one that pointed in a very different direction, came from the active achieving world of men—through the example of her father. Jane Addams' mother had died in infancy, and although her father remarried when Jane was eight, she was never at all close to her stepmother. Instead, she writes of her father, "I centred upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits." John Addams became the model, the superego for his daughter. It was a strong model. He had moved from Pennsylvania to Illinois in 1844, and through hard work and shrewd business skill had established a successful flourmill. He came to personify for Jane the activism of the West, the striving will of the selfmade man, and, in her own words, "the sturdy independence of the pioneer." In addition, John Addams was a public figure, for many years a state senator, and as an early Illinois Republican a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. As a child Jane was very conscious of the two pictures of Lincoln in her father's bedroom, and his carefully kept packet of letters from Lincoln each beginning "My dear double D'ed Addams." "For one or all of these reasons," she writes, "I always tended to associate Lincoln with the tenderest thoughts of my father." In her mind the two Illinois pioneers fused into a powerful image and example of Civil War heroism, of public-spirited achievement.⁴

In the context of Rockford Seminary in the 1870's the force of her father's example was crucial. It gave her the strength to resist the evangelical pressures of Rockford. John Addams never joined a church and he never had Jane baptised. But he did teach Sunday school, and it was he who first drew his daughters into "the moral concerns of life." Her father became in a sense, both Jane's priest and her God. It was his wrath, not God's, that she feared when she committed some childish misdemeanour. Her father's code of ethics became her religion.⁵ The challenge of Rockford's Christian indoctrination brought this to consciousness. In her letters to her friend Ellen Gate Starr, written while at Rockford, she agonizes over her religious state. She knows that she ought to believe in Christ but finds she cannot. "I have been trying an awful experiment. I didn't pray, at least formally, for about three months, and was shocked to find that I feel no worse for it.… I feel happy and unconcerned and not in the least morbid." She has to conclude that "Christ don't help me in the least," and has to make do with the creed "ever be sincere and don't fuss." Instead of reading the Bible, she turns to Carlyle, and finds in his praise of the hero a religious inspiration to search for moral perfection which accords well with her father's example.⁶ Religion becames not a matter of Christian dogma, but of becames ethics in the service of man. This humanistic conclusion was important. It closed off church missionary work as a career option, and, of more significance, it implied a challenge to the evangelical and narrowly Christian assumptions that lay behind the domestic piety tradition.

The third great social influence in Jane Addams' life was a changing mood in women's education during the 1870's.⁷ Increasingly arguments were heard that women should not simply attend seminaries for training in the social graces and the Christian virtues of motherhood. Instead they should attend degree-giving colleges and have an education that would tune the intellect. Vassar, Smith and Wellesley were the institutional expression of this new climate of opinion. John Addams, once a defender of Susan B. Anthony before the Illinois legislature and long an advocate of greater rights for women, gave cautious approval to Jane's interest in the movement. She had initially hoped to go to Smith, but once at Rockford, and very much against Anna Sill's opposition, she led the fight to transform the school from a seminary to a college. When that fight succeeded Jane Addams became Rockford's first B.A. She began to see science, that traditionally masculine subject, as the great means of expanding women's mission. She founded a scientific society, spent her vacation with her brother in pressing plants and stuffing birds, and a year after leaving Rockford presented the college with $1000 for the purchase of scientific books.⁸ In her graduating essay Jane Addams took the theme of Cassandra and the female fate "always to be in the right, and always to be disbelieved and rejected." But Jane suggested a solution "There is a way opened, women of the 19th century, to convert your wasted force to the highest use … only by the accurate study of at least one branch of physical science can the intuitive mind gain that life which the strong passion of science and study feeds and forms."⁹ Science was the path to new territories for women. Superficially this mood may appear to have offered real opportunities for women's liberation. Could not Jane Addams, guided by the active public career of her father, detached from the evangelical ethos, and armed with the weapons of intellect, launch an open attack on the whole doctrine of a women's sphere? Could not she begin to claim true equality with men? Perhaps, but hardly likely. For the more one examines this educational movement in the 1870's, the more its conservative animus becomes apparent. It was in no sense an attack on the domestic piety tradition. It was merely believed that women would carry out their spiritual and cultural mission more effectively with the aid of a true college education. Smith's motto expressed it perfectly, "Add to your virtue, knowledge." In that atmosphere then an attack on the old doctrines was never really a live option for Jane Addams. Unwittingly she slipped into a course that would be crucial for 20th century women. She would not satisfy her yearnings for an active and intellectual life through rejecting the doctrine of spheres. She would simply expand that doctrine to accommodate her growing ambition. Her attitude was summed up in a speech given at her class exhibition in 1880. The exhibition itself was seen as proof of women's new intellectual confidence, and Jane's decision to speak about it in public was seen as subversive radicalism by the earnest Miss Sill. The sense of exciting new possibilities echoes through the speech. In welcoming visitors to the first Junior exhibition, Jane Addams claims, "The fact of its being the first, seems to us a significant one, for it undoubtedly points more or less directly to a movement which is gradually claiming the universal attention. We mean the change which has taken place during the last fifty years in the ambition and aspirations of women; we see this change most markedly in her education. It has passed from accomplishments and the arts of pleasing, to the development of her intellectual force, and her capabilities for direct labor." Then, however, she continues, the modern woman "wishes not to be a man, nor like a man, but she claims the same right to independent thought and action … We, then, the class of 1881 in giving this our Junior exhibition, are not trying to imitate our brothers in college; we are not restless and anxious for things beyond us, we simply claim the highest privileges of our time, and will avail ourselves of its best opportunities. But while on the one hand, as young women of the 19th century, we gladly claim these privileges, and proudly assert our independence, on the other hand we still retain the old ideal of womanhood—the Saxon lady whose mission it was to give bread unto her household."¹⁰ The "on the one hand and on the other" expressed the strained compromise achieved by Jane Addams as she graduated from college in 1881. Her father had provided her with a model of pioneer activism and an ambition for heroic public achievement of Lincolnesque proportions. From the new mood in women's education she had won a confidence that education and especially science would win new respect for the female spirit. But this larger vision was always to be contained within the narrow confines of woman's traditional sphere. Jane still clung tenaciously to the Rockford view that woman's chief obligations were to the home and family, that woman's character was spiritual and selfabnegating. It was the effort to embody these somewhat contradictory demands in some vocational form which shaped the pattern of Jane Addams' subsequent career.

