SOURCE: "Reforming: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams," in States of Perfect Freedom, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, pp. 157-81.

The autobiography would seem to be the ideal structure for feminist political theory. The historical subjection of women has taken the form of what John Stuart Mill called "bonds of affection." When a woman looks to identify the sources of her oppression she looks not only at the factory and its boss but also at the family and its bosses, the father and husband. For the feminist, the personal is political in a way that is fundamentally different from the experience of other writers.

This perspective can permit an understanding of the origin of politics and liberal society that the male writer can never appreciate in an autobiographical sense. For the feminist, childhood is not an escape from the demands of liberal society but rather a source of her subjection. A woman's remembrance of childhood as a state of nature is gothic but it is not its anarchic violence that she remembers. Rather it is an ordered subjection. There are, of course, many variations in this theme of childhood as a memory of bondage, as a world of "free" boys and "captured" women and girls. The autobiography can reveal the range of human experience in a way that conventional political theory cannot. There are permissive as well as overbearing fathers, homes without fathers, homes run on matriarchal principles, homes with brother and sister treated alike. But the weight of both female experience and tradition teaches the autobiographer to come to the conclusion that childhood remembered as "idylls of innocence and redemption" is a male "idealization."

But what are the consequences of this view of childhood as a state of bondage, of the effort to demythologize the origins of one's self? One result, I think, is that the autobiography, despite its penetrating analysis of social institutions, suffers from a fundamental confusion of the personal and the political, of the public and the private. In part this confusion is the consequence of patriarchy in the context of a liberal society. The autobiography simply reflects in refracted ways the burdens of social structure. The burdens here can be heavy indeed. If the self of a woman is in part the result of these institutions of bondage, then she must fashion a new identity. But a liberal society takes autonomy as, if not a given, at least the responsibility of each self. Once patricide has been committed in a psychological sense, where does a woman find her new identity? Certainly not in relation to a husband and children; that choice would involve the kind of generational reconstruction of patriarchy that the feminist wishes to break. In general, the answer to this problem lies in the feminist conception of reform. In fact, the autobiography as a positive act involves the attempt to find a new self through political action. New communities must be built, so says the feminist autobiographer, and her life is offered as an exemplar of reform. But if the recognition of sisterhood is a revolutionary act requiring devotion and commitment, what precisely is the nature of the feminist's obligation? If the construction of a new identity is the duty one sister has toward another, then is personal self-improvement an act of service and community building? Is self-aggrandizement selflessness? Is egoism an act of altruism? Is reform of the self political reform? Not all feminists have conflated the personal with the political in such a way, but the problem always remains ready to be answered in this fashion. There are ways out; there are ways in which it is possible to convert personal troubles into new and genuinely collaborative visions, and the autobiography is indeed the structure that can permit that kind of selfconsciousness. That road is suggested by Jane Addams. The other and more traveled route is taken by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many others. The source of the confusion of the personal with the political may rest with the injustice of patriarchy itself but it also lies with the confusion that bonds of affection are really bondages.

"MY MOTHER WAS A BABY-WORSHIPER"

Are fathers the concealed enemies of daughters? Does family structure determine consciousness? The memories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams reveal how complex an affirmative response to this question can be. Gilman's father abandoned his family; Addams's mother died when she was two years old. For Gilman "the word Father, in a sense of love, care, one to go to in trouble, means nothing to me." Her father was only "an occasional visitor, writer of infrequent but always funny drawings, a sender of books, catalogues of books, lists of books to read, and also a purchaser of books with the money sadly needed by his family." Addams, on the other hand, cannot recall many experiences apart from her father. Her memories form a "single cord" of "supreme affection" and a "clue" to which she clung in the "intricacy of the mazes" of "the moral concerns of life." Much of her childhood involves memories of attempts, "so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the affairs of the imagination," to express her "doglike affection" for her father.

A fatherless childhood, for Gilman, did not create a childhood independent of the consequences of paternal power. The Perkins' matriarchal family moved nineteen times in eighteen years, fourteen of them from one city to another. Gilman's memories of childhood are "thick with railroad journeys, mostly on the Hartford, Providence and Springfield; with occasional steamboats; with the smell of 'hacks' and the funny noise the wheels made when little fingers were stuck in little ears and withdrawn again, alternately." She resented bitterly the sets of clothes she had to wear on these trips so that the number of suitcases could be kept to a minimum. Her mother refused to give up waiting for the return of her husband. She longed to see him before she died: "As long as she was able to sit up, she sat always at the same window watching for the beloved face. He never came."

