SOURCE: "A Return to Hull House: Reflections on Jane Addams," in Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, pp. 3-12.

From a standpoint of jaded modern sophistication, the story of Jane Addams at first seems a tale of old-fashioned do-goodism fired by the charitable impulses of a "lady" who wound up fashioning an overpersonalized approach to social problems. Such naive forms of social intervention, the sophisticate might continue, inevitably gave way to professionalism, social workers who neither require nor need even be aware of the complex inner wellsprings of their own motivation but who act, instead, from the realization that there is a job to be done. The primary question is how most efficiently to do it—to "manage" a "client" population. To see Hull House and Jane Addams simply as an instance of noblesse oblige suited, perhaps, to its day but quickly eclipsed by the welfare state and the abstract demands of justice is not so much to oversimplify—though it is to do that—but to pretty much miss the boat altogether. For Jane Addams was up to something else.

A second layer of distortion that partially obscures Jane Addams's life and work reflects our changing constructions of American womanhood. The chaste and the maternal intermingled in Addams, always Miss Addams, sometimes Queen Jane. Hers was a symbol overtaken in epochs that witnessed, successively, flappers, WACS and Rosie the Riveters, the feminine mystique, feminist protest, sexual liberation, rampant consumerism, demands for "self-actualization" and the (apparent) final triumph of secular and technological world views. A life of unforced chastity infused with a deeply felt maternalism is a combination that we find difficult to understand, even more difficult to respond to. We no longer see the world, as Addams did, through the prism of duty and compassion, social responsibility and witness-bearing; life as a Pilgrim's Progress. Perhaps this as much as anything else dates her and fixes her in our eyes as a remote figure.

Having said all this, I shall try, nevertheless, to see her once again, rethinking her as both a theorist and symbol.

Briefly, however, it is worth surveying the received wisdom of Addams as a social thinker. Views of her long ago congealed. Nearly all commentators, with few exceptions, find her work derivative. Allen F. Davis, her most recent biographer, endorses the view that Addams is "more important as a publicist and popularizer" than as an original thinker.¹ Daniel Levine, author of Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition, concurs: Addams is "not an original thinker"; rather, she was a "publicist" alive "to the currents of the day."² Addams fares little better in a number of influential social and cultural histories. Henry Steele Commager, in The American Mind, mentions her in no capacity.³ Ralph Henry Gabriel's classic standard, The Course of American Democratic Thought, contains one scanty reference to Addams. In his discussion of progressivism, Gabriel gives the progressive kudos for transcending both the agrarian parochialism of the populists and "the humanitarianism of such urban reformers as Jacob Riis and Jane Addams" in the name of a more cosmopolitan, less personally humanitarian stance.⁴ In Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter characterizes "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," an early and important Addams essay, as "fine and penetrating" and Addams herself, he declares, embodies "the most decent stream" in the Progressive moment given her keen awareness of the deracination attendant upon industrialization.⁵

One important exception to cursory notices on Addams is Christopher Lasch's introduction to The Social Thought of Jane Addams and his chapter devoted to Addams in The New Radicalism in America. Lasch sees Addams as "a theorist and intellectual—a thinker of originality and daring."⁶ Though he is critical of the anti-intellectualism he finds in some of her work, particularly in those discussions of education that extolled "applied knowledge," Lasch's serious consideration of Addams as a social theorist of continuing importance is instructive, and it is one on which I shall build.⁷ I do so in an effort to recover and restore Addams's commitment to an interpretive social theory that bears within it the seeds of cultural and political criticism.

Jane Addams was forty-five years old when she began Twenty Years at Hull House, the first volume of her autobiography. Published in 1910, it was to be her most successful book; eighty thousand copies were published during her lifetime. Twenty Years stands out among her nearly dozen books and her many essays and occasional pieces as, perhaps, her finest sustained effort.⁸ Her gifts as a thinker of rare insight and a writer of unusual descriptive powers are here abundantly displayed. Already a celebrated public figure when she penned her own story, her autobiography sealed that public persona. To her biographer, Davis, Twenty Years captures Addams in the self-conscious process of casting her public image in a heroic mold, "at least," Davis equivocates, "acquiescing in the public image of herself as a self-sacrificing saint, and friend of the down-trodden." Davis goes on to scold Addams for refusing to "come clean" about her "administrative talent and her ability to compete in a man's world that actually made her a success"⁹—an injunction wholly out of touch with Addams's own sensibilities and her moral location.