Just how contradictory those demands were, was painfully revealed in the 8 years after she left college. She found herself caught between the intellectual achieving world of men, and the maternal spiritual world of women. Access to the first was harshly cut off in the summer of 1881 with the death of her beloved father. Gone was her model, her cue for achievement. And in her one brief effort at a professional career, as a student at the Women's Medical School at Philadelphia, she dropped out ignominiously after seven months of misery. Options in the female world were similarly closed off. After an operation to cure the spinal problems she had suffered from childhood, she sadly learnt that she could never have children; and three years later in 1885 she turned down the offer of marriage of her stepbrother George Haldeman. Jane would never be a wife or mother. Her very femininity was thrown in doubt. Yet other traditional female roles were tried and found wanting. Launched upon the genteel waters of Baltimore society, she found it mindless and insipid. She was too intelligent and ambitious to live as a polished adornment. Twice she set off on the grandest of grand tours in a frantic search for refinement and culture. She studied over 50 Gothic cathedrals, traipsed through endless art galleries, attended the opera, and politely practised her German, Italian and French. All this was appropriately spiritual and feminine, and it had intellectual attractions of a type, but it was so passive, so private. It provided no opportunity for the dramatic public involvement for which Jane yearned. She began to feel "a sense of futility, of misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation would not in the end bring either solace or relief."¹¹ Slowly Jane herself came to the realisation that her constant depression and invalidism was not physical, but psychological: the natural consequence of passivity, the lack of an appropriate role. Cut off by her female nature from the professions and the world of business, rejecting out of ambition and intellectual conviction the old female options of marriage, missionary work or society lady, Jane Addams found herself without a viable career. She was caught, sick and inactive, between the two worlds.

This dark night of the soul ended after 8 years in 1889 when Jane Addams and her close Rockford friend Ellen Gates Starr established the first American settlement house in the 19th ward of Chicago. She was quite frank that her basic interest in this new venture was less to aid the immigrants around her than to cure her own malaise. Ellen Starr wrote to her sister, "Jane's idea which she puts very much to the front and on no account will give up is that it is more for the benefit of the people who do it, than for the other class. She has worked that out of her own experience and ill health … Nervous people" concluded Miss Starr, "do not crave rest, but activity of a certain kind."¹² And this was the first great function in personal terms of Hull-House, as they called their settlement. Whether out delivering babies, or reading to children in kindergarten, or organising the community's garbage disposal, Jane found herself perpetually involved, perpetually active. Her health improved dramatically. The "mere passive reciptivity" from which she had suffered for eight years was replaced by "the solace of daily activity." Jane Addams revelled in the continual contact with poverty-stricken immigrants, for at least on a vicarious level it allowed her to share the race life, to participate in the starvation struggle. At last, she felt, she was reliving the active pioneer life of her father. Not simply were the people around her immigrants and therefore pioneers, "so like the men and women of my earliest childhood," but she herself was in a sense a pioneer in a new social frontier. Even the name "settlement" itself conjured up this vision of herself as a western frontiersman, repeating her father's initial struggle with life.¹³