The father who deserts his family exacts economic punishment through his absence. But for Gilman this exercise of paternal power affected all familial relationships. Mary Perkins avoided showing any sign of affection toward Charlotte so that her daughter would not later suffer from the same kind of bond that she had. When nursing, her mother would push aside the infant's hands. Charlotte was never hugged or kissed. Later she discovered that her mother would wait until she was asleep and then quietly caress her. The young daughter would use pins to keep herself awake, carefully pretending to be asleep until her mother would arrive, "and how rapturously I enjoyed being gathered into her arms, held close and kissed."

Charlotte was a victim of her father, and she was further victimized by the withdrawal of maternal affection, itself the result of her mother's victimization. What was the source of Charlotte's mother's suffering? Her life was "one of the most thwarted" Gilman had ever known. The young Mary Westcott was the "darling of an elderly father and a juvenile mother." She was "petted, cossetted, and indulged." She was "delicate and beautiful, well educated, musical … femininely attractive in the highest degree." There were always lovers, "various and successive." One man proposed to her at first sight. But Mary Westcott was a "childlike" woman. Even at seventeen she would excuse herself from gentleman callers to go upstairs to put her dolls to bed. Finally, after many engagements broken, renewed, and rebroken, Mary married at the age of twenty-nine. From this point, her life was lived in tragic contradiction: "After her idolized youth, she was left neglected. After her flood of lovers, she became a deserted wife." The "most passionately domestic of home-worshiping housewifes," she was forced to live with a succession of relatives. After a "long and thorough musical education," she was forced to sell her piano when Charlotte was two. Mary was a "baby-worshiper"; two of her four children died in infancy.

Through all these ordeals, Charlotte's mother remained absolutely loyal and as "loving as a spaniel." She was devoted to her children and "in her starved life her two little children were literally all; all of her duty, hope, ambition, love and joy." But there was to be no consolation even her. Mary could only really care for babies. As her children grew older, "she increasingly lost touch with them, wider and wider grew the gulf between.…"

Biblical injunction ("the sins of the fathers …") and psychiatric theory both confirm what all of us, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, know autobiographically: families replicate themselves. But the young Gilman was determined not to become another victim. She must reconstruct a personality that avoided her mother's errors, a personality that would be beyond the reach of paternal power.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's critique of her mother becomes the basis for her self-measurement and the basis of feminist reform. Mary Perkins was dependent first upon her husband, then upon the good will of relatives. She was a devoted mother but "love, devotion, sublime self-sacrifice" were not enough even in a "child-culture." Mary Perkins lacked knowledge. The descendant of Lyman Beecher and subsequent generations of "world-servers" could only serve and then would lose touch with them because of her limited knowledge of the world. She would embrace Swedenborgianism. But Charlotte regarded these meetings of coreligionists as proof of her mother's intellectual inadequacy. The Swedenborgians would sit around a table "floating and wallowing about in endless discussion of proofless themes and theories of their own … interminably talking on matters of religion and ethics."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's formal education is limited largely as a result of her mother's position. She attended seven different schools and estimated that she had received only about four years of education. But she ferociously initiated her own system for self-education, which has all the earmarks of Franklin's plan. First there is the attempt, undertaken with great enthusiasm, to develop a philosophy of everything, which became the central characteristic of her later writings. The young Charlotte wrote her father for a list of books, "saying that I wished to help humanity … and where shall I begin." She read widely in history and anthropology and joined the Society for the Encouragement of Studies at Home. Armed with "the story of life on earth," Charlotte set out to "build her own religion." The result, achieved after consideration of God, evil, death, and pain was stated in a single maxim: "The first duty of a human being is to assume right functional relations to society—more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.'" God had a plan for the human race that was revealed in some evolutionary "telic force," and Gilman's task was to discover her role in this process. For that she needed her own plan: "And I set to work, with my reliable system of development, to 'do the will' as far as I could see it."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman described herself as a "philosophic steam engine." She believed that she had invented her own praxis. "My method was to approach a difficulty as if it was a problem of physics, trying to invent the best solution." In order to develop the energy necessary to carry out her plan, she invented her own system of "physical culture." She adopted her own style of dress (short, light garments), which included inventing a new kind of bra. She walked five miles a day and started an exercise class for women. She redecorated her stuffy room by taking a window out of its casing and installing a leaf from a dining-room table to keep out snow. On some mornings, Gilman proudly recalls, her wash bowl had ice so thick that she could not even break it with her heel. As a result, her health was "splendid": "I never tired.… When asked, 'How do you do it?' it was my custom to reply, 'as well as a fish, as busy as a bee, as strong as a horse, as proud as a peacock, as happy as a clam.'"