But Davis's judgments, those of a sympathetic but partially debunking observer, show how difficult it is for the sensibilities of the present to get inside the world as Jane Addams understood it. That difficulty is manifest, for example, when the fact that Addams deployed various literary conceits and fictional conventions popular in her era serves as the basis for Davis's additional claim that there is little difference, in principle, between Twenty Years and the other tales of the self-made person who overcomes all obstacles to achieve fame and success. If Addams's story were just one more example of the pluck and luck genre, we would long ago have ceased to pay it any mind, whether as personal history or as social commentary. These judgments by a biographer highlight a general problem that emerges when our historic hindsights are so finely attuned to contemporary abuses of "publicity" that we blind ourselves to the deeper discursive tradition that—in this case—Twenty Years embodies.

What I call to mind here is story-shaped history that aims to edify. "Jenny" Addams viewed her world through the prism of Christian symbols and injunctions, purposes and meanings. These gave her world its shape—a narrative form involving the use of instructive parables in the conviction that the moral life consists in "the imitation of Christ," not in abstract obedience to a formal model of moral conduct. From the book's opening passages, Addams traces her life as a singular narrative, a particular story but one that forms as well part of the greater American story. Addams quotes herself (from an 1889 journal entry): "In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life."¹⁰ Life, she declares, is a quest, and a life of virtue lies within reach if one emulates exemplary individuals. For Jenny, Mr. Lincoln early became her secular saint, a figure with whom she explicitly, self-consciously, and unwaveringly identified until her death. Lincoln was the standard by which she took the measure of her own existence.¹¹

Just as she had an ongoing connection to Lincoln, in Twenty Years Addams invites her reader into a particular identification with herself. For Addams, each human life was instructive. She evokes the desire of the young girl to please her "handsome father" trying to understand life "as he did," including the sense he conveyed through his attachment to the Italian patriot Joseph Mazzini of the "genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language and creed."¹² As a child, Addams claims, she recoiled from adult attempts to patronize her by isolating her from life's experiences, being already (at least from hindsight) convinced that ethics "is but another word for 'righteousness,' that for which men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless."¹³

If the child, from the standpoint of the mature adult, can, through reminiscence, instruct that adult on childhood; if the rebellion of youth is forged and shaped so long as there "is something vital to rebel against"—adults revealed with their flaws but their dignity intact—the social bond is strained but unbroken and the power of empathetic reflection is affirmed. "Even if we, the elderly," she writes, "have nothing to report but sordid compromises, nothing to offer but a disconcerting acknowledgement that life has marked us with its slow stain, it is still better to define our position."¹⁴Twenty Years is her attempt, mid-life, to define and to clarify her own position so that others might emulate or challenge written in the conviction that "truth itself may be discovered by honest reminiscence."¹⁵

In this sense Twenty Years represents the culmination of Addams's early social thinking and sets the agenda for her work to come.¹⁶ All the characteristics of her philosophy are present: her repudiation of abstract systems in favor of a social theory open to experience; her sense of moral seriousness and struggle; her rejection of "feverish searches" after culture that cultivated a life of pale aestheticism in favor of a life of action, for "action is the only medium man has for receiving and appropriating truth."¹⁷ To this one must add her powerfully conveyed image of human solidarity, "which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy."¹⁸ That was the starting point from which she derived a politics whose end was social change through the ever-deepening processes of social democracy.

Several apparent paradoxes in Addams's thought come to the surface—double convictions that set her apart from unambivalent celebrants of the progressive faith. One such double commitment lies in her battered but never repudiated belief in progression towards more inclusive and pacific social forms, on one hand, and her equally unwavering recognition and depiction of the pathos of those lives swept up, as so much human debris, by imperious waves of industrialization, on the other. When Addams celebrated progress she did so as an expression of liberal faith and given a particular reading of history. But when she told the story of history's victims she did so from the point of view of those victims, from inside their despair, their often stupefied not-being-at-home in a strange new world that forced many into silence, madness, or self-destruction.

Addams's ambivalence about the world industrialization had wrought is rooted in her social morality and compelled as well by her commitment to a social theory anchored in the detailed consideration of particular cases. No social abstraction has authenticity, she argued, unless it is rooted in concrete human experience. Her immersion in the particular, her ability to articulate wider social meaning through powerful depictions of individual suffering or joy, hope or despair, sets her apart from all who write abstractly about experience. One example must suffice to evoke the human suffering the early wage-labor system trailed in its wake and to illustrate Addams's descriptive powers. Addams pens an unforgettable word portrait of a single suffering woman, one human story beneath—or beyond—the facts of the matter. She writes:

With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world! It is curiously inconsistent that with the emphasis this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office building by a prolonged committee meeting of the Board of Education. As I came out at eleven o'clock, I met in the corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew, on her knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened to greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at five o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to nurse her baby. Her mother's milk mingled with the very water with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at midnight, heated and exhausted to feed her screaming child with what remained within her breasts.¹⁹

Addams's project, with this vignette, is a task at once ethical and political. Her theory of morality opposed abstract appeals and the repetition of formulae. It was her conviction that only a tug upon our human sympathies and affections could draw us into an ethical life and keep us there. This life has no final fixed reference point but evolves as an ongoing engagement with competing human goods and purposes. "Pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties with paramount claims,"²⁰ claims run roughshod over in the preceding story. To override these claims, those Addams called "the family claim," or in some manner to reconstruct and transform the terms and boundaries of moral life, powerful countervailing forces, "the social claim," must be at work.²¹ The tragedy of the scrubwoman is that she has no choice at balancing out these competing claims: She is simply forced against her will into ill-paid labor by economic necessity, compelled to deny the needs of her child but denied as well the opportunity to make her way in the larger scheme of things.

A human ethic, then, is embedded in life as lived. Because that life is complex, not simple; because human motivations are a dense thicket, difficult to cut one's way through; because one often has to choose between two goods, not between a clear-cut case of good versus evil, our ethics must be similarly complex. What spares Addams from a slide into thorough-going relativism or, alternatively, a leap into high-handed moral preachment, is her dual commitment to empathetic understanding as the surest route to social truth and to a compassion that eschews judging human beings by their "hours of Defeat."²² These two—understanding that demands of the social observer a sympathetic attempt to convey the nature and meaning of the experiences of others, and a compassionate awareness of our human tendency to "backslide"—lie at the core of Addams's social theory and her apostleship of nonviolent social change.

Human nature being "incalculable," there can be no final, fixed human definition—neither fallen man, nor economic man, nor any other one-dimensional substitute for infinitely varied human life. What staves off anarchy and flux is that rootedness provided by Addams's social ontology, the ground of her discourse. She gives prescriptive force to a human solidarity that links us, across societies and through time; that has its base in "widespread and basic emotional experience" central to a human condition but allowing a wide berth for individual particularity and cultural diversity. As individuals and societies we can come to know ourselves, Addams suggests, only to the extent that we realize the experience of others. Cultures as well as individuals would fall into stagnation and dullness without the terms of perspicuous contrast offered by those different from themselves.

This brings us, in a sense, to the starting point—to the establishment of Hull House itself. That experiment was never intended primarily as a charitable institution or as a possible solution to the assorted evils of uncontrolled industrialization. Addams's "subjective necessity" compelled the genesis of Hull House and precluded any simple account of its purposes or her own. Hull House aimed explicitly to meet the needs of Addams and others like her to put their beliefs into practice, to lead lives of action. She and her comrades needed Hull House and that is why it was created—to open up a life of humanitarian action to young women "who had been given over too exclusively to study."²³ To serve but in serving to reveal oneself. Without an understanding of this double edge, Hull House cannot be seen for what it was: an attempt to put into practice "the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal."²⁴ This reciprocity "gives rise to a form of expression that has peculiar value."²⁵ "It is not," she declared, "philanthropy or benevolence, but a thing fuller and wider than either of these, as revelation that, to have meaning, to be made manifest, must be put into terms of action."²⁶

Placed alongside Addams's rich exploration of her own complex motives, the prose of the Hull House charter sounds remarkably prosaic: "To provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago."²⁷ She and her companions learned quickly "not to hold preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood ought to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt our undertakings as we discovered those things which the neighborhood was ready to accept."²⁸ "Those things" were diverse, and Hull House quickly turned into a social space, a particular sphere, that encompassed drama classes, play groups, music societies, well-baby clinics, nutritional courses, day nurseries, and an immigrant arts and crafts museum to reveal the skill and pride of immigrant parents and grandparents to Americanized children often ashamed of them. To this one must add the "Working People's Social Science Club" and Hull House's own social scientific investigation of conditions in the district ranging from housing to hygiene, medicine to transportation, employment to child care, prostitution to truancy. In Twenty Years, Addams details this diversity and an exhilarating sense of shared adventure. She resisted attempts to structure Hull House rigidly or to homogenize its many activities. The firmness of her commitment to social interpretation, to politics as the chief way people in a complex, heterogeneous society reveal themselves to one another, shines through. But what also emerges is the tension between providing a forum where immigrant cultural diversity and dignity could be displayed and preserved and studying this population or that through the methods of the new social science and in the sure conviction of historic progress.