Second, Hull-House satisfied in vocational terms Jane Adams' desire to use the educational skills and intellectual powers upon which she had placed such store. The Settlement she said, "is a protest against a restricted view of education, and makes it possible for every educated man or woman with teaching faculty to find out those who are ready to be taught."¹⁴ Reading classes and university extension courses were started, and Hull-House residents conscientiously led the 19th ward through their own college program in Greek and Latin, in the Florentine painters and in Shakespeare. Julia Lathrop even dragged bewildered immigrants through Jowett's Plato. Lectures with prominent academics were instituted, a library established, and for ten years there was a summer school at Rockford. College education had discovered a use. Even Jane's trips to Europe suddenly came to have a new meaning. She had deliberately chosen residence in an immigrant area, partly to give a vocational purpose to her long and patient learning of German and Italian, and partly because her European travel would allow her to understand the people around her. Art and culture too had new uses. They could bring spiritual values to the materialistic world of the slum. The first addition to Hull-House was an art gallery, where the residents were careful to show "only pictures which combine, to a considerable degree, an elevated tone with technical excellence," and a circulating library of suitable prints was instituted. It gave Jane Addams great pleasure to know that "within a short walk from Hull-House a little parlor has been completely transformed by the Fra Angelico over the mantle and the Lucca Dell Robbias on the walls, from which walls the picture scarfs and paper flowers have fallen away." Even the tasteful decorations of Hull-House itself—its oriental rugs, its piano, its marble statues, its etchings, its corinthian pillars—could now be seen, not as the useless ostentation of cultivated women, but as things "helpful to the life of mind and soul," an infusion of spiritual values into the benighted world of the tenement house.¹⁵ Further, through its regular lectures and public discussions, Hull-House attracted to it many of the noted intellectuals of the Anglo-American world. People like John Morley, Henry George, Fredrick Harrison, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsey McDonald, and the local Chicago luminati John Dewey, George Mead, F. L. Wright, and Clarence Darrow all visited Hull-House in the 1890s. Confident that she was bringing knowledge and culture to the people, Jane Addams could satisfy her intellectual yearnings through creating her own "salon in the slum."¹⁶

Hull-House gave Jane Addams an active life. It gave her an intellectually invigorating life. But most significant of all it gave her a woman's life, one that well suited the Rockford alumna. Hull-House was consciously conceived of as a home. The immigrants around her were alternatively Jane's "Family" or her "guests." All the initial activities of Hull-House were seen in these terms. First was a kindergarten and soon followed children's clubs and a day nursery. Hull-House was filled with an endless chorus of children who came to think of Jane as their new mother. A public kitchen and coffee house were started, then a public dispensery of drugs and finally a public bath house. All the facilities of the traditional home were extended into society on a public basis. The 19th ward became Hull-House's family. Even the emotional function of the home was repeated. Just as the 19th century home was seen as a warm and comforting refuge from the harsh world of business and of the city, so Jane Addams welcomed people to Hull-House on exactly such terms. Indeed in its emotional demands upon her, Hull-House called forth all the values of the maternal and missionary spirit. Settlement work was a career of altruistic service, and as Jane Addams viewed it, it required qualities of sympathy and self-abnegation. She explicitly denied that she had come into the immigrant quarters to impose her own values or control the lives of the people around her. She came simply to respond sympathetically and with natural womanly emotion to the problems which the neighborhood, her children, threw up. Working people, she said, "require only that their aspirations be recognized and stimulated, and the means of attaining mem put at their disposal."¹⁷ Jane Addams set out to be the perfect mother of her immigrant family.

In a large part however Jane Addams also saw her role as "mother superior." The religious values of Rockford and the domestic piety tradition found a natural expression in Hull-House. There is some evidence that one of the models for Hull-House was the monastery, a community of love standing out against the cruel world; there is stronger evidence that a leading example was the missionary school to which so many of Jane Addams' women friends had already given their lives. Certainly she explicitly claimed that Hull-House was in the tradition of the early Christians and embodies "a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity."¹⁸ In slightly self-conscious manner she immediately joined the local congregational church, and each evening would gather the household for prayers and bible-readings. Before long she was somewhat embarrassed to find herself officiating at funerals and confessions. But such religious activity was carried out less in the dogmatic spirit of a Christian mission than in the atmosphere of the religion of humanity. During the late 80's, probably through George Eliot's example, Jane Addams had discovered Comte and Positivism. In later years Comte's famous concept of the priesthood of intellectuals came to be significant to her, but at this point she was particularly attracted by his concept of the religion of humanity, a religion which substituted for Christian worship practical service in the cause of man. An ethic of altruism, Comte argued, would replace the egotistical values of business, and in this transformation women would play a special role as examplars and guides. Comte provided the rationalisation for a religious attitude she had learned from her father. As for so many people of this generation, so for Jane Addams, Positivism served to legitimise a move from Christianity to social service. With the ideological backing of the religion of humanity she could still conceive of her function in religious terms, as the 19th century View of women demanded, yet occupy all her energies in benevolence towards man rather than in Christian dogmatising. After several years at Hull-House explicitly Christian activities ended. The prayer meetings and bible-readings died out, and Jane stopped going to church. Her sense of feminine identity was fully satisfied through the religion of humanity.