But the plan included more than a regimen for physical fitness. She worked on methods of "the turning of consciousness from self to others." She began with "minor self-denials." "I would gaze at some caller of mother's and consider what, if anything, I could do for that person; get a footstool, a glass of water, change a window-shade, any definitely conceived benefit." These efforts, however, were "too slow, too restricted." Charlotte "devised a larger scheme." She discovered a crippled and blind young girl and arranged to meet her. The girl laughed bitterly when young Charlotte asked, "Will you do me a service?" But Charlotte explained: "You see, I don't think about other people, and I'm trying to learn. Now I don't care anything about you, yet, but I'd like to. Will you let me come and practice on you?" The practicing included reading to the "unhappy creature," bringing her flowers, buying a small present. When Charlotte learned second-hand that the girl had said that Charlotte Perkins was "so thoughtful of other people," she recalls exclaiming, "Hurrah!, another game won!" With the victory over selfishness assured did Charlotte continue her visits to the young girl? Here the autobiographer is silent. We do not know if she moved on to other projects to acquire new virtues.

Like Franklin before her, Charlotte Perkins Gilman had created a new personality as an act of will. And like Franklin's, this new person entailed political implications. All of the newly acquired freedoms of both individuals were replicable. Franklin had avoided the narrow horizons of a tradesman as well as the dissipated life of a journeyman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, at least up to this point, had not become like her mother. She was independent, educated, and primed to dedicate her life to service beyond the confines of the family. But when it had become time to marry, she could not simply find a "helpmate."

After many delays, she married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884. A year later Katherine was born. She was "angelic," "the best," "a heavenly baby." Charlotte Stetson had a "charming home; a loving and devoted husband; an exquisite baby, healthy, intelligent and good; a highly competent mother to run things; a wholly satisfactory servant—and I lay on the lounge all day and cried." "That baby-worshipping grandmother" had to come to take care of the baby because Charlotte has become a "mental wreck." No plan, no amount of will, could bring Charlotte Stetson out of her "growing melancholia." She, "the ceaselessly industrious, could not mop a floor, paint, sew, read, even hold a knife without suffering from sheer exhaustion." But worse than the inexplicable weariness was a sense of shame: "You did it yourself! You had health and strength and hope and glorious work before you—and you threw it away! You were called to serve humanity and you cannot serve yourself."

On a doctor's advice, Charlotte Stetson went West to Utah to visit her brother and from there to California to visit friends. As soon as the train moved she felt better. A month later she went home and the symptoms returned almost immediately. In 1887 she and her husband were divorced and Charlotte Gilman went to California. "After I was finally free … there was a surprising output of work, some of my best." Later she returned the young Katherine to her father.

In San Francisco, Charlotte Gilman begins the second reconstruction of her personality. She starts another plan with the realization that at thirty-five she is "a failure, a repeated, cumulative failure." She had published a collection of poems, worked on a small newspaper which had folded in twenty weeks. But the basis of Gilman's livelihood and of her new personality as well was the public lecture. She would speak before women's groups, church gatherings, and Nationalist Clubs. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is filled with accounts of the reactions to her lectures, including records of the donations that followed the talk: "lectured in Brooklyn … $20.25"; "spoke" in Kansas City on '"The New Motherhood.' Successful. Stayed to dinner. Stupid evening—the men afraid of me. $10.00"; "I spoke in a little church in Madison, Kansas, and on Thursday, … went to Eureka.… Friday I spoke twice, $17.00; again visiting the Addisons, and preaching the next day in the Congregational church—$4.00"; "in Bedford, Iowa, with a friend's friend, and an address—$5.45, and so back to Chicago."