We, from our standpoint, are aware of the decline of the Hull House model as the state has taken over more and more benevolent functions and we are immersed, in a way Addams was not, in a social era that is almost totally dependent on officials and experts. Given this, our assessment of Addams and her "subjective necessity" will depend in part on our approval or dissent from our own era. Whatever that assessment, there is great poignancy in Addams's summary of the idealistic convictions that dignified Hull House: "At that time I had come to believe that if the activities of Hull House were misunderstood, it would be either because there was not enough time to fully explain or because our motives had become mixed, for I was convinced that disinterested action was like truth or beauty in its lucidity and power of appeal."²⁹

Criticism of the progressivist spirit and faith that Jane Addams shared, if not uncritically, is by now well known: the stress on social hygiene and "more wholesome" pursuits; the promotion of better methods of "social adjustment," wavering, in Addams's case, between bitter indictments of a brutal industrial order and efforts to make that society work better by smoothing over some of its roughest edges and helping people to adjust to industrial machinery and to a social world indifferent to their welfare.³⁰ With other progressives, Addams turned to the state to ameliorate social distress, to embody a social-wide commitment to compassion, constituting the state as a Hegelian embodiment of the highest ethical imperatives. But Addams's suspicions of the state grew after World War I, and she eventually concluded that any state founded on nationalism and militarism was incompatible with genuine social progress, perhaps even with democracy. She also held apparently contradictory views on play and pleasure as well, celebrating play as free and spontaneous, on the one hand, and calling for its organization and control on the other.³¹ There are tensions embedded in her celebration of the settlement as "a place for enthusiasms," an attempt "to interpret opposing forces to each other," and her stress upon adjusting these same individuals to industrial life. The lacunae in her thinking often leave one stranded; paradoxes and tensions threaten to implode her arguments from within. But in Twenty Years she holds it all together, grasping firmly to the thread of empathetic understanding made manifest in her potent characterizations of the plights and purposes of others.

The honesty of this early vision shows us Addams at her best. This is an Addams concerned with the kind of story America will tell the world. Will it be a tale of power and conquest through arms? Or will it be the story of a decent and free industrialized democracy? Will there be room for many diverse stories or will one grand narrative swallow up all "lesser" tales? Perhaps even Addams's politics of class cooperation is less disingenuous than it appears at first glance. We all know the problem: How can there be class reciprocity and mutual recognition in the face of vast disparities of power and privilege? Given that Addams was no advocate of quiescent social suffering, what did she have in mind by repudiating politics as pre-eminently a power struggle? It is clear that disparities of power and the politics that flow from a power-grounded obsession concerned her. Within such a power system, the politics available to those least well placed often results in romantic, suicidal gestures or a smoldering resentment that sees politics as the means to get what "they" have now got. As an advocate of nonviolent social change, Addams urged face-to-face (or arbitrated) debate, even confrontation, so that each side could see and hear the other. What to us sounds hopelessly naive may, in fact, offer a compelling alternative to power politicsas-usual. Whether we are open to Addams's arguments will turn, in part, on how we evaluate later movements for nonviolent social change and what space, if any, we see for moral suasion, for the power of disinterested moral action to touch and to persuade people—even one's adversaries.

There is, then, much to question and to challenge in Addams's social thought but there is also much to learn, particularly about how to do social theory from the "inside out." But Twenty Years at Hull House also retains its freshness after more than seventy years because it invites us to reflect on welfare state liberalism, on the difference between Addams's participant-interpreter and the bureaucratic case worker; between a social science that views the world through the lens of functionalist givens and an interpretive approach alive to the sights, sounds, and smells of everyday human existence. That a "Jane Addams" is unlikely to come into being in our society at this time tells us much about ourselves. It signifies how deeply we are sunk in instrumental reason and technocratic bureaucracy. It indicates how entrenched is the conviction that nearly all constraints on the pursuit of personal pleasure are unacceptably limiting. For Jane Addams recalls another world. The fact that contemporary America would not provide the social soil to nurture her points to our loss of a particular civic culture and the ideal of that culture. Paternalistic, hypocritical, and stifling as that world could be, especially for young women, it nevertheless instilled in many of its young the conviction mat a human life is one lived with purpose, dignity, and honor.

To see in the dissolution of the way of life that sustained such beliefs and practices only our collective liberation from irrational constraints is no longer tenable. Jane Addams helps us to take the measure of what we have lost as well as what we have gained. We cannot simply call up or go back to the civic culture of an earlier time, whether through individual will or social polity. But we can at least try to understand what forms of community make lives such as Jane Addams's possible. Rereading Jane Addams renews our acquaintance with a writer of great clarity, one gifted with the capacity to convey deep human emotion without mawkishness or cheap sentimentality. In this way she deepens our empathies and stirs us to an awareness of human limits and vulnerabilities.