Hull-House fulfilled Jane Addams' identity as a woman in one final sense. Hull-House was always conceived of as a women's institution. Initially there was no expectation that men would live there, and although as the settlement expanded men did take up residence, the leading and charismatic figures were always women—the two founders, Jane herself and Ellen Starr, and that trio of strong women, Alice Hamilton, Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop. The settlement's most active supporters were nearly all rich leisured women like Mary Wilmarth, Mrs. J. T. Bowen, and Ethel Dummer, and the largest most enterprising club, and ever Jane Addams' favorite, was the Hull-House Women's Club. The settlement carried a distinctly feminine atmosphere. In more personal terms, as at the Henry Street settlement in New York, so at Hull-House there are strong indications of lesbian relationships. Jane Addams herself was clearly in love with Ellen Starr when they set up Hull-House together in 1889. By the mid 90's she had transferred her affection to Mary Rozet Smith. Their constant companionship, Jane's frequent visits to Mary's gracious mansion in Chicago, the ardent letters and sentimental love poems, all attest to the emotional depth of their attachment. In all but name it was a marriage. The existence of such a relationship reveals strikingly how alienated Jane Addams was from the masculine world and its values; and how strongly femi-nine were the attitudes implicit in Hull-House.

So well had settlement work fulfilled Jane Addams' various needs—her yearning for action, her desire to use her education, and her demand for a traditional female identity—that one might have imagined her continuing the rest of her life at Hull-House as the mother of the 19th ward. What disturbed the equilibrium and led to a change in public posture was first her gnawing ambition, her continued longing to emulate her father in larger public service and greater burdens of self-sacrifice; and second the arrival at Hull-House of Florence Kelley simultaneously with the onset of the 1893 depression. Florence Kelley, though a woman with children to prove it, was no precious cultivated lady trying to bring motherhood and culture to immigrants. A cool professional with a degree in economics from Zurich, a former Marxist and translator of Engels, she brought to Hull-House the stout conviction that what the American poor needed was not more art but more food. She came committed to basic economic and social reform. This was a new thought in Hull-House which had been established to aid individuals in a neighbourhood, not cure the ills of all society. Mrs. Kelley's message was reinforced by the economic depression of 1893. As a sympathetic woman Jane Addams could not stand detached and lecture on Shakespeare while children were starving and men without work. In 1893 Hull-House became the district bureau of the Central Relief Association and Jane Addams found herself dispensing coal and food and clothes.

Under the impact of these two events, Jane Addams began to see herself in a new light. She would not merely be the spiritual mother and teacher of the 19th ward. She would also become a force for reform throughout the whole Chicago community. In serving on the Civic Federation's committee of five in 1893, Jane Addams took her first public position outside Hull-House, and similar posts soon followed. She was on the committee to aid the unemployed the same year, in 1894 she was a public mediator during the Pullman strike, and the following year served on a commission to investigate the county poorhouse. The new role as a spokeswoman for reform was immensely satisfying to Jane Addams. It was an active varied life of public service. It brought her public renown and temporarily appeased her ambition. In addition it used her intellectual talents. She became a prolific lecturer for reform causes, wrote innumerable articles, and after 1902 produced a stream of books. Her literary skills, in abeyance since her college days, were fully utilized. Further, under the influence of Florence Kelley, and after reading Charles Booth, she came to accept that reform should be based on scientific expertise. In 1893 Hull-House began an investigation of Chicago slums for the U.S. Department of Labor, and the following year Jane Addams edited Hull-House Maps and Papers, where statistics and facts were scientifically marshalled in the cause of reform

It was now that the other side of Comtian Positivism attained a new relevance for Jane Addams. Comte saw the intellectual, and especially the sociologist, as the priest of his religion of humanity. Jane Addams, cooperating closely with the new sociology department at the University of Chicago and writing frequently in its periodical The American Journal of Sociology, saw herself in this tradition, and so confirmed the religious self-conception which the 19th century demanded of its women. Through participating in reform based on science, Jane Addams was donning the priestly garbs of the religion of humanity. But in a more direct sense her role as apostle of reform placed Jane Addams firmly in the domestic piety tradition—for in her lectures and books it is less the appeal to science that is noteworthy than the appeal to conscience and ethical values. In the traditional 19th century view the woman as wife and mother had a peculiar responsibility to uphold the morals of her family. She must lead her husband and children to salvation. It is in such terms that Jane Addams sees her new role. Her family has grown from the 19th ward to the Chicago community and eventually to all American society, and within that enlarged family Jane is the conscience, the moral beacon, to whom falls the female mission of leading all to social salvation.