This constant movement provided the structure for her new self. Gilman described herself as "propertyless and desireless as a Buddhist priest." She replicated the endless travels of her childhood, not as a mother dependent upon the charity of relatives but as a free independent woman who was dedicated to the emancipation of mothers. She had freed herself of "the home." In a visitors' book in Los Angeles she proudly signed, "Charlotte Perkins Stetson. At Large." The airy, belligerent confidence achieved by the first plan had returned: '"Don't you feel very much at sea?' someone asked. 'I do. Like a sea gull at sea.' And when inquiring friends would ask, 'Where do you live now?' my reply was, 'Here.'" Charlotte Gilman was again "as happy as a clam." But there were, on Gilman's own admission, two selves, her "outside life" in which there was "a woman undergoing many hardships and losses" and an "inside" self that was a "social inventor, trying to advance human happiness by the introduction of better psychic machinery."

Gilman is not the first reformer whose activity was impelled by psychic needs. What is instructive here in terms of American political thought is that her conception of her "real" self, the self that holds together her personality, is understood by her to be her social self. The "outside" self, the self that is existential and finite, the self that suffers and has longings, is epiphenomenal. Seen in light of Gilman's political theory, feminism promises to "free" women by abolishing those institutions that are responsible for the maintenance of this outer self.

One of the most puzzling aspects of feminism is its formation as sets of small local groups and its political agenda that promotes bureaucratic organization. Gilman's autobiography reveals how this happens and as such provides us with a complete feminist political theory. Let me recapitulate the theory as autobiographically presented thus far. Gilman's growing up is influenced by the consequences of patriarchy. With great effort she is able to conceive, and to a limited extent live, a life independent of male control. Marriage and motherhood, however, threaten this effort, an effort made at considerable psychic cost. After all, Gilman had had to deny first her father and then her mother, and this brings about a breakdown. She recovers, however, by denying her husband and her daughter and traveling to California, that land of "swift enthusiasms." Her new personality, now twice reconstructed, is formed through an identification of the only nonpatriarchal communities she can find, voluntary associations composed in part by likeminded women. Service to these groups is her "real" self, the other self becomes a recurring ghost of doubts about her independence. Thus Gilman can never really identify with the suffrage movement or socialism. "My main interest was in the position of women.… economic independence" was "far more important than the ballot."

But how does one translate the transient nature of the voluntary association to a firmer basis? Must Gilman travel forever, like Thoreau had considered, to maintain her real self? One alternative, offered by Addams, would be to give the voluntary association some structural permanence by linking it to traditional institutions and presumably transforming both in the process. But Gilman could not take that path. She turned down an offer to direct a settlement. When she finally did give up her "at-large" identity, by renting a flat late in life, she notes the "insidious drugging effect" of a home. She still attempted to avoid the insidious effects of "spending one's time waiting on one's own tastes and appetites, and those of dear ones" by recurrent lecture trips. Her sense of a "real" self depended upon continual contact with these groups as if her personality was strewn across the country in clubs and associations, which in a sense it was. There was also the possibility that the groups who paid her to present visions of new structures might become like her mother's Swedenborgian groups, "floating and wallowing about in endless discussion.… "

Thus Gilman's life work—her service, her fame, and her livelihood—is devoted to the presentation of structures that will abolish the home and the "outer" self and replace it with surer nonpatriarchal institutions than voluntary associations. Gilman's feminism, and that of others who followed her, seeks to destroy the very kind of relationships that have really made women's emancipation possible. Sisterhood is, above all, a set of personal relations, relations built upon a personal community of common experience and common goals. Can this vision be realized in sets of bureaucratic institutions? Gilman says they must.

This paradox in feminist thought can be illustrated by briefly comparing Gilman's autobiographical short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" to her The Home. "The Yellow Wallpaper," written during her first years in California, is a moving fictional account of her own breakdown. It tells the story of a young middle-class wife and mother who suffers so from the bonds of affection that her personality disintegrates before the eyes of the reader. The story concludes with a doctor's prescription that the woman cease all intellectual efforts and focus what little energy she has on her family. Of course this regimen only serves to sink the young woman to deeper levels of depression; the swirls she sees on the wallpaper of her bedroom begin to float and undulate uncontrollably, as does her conception of her self. The story suggests the woman's need to experience a community of equals beyond her family. But then look at Gilman's solution to the yearning for sisterhood. In The Home she insists that she offers no "iconoclastic frenzy of destruction" but only a "pruning" of a "most precious tree," but she portrays the home in what is actually a much more negative light. She looks at it as an institution that has thus far resisted "social evolution." The sentimental attachment to the home is traced to two ancient twin gothics, a sexual contract (bodily submission in exchange for protection) and religion. Today our conception of religion is monotheist, we no longer need household gods. Harems have been abolished in civilized societies, but for the man the home is still his "private harem—be it ever so monogamous—the secret place where he keeps his most private possession."