Though Jane Addams has had her day, she has yet to receive her due.

NOTES

¹ Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), xi. Addams is not among the many women rediscovered in our time and restored to her presumed rightful place in history by feminist social historians and political thinkers. Outside the mainstream feminism of her day, Addams remains an ambivalent figure for contemporary feminists, one not easily appropriated to any particular cause save that of antimilitarism.

² Daniel Levine, Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Madison, Wis.: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971), x.

³ Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).

⁴ Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 360.

⁵ Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955).

⁶ Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social Thought of Jane Addams (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xv, and The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (New York: Vintage, 1965). The chapter devoted to Jane Addams is entitled "Jane Addams: The College Woman and the Family Claim," 3-37.

⁷ Interestingly, John J. McDermott, editor of The Philosophy of John Dewey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), states that much of Dewey's "range of interests" in addressing public issues "can be traced to Jane Addams and her work at Hull House in Chicago." This appears in footnote 13 to the "introduction," xxxiii. McDermott here counters the received view that Addams is, at best, a pale, derivative Deweyite who popularized a simplified version of his philosophy. The story of Addams as an intellectual influence on Dewey has yet to be told. This lacuna no doubt reflects Dewey's stature as a philosopher and his seminal influence. But my hunch is that the somewhat condescending treatment of Addams as a thinker has other roots. One may be the fact that her role as social activist and interpreter rather than career academic meant she never acquired the automatic legitimacy we accord to credentialed scholars; in fact her interpretive, storytelling social theory is easily viewed as personalistic and subjectivist by those who prefer bloodless abstractions; and no doubt, by the presence of the old-fashioned sexist canard that posits a tacit Manichean dualism between man the thinker and woman the feeler.

⁸ I worked from three published editions of Twenty Years at Hull House at various points: a 1968 edition published in New York by Macmillan; a New American Library paperback published in 1960; and the one-volume combined edition of Twenty Years at Hull House and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House, the final installment of Addams's autobiography, published originally in 1930, republished as part of Forty Years by Macmillan in 1935, the year of Addams's death.

⁹ Davis, American Heroine, xi. Addams could never have seen herself reflected from the mirror as a tough-minded realpolitiker. This is not a piece of dissimulation; instead, it is her honest awareness of the fact that the trajectory of her life and the response of a particular public at a particular time to her evocations of moral suasion were of a piece. Given that Addams repudiated a power definition of politics, a repudiation fully compatible with a realistic assessment of who has force, who controls, who manipulates, etc., for her to have embraced a tough-minded, calculating image of herself is unthinkable.

¹⁰ Addams, Forty Years at Hull House, 66.

¹¹ I do not see the American chauvinism Davis covers in Twenty Years, which most often includes a heavy dose of arrogance towards other ways of life. As a social activist Addams resisted overidentifying her public life with a narrow nationalism that might preclude criticism of state policy. She broke openly with the mission of America to "make the world safe for democracy" in World War I. This undercuts, at least in part, Davis's collapse of Jane Addams's personal calling with America's mission.

¹² Addams, Forty Years at Hull House, 66.

¹³ Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 1.

¹⁴ Addams, The Second Twenty Years, 6.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Her first published book was a collection, Democracy and Social Ethics.

¹⁷Twenty Years (Macmillan ed.), 122.

¹⁸ Ibid., 126.

¹⁹ Ibid., 174-75.

²⁰ Ibid., 247.

²¹ Addams implies but never develops fully a theory of the child's developmental emergence as a moral being. She recognizes that early neglect may lead the individual to remain forever impervious to life's gentler aspects, and that compelling a child to complete tasks beyond his or her "normal growth" is cruel and often disastrous. She poses a concept of sublimation, urging that blind appetite be transformed into worthy psychic impulses by the moral motives. For Addams, child development was a Bildung, an evolving education of the heart.

²² Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 137. This attack on prostitution and paean to chastity is described by Walter Lippman as a "hysterical book." It is not one of her finest efforts.

²³ Jane Addams, Twenty Years (Macmillan ed.), 85.

²⁴ Ibid., 91.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid., 121-22.

²⁷ Ibid., 111-12.

²⁸ Addams, Forty Years, 132.

²⁹ Ibid, 150-51.

³⁰ See Lasch, The New Radicalism, 157. Addams's ambivalence is also traceable to the fact that she saw in the social forces of industrial production a political potential for the spread of industrial democracy.

³¹ Discussion of aesthetic impulses and the necessity of social space for free play are themes that run through her work.