Her series of books between 1902 and 1912 reveal how firmly Jane Addams retains the assumptions of the domestic piety tradition.¹⁹ As a writer her stance is always that of the self-abnegating woman. With remarkable powers of negative capability, she is able to crush her own prejudices and sympathise with figures as diverse as the union workman, the domestic servant, the immigrant woman or the industrial boss. Each in turn becomes the host to her self-sacrificing imagination. Her mode of analysis is never a crude economic approach, for that would be to recognise the importance of the male business world. It is always a subtle evocation of other people's psychological attitudes and needs. Where others, for instance, interpreted the Pullman strike as a clear case of open class conflict, Jane Addams avoided such terms, and instead saw it as a problem of family psychology. Bringing to the issue her cultured female sensitivity, she saw Pullman as a Lear embittered at the ingratitude of his children.²⁰ And when she comes to pass judgement Jane Addams' appeal is to the conscience, to the individual ethics of the situation, and never to mere efficiency or economic productivity.

If we turn from her literary mode to the main burden of her message, her acceptance of the old female values are equally apparent. Her constant plea is for a universal change of heart, a semi-religious awakening that will usher in a new code of ethics. New laws and new institutions must await a "religious enthusiasm, a divine fire to fuse together the partial and feeble efforts at 'doing good' into a transfigured whole." And the new social ethic, when it arrives, will be peculiarly feminine in character. It is the old ethic of altruism, of benevolent self-sacrifice. It will arise, she says, not in consequence of some cold theory, but through the "natural promptings of the heart."²¹ Her model is always the spontaneous goodness of the mother within the family. As the mother responds intuitively to the afflictions of her children, so society will respond to others less fortunate. Female emotions, not the masculine mind, will always be the source of the new compassion. Those few institutions in the modern world which Jane Addams praises as vanguards of the new order are those that embody traditional female values—the unions, not for their class consciousness or economic ideas but because "trade unionism has the ring of altruism about it"; striking workers because of their "manifestation of moral power"; the poor for their "ready out-flow of sympathy."²² Her chief targets of abuse are those institutions retaining the traditional values of the male world—commercial greed, militarism and prostitution which she sees as "sexual commerce," the sacrifice of noble womanhood to the monied greed of men.²³ In addition she joins the growing chorus of contemporary criticism levelled at Social Darwinism, but not because of its intellectual weaknesses, as out of moral revulsion. She cannot accept its masculine principles of assertive self-interest and rank materialism. She finds it indecent for a woman charity worker to "talk always of getting work and saving money." Her most pungent and lasting social criticism is levelled at paternalism. With deftness she exposes the pretensions of those 19th century philanthropists who tried to do "good 'to' people rather than 'with' them."²⁴ But here again her chief animus is anti-male. What she objects to about paternalism is its assumption of self-assertion, of aggressive individualism. What she wants is less paternalism and more maternalism—rule by self-abnegating mothers.

Jane Addams' devotion to the traditional values of women is most strikingly apparent when we realise how much of her writings and almost all of her direct participation in institutional reform were concerned with the defence of the family. In 1893 she cooperated closely with Florence Kelley and Governor Altgeld to push through the first Illinois factory legislation. Its provisions were seen as a shield for the protection of the orderly family. Tenement-house work was restricted in the hope that home and labor would be clearly separated, and the home fulfill its true function as a restful retreat from the cruel world of business; women's work was limited to 8 hours a day with the aim that women would have opportunity for their true vocation as mothers and wives; and the labor of children under 14 was prohibited in the expectation that they would remain safely protected within the family's loving circle. In her writings Jane Addams showed particular concern for the domestic servant, isolated as she was from her family; and for the prostitute whose misfortune not only subverted family order but was usually caused by lack of parental control.²⁵ And appalled at anarchy in the immigrant family, where the children as natives to the new land frequently became the guides to their foreign parents, Jane Addams set up the labor museum at Hull-House. It was intended to show off the parents' traditional skills, and thus regain for them their children's respect. Family order would be maintained.²⁶ Rarely did Jane Addams press for better wages and hours for men, or for health insurance, but when she did, it was always in the hope that the male would be able to support the family unaided. Believing that "the maternal instinct and family affection is woman's most holy attribute," Jane's enduring mission was to provide the poor and the immigrant with the middle class Anglo-Saxon family circle.²⁷ Indeed the family always remained for Jane Addams society's most precious institution, which could never be sacrificed for any claims of selfhood or ambition. In Democracy and Social Ethics, she wrote, "The man, for instance, who deserts his family that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what he considers more fullness of life for himself, must always arouse our contempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's 'Nora' did, to obtain a larger self-development, or holding to it, as George Eliot's 'Romola' did, because of the larger claims of the state and society, must always remain two distinct paths … The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard and protection. [The family's] obligations can never be cancelled. It is impossible to bring about the higher development by any self assertion or breaking away of the individual will."²⁸ If the action of Ibsen's Nora in slamming the door in her husband's face is accepted as the classic feminist act of the 19th century, then no clearer indication could be found than this, of Jane Addams fundamentally anti-feminist animus.

While Jane Addams' central hopes for reform always resided implicitly in the triumph of motherhood and family sympathy, yet this was only made fully explicit when she came to argue for women's suffrage in the early 20th century. Her arguments for the vote were never on the grounds of natural rights, or of a claimed equality with men. Rather the reverse. Attempting to give scientific validity to her belief in the innate difference of men and women, she turned to the work of Paul Geddes and William Thomas who posited a fundamental contrast in the cell structure of the two sexes. The male cells, they argued, were katabolic, hungry and aggressive; the female cells were anabolic, reproductive and nurturing, patient and passive. Women should be allowed the vote, said Jane Addams, precisely because the state now needed such peculiarly female anabolic qualities. While the city's chief problems were military defence or economic growth, then a male franchise was only right and proper. But now the city's concerns were the education of children and the cleaning of streets. Ruling a city, she argued, was now "enlarged housekeeping," and women, the traditional housekeepers, should take over. "The men of the city" she wrote, "have been carelessly indifferent to much of this civic housekeeping, as they have always been indifferent to the details of the household." What society desperately needed to cure its problems were women's nurturing qualities and domestic skills.²⁹

This idea was most dramatically seen during Jane Addams' participation in the 1912 Progressive campaign. As her claims for the virtues of womanhood had grown more explicit, so her personal arena had widened. At first her extended family had been merely Hull-House and the 19th ward. Then in the mid 90's as she adopted the role of social reformer, it became the city of Chicago. Now in this campaign, her personal responsibility had widened to the nation. Driven by ambition and a desire for public service, and imbued with an increasingly apocalyptic vision of the triumph of domestic piety throughout the nation, she came to see herself as the great representative of American womanhood, mother of the American family and saint of the religion of humanity. For her the social welfare planks of the Progressive platform and the promise of female suffrage were inseparably connected. "One is the corollary of the other," she wrote, "a program of human welfare, the necessity for women's participation."³⁰ Both together promised a semi-religious awakening, the triumph of the old female values of altruism, self-sacrifice and motherhood. She was incredibly active throughout the crusade—on the platform committee, the seconder of Theodore Roosevelt at the convention, and a tireless campaign worker travelling hundreds of miles to speak for the cause. Throughout she conceived of the campaign less as an effort to elect candidates, for she was always sceptical about Theodore Roosevelt, than as an educational campaign, a religious crusade to convert America to a new social ethic. For her the "Jane Addams chorus" at the convention singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" was central to the campaign's meaning. Her personal satisfaction was immense. Her desire to emulate her father in public service was temporarily appeased; in lecturing and platform writing her intellectual talents were used to the full; and in the promise of the campaign she believed herself witnessing the triumph of Rockford's values throughout the nation.

But her will to achieve was not yet quite satisfied. The onset of the Great War brought new challenges. It challenged first her long-held belief in the potential of intellect. Now rational debate had been replaced by primitive tribal violence. Even John Dewey her close friend and philosophic guide had abandoned the critical spirit for involvement in war. It was a challenge too to her sense of community, her feeling of public recognition. Now as war mania overtook the nation she felt isolated and lonely. But above all it was a threat to her womanhood. Believing that the female spirit of nurture was unutterably opposed to the male spirit of militarism, Jane Addams had long been a pacifist. Peace she always claimed, "was not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life."³¹ The ethic of peace was the ethic of social reform, and as America prepared for war, she saw both causes being sacrificed. Isolated and depressed she slipped into invalidism.

Slowly however she began to realise that war was an opportunity not a defeat for woman's pacifist nature. A new vision began to possess her. Could not her family responsibility be extended yet again—this time from the nation to the whole world; and could not she, Jane Addams, lead a worldwide triumph of feminine values which would abolish war forever? Domestic piety in the person of Jane Addams would sweep the world to eternal salvation. In 1915 she founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Its two conditions of membership were a belief in women's suffrage and pacifism. A conference was held at the Hague, and Jane Addams was despatched on a mission to convert the world's leaders to peace and social altruism. In meetings with European cabinets, in a papal audience, in a conference with President Wilson, Jane Addams stood for the new international conscience. She was redeeming womanhood personified. In 1919 a congress of women was called to coincide with the Versailles peace conference. Led by Saint Jane, the congress called not for new institutional guarantees such as a League of Nations, but for "a great spiritual awakening in international affairs."³² Jane began to develop the meaning of her place in human destiny. Women, she argued, had been responsible for the first great advance in human civilisation, the move from a nomadic warring state to a settled peaceful agricultural existence. Primitive women long ago compelled by the maternal instinct, she said, "made the first crude beginnings of society by refusing to share the vagrant life of man because they insisted upon a fixed abode in which they might cherish their children." And it was women who had first opposed human sacrifice in religion. Now women might compel another human advance. "There might be found an antidote to war in woman's affection and all-embracing pity for helpless children."³³ In Jane Addams' eyes the leading expression of the new international ethic was Herbert Hoover's Food Administration which had been organised to feed the starving peoples of Europe after the war. Jane Addams quickly volunteered her services, and began to travel the nation speaking to women on its behalf. Now the role of efficient housewife became endowed with apocalyptic implications. If the American mother could save food in her kitchen then food would be available for the hungry of Europe. Competitive commerce might be replaced by a humanitarian sympathetic commerce in food. "I believed," she wrote later, "that a genuine response to this world situation might afford an opportunity to lay over again the foundations for a wider, international morality, as woman's concern for feeding her children had made the beginnings of an orderly domestic life."³⁴

The great symbol of this international ethic for Jane Addams was bread. The book she wrote in 1920 was called Peace and Bread in Time of War. In her travels through America she would frequently revive the anthropological myth that women were the first grain farmers, and would allude to the corn spirits: "These spirits are always feminine and are usually represented by a Corn Mother and her daughter."³⁵ The choice of bread as symbol of international salvation was no accident. It revealed how perfectly the campaign of 1919-20 fulfilled all Jane Addams' deepest needs. For bread had been her father's livelihood. He had been a flour-miller. She recalled as a child "a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb," and in 1919 "I used to remind myself that al-though I had had ancestors who fought in all the American wars since 1684, I was also the daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughter of millers."³⁶ In urging the women of the world to save bread, Jane Addams had finally outstripped her father. But that was not all. The motto of her Rockford class of 1881 was "Breadgivers," and its letter-head a sheaf of wheat, in recognition of "the old ideal of woman-hood—the Saxon lady whose mission it was to give bread unto her household." Jane Addams herself in that speech at the opening of her class's junior exhibition had reminded her friends, "our destiny throughout our lives should be to give good, sweet, wholesome bread unto our loved ones."³⁷ By 1919 the size of the family and the number of loved ones was on rather a different scale from her imaginings in 1880, but her posture, her ethical stance was still that of the Rock-ford alumna, the nurturing mother, the self-sacrificing woman. Finally the Christian symbolism of bread is almost too obvious to be mentioned, and that Jane Addams was aware of it, we may be certain; and here again it confirmed her within the traditional female role—that of the missionary, the religious guide and exemplar. Jane had become the Christ, not of Christianity but of the religion of humanity.

In a purely personal sense then, Jane Addams' career was a success. She had achieved a life of activism and public service way beyond that of her father. In international renown she approached even her beloved Lincoln. The Nobel Prize in 1931 was just payment of the world's dues. Her education and intellectual talent had opened new opportunities as she had so ardently wished. Ten books and some 500 articles attested to the value of a college education. Yet all had been achieved within the confines of the domestic piety tradition that Rockford had so firmly implanted. It is true that Jane Addams redefined the institutional expression of that tradition. Motherhood and family expanded out of the home into the 19th ward, the city, the nation, and eventually encompassed the world. And woman's religious function became service to man rather than service to God. But she never challenged the basic assumptions of the ideology, nor the doctrines of a separate woman's sphere and a distinct female nature. If anything she strengthened the ideas by giving them some scientific validity. And it is this inability to question the central tenets of the piety tradition which produced ultimate failure in all but a narrowly personal sense.

To the women whose cause she so fondly espoused, Jane Addams' contribution was disastrous. The generation of which she was the charismatic figure was a crucial generation for the place of women in American society. It was the first generation which had received a college education; it was the first generation which followed Darwin and the consequent secularisation of social values; and it was the first generation which had the vote and could participate fully in the political life of the nation. It was also a period, in which as Robert Wiebe has observed, the occupational structure and status hierarchy of 20th century urban society was being established.³⁸ Roles were fluid, the professions young and relatively open. The possibility was there for the women of that generation to strike out on a new path—the path of equality with men within the new professional structure. But Jane Addams, as the leading figure of this generation helped close off that option. The path she chose was destined to have a no exit sign at its entrance. The road to sainthood could not be trod by more than one woman a generation, and Eleanor Roosevelt was soon to ascend the saintly steps as Mrs. Eddy had done in an earlier era. Liberation in the end required more than an expansion of domestic values into the world, however bold and ingenious that expansion might be. It required an acceptance of self-assertion and ambition, and an acceptance of the grubby material secular world outside. It required a few more self-committed Noras and rather fewer self-sacrificing Romolas.

And even in the reform movements of her day Jane Addams failed. A new international ethic did not sadly sweep the world. Wars are still with us, children still starve. Female suffrage in 1920 ushered in Harding and normalcy, not the maternal state; and when a new order of a kind emerged after 1932 it was on the heels of failure by Jane Addams' great moral example, Herbert Hoover. Female values and the religion of humanity were vain hopes in a world of laws, institutions, and economic interests. Even Hull-House, Jane Addams' greatest institutional legacy, now stands gaunt and isolated amid the refuse of Chicago's urban renewal, a sad memorial to a noble woman.

NOTES

¹ James Webber Linn, Jane Addams, a Biography (New York, 1937), pp. 382, 399.

² e.g. Penina Migdal Glazer, "Organizing for Freedom," The Massachusetts Review, 13 (Winter-Spring 1972): 29-44; Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York, 1965), pp. 3-37.

³ Information on Anna Sill from H.M.G[oodwin], "Biographical" in Memorials of Anna P. Sill, (Rockford, 1889), pp. 5-20; Linn p. 44; John C. Farrell, Beloved Lady (Baltimore, 1967), p. 30. On the later careers of Jane Addams' friends, Winifred E. Wise, Jane Addams of Hull-House (New York, 1935), p. 76.

⁴ Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York, 1910), p. 25; Jane Addams, My Friend, Julia Lathrop (New York, 1935), p. vi: Twenty Years p. 38.

⁵Ibid., p. 19.

⁶ Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, Rockford, January 29, 1880; Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, Cedarville, Illinois, August 11, 1879; Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, Rockford, November 22, 1879 (all in Starr Ms., Box 1, Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass.).

⁷ On this theme see especially John P. Rousmaniere, "Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: The College Woman and the Settlement House 1889-1904," American Quarterly, 22 (Spring 1970): 45-66.

⁸Twenty Years pp. 52, 57-8.

⁹ Quoted in Wise p. 77.

¹⁰ Jane Addams, "Breadgivers," Rockford Register April 21, 1880.

¹¹Twenty Years p. 64. See also

¹² Ellen Gates Starr to Mary Blaisdell, February 23, 1889, in Starr Ms., Box 1.

¹³Twenty Years pp. 74, 87.

¹⁴ Jane Addams, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" in Henry C. Adams (ed.), Philanthropy and Social Progress (New York, 1893), p. 10.

¹⁵ Jane Addams, "Appendix" in Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York, 1895), p. 210; Jane Addams, "ArtWork Done by Hull-House," Forum 19 (July 1895): 615; Hull-House Maps and Papers, p. 211.

¹⁶ This felicitous phrase is Jill Conway's in "Jane Addams: an American Heroine," Daedalus 43 (Spring 1964): 761-780.

¹⁷ Jane Addams, "Objective Value of a Social Settlement," Philanthropy and Social Progress p. 56.

¹⁸ "Subjective Necessity," p. 17.

¹⁹ The books are: Democracy and Social Ethics (New York, 1902); Newer Ideals of Peace (New York, 1907); The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York, 1909); A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York, 1912).

²⁰ Jane Addams, "A Modern Lear," Survey (November 2, 1912): 131-7 (partially included in Democracy and Social Ethics pp. 137-177).

²¹Newer Ideals p. 22; Democracy and Social Ethics p. 26.

²²Ibid., pp. 148, 20.

²³Newer Ideals passim; A New Conscience, passim.

²⁴Democracy and Social Ethics pp. 31, 154.

²⁵Ibid., pp. 102-136; A New Conscience, passim.

²⁶ e.g. Twenty Years pp. 171-2.

²⁷ Jane Addams, "The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement," Hull-House Maps and Papers p. 186.

²⁸Democracy and Social Ethics pp. 76-9.

²⁹Newer Ideals p. 182.

³⁰ Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York, 1930), p. 33.

³¹Ibid., p. 35.

³² Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York, 1922), p. 153.

³³ Jane Addams, The Long Road of Woman's Memory (New York, 1916), p. 127; Peace and Bread p. 83.

³⁴Ibid., p. 81.

³⁵Ibid., p. 77.

³⁶Twenty Years p. 25; Peace and Bread p. 76.

³⁷ "Breadgivers," Rockford Register April 21, 1880.

³⁸ Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York, 1967).