Division of labor characterizes modern work but women still labor like their ancestors. They cook, clean, nurse, educate. Women must rise to the "higher plane" of evolution for which they are fit. Water and sewage used to be taken care of on an individual household basis but now there is "an insidious new system of common supply of domestic necessities." If water and sewage have come to be "fully socialized," why not food, housekeeping, nursing, and education? The endless repetition of kitchens could be replaced by cooked-food supply companies. In anticipation of modern children's rights theorists, Gilman asserts that children must be recognized as a "class" with "rights guaranteed by the state." Every baby is better off with a "good trained nurse." The housewife ought to enter the world of productive work, pay her substitute and contribute to the "world's wealth."

Of course, in a sense, The Home perceived changes in the structure of families and family life that were in process and Gilman simply carried them to what she saw as a logical conclusion. The language that chronicles the development of the new home of the future is that of the progressive's interpretation of evolution. The present structure of families is "irrational" in the sense that performance of its functions is wasteful and erratic. Both good wholesome food and babies are produced by families almost by happenstance. Gilman's assertion that bakers' bread is always better than homemade captures the spirit of the entire essay. But what is most important is that the new home constructed by Gilman is modeled on her conception of her "real" self. Life is service but service abstractly conceived. And who can fail to detect the element of retribution and scorn for women behind the measured arguments of progressive reform? In fact, the home conceived by Gilman has all the characteristics of Marx's description of crude communism. Marx had warned that in the first stage of revolution the workers seek to "destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property." "The category of laborer is not done away with but extended to all men." The community becomes the universal capitalist; private property becomes "universal private property." Transpose women for proletariat, service for universal private property, and one sees Gilman's recommendations as a feminist version of crude communism. A woman must become a "free cook, a trained cook, a scientific cook." "For profit and for love—to do her duty and to gain her ends—in all ways, the home cook is forced to do her cooking to please John. It is no wonder John clings so ardently to the custom." Notice the depiction of the future: "Never again on earth will he have a whole live private cook to himself, to consider, before anything else, his special tastes and preferences. He will get better food, and he will like it." What brings Gilman to advocate this "thoughtless" communism is certainly in part what she calls the "sexuo-economic" structure of the family. But instead of attacking a gender-based system in which acts of personal sacrifice, love, and service are a perversion of the ideal of personal relationships, to be replaced perhaps by mutual acts, she seeks to destroy personal relations themselves. Who can adequately serve, she asks, under "direct pressure of personal affection?" "It is very, very hard to resist the daily … demands of those we love." That "outer self is finally destroyed by Gilman in her home of the future, and only the real self remains. The personal is indeed political for Gilman and she transcends the latter by destroying the former.

"SWEET DESSERT IN THE MORNING"

If Charlotte Perkins Gilman's conception of self and political theory was the result of efforts to overcome patriarchal power asserted through the denial of bonds of affection, Jane Addams's struggle is centered around the consequences of the benevolent father. Addams's devotion is complete, so complete that she seeks to be her father. She was obsessed by the disparity in their physical appearances. She remembers herself as an awkward, homely child who so dreaded the thought that "strangers" would see the incongruity between her and the dignified man in the great frock coat that she would walk to church with her uncle. She longed to attain some physical likeness, even if it meant acquiring burns on her hands similar to those that her father had suffered during his early work as a miller.

Father Addams (he is never named in the autobiography) was also the major employer in Cedarville (he owned two mills) and the Addams house was the largest in the town. In antebellum Cedarville paternal authority was complete. The young Jane associated the mill with her father's activities and "centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits." Of course, Jane Addams would learn that she could never completely imitate her father. We can even leave the Freudian implications of this observation aside. Jane Addams could not become the "self-made man" that her father was; she could not be a member of the legislature; she could not be a soldier in the "Addams Guard." But her sense of estrangement was even greater. She was born too late to be a member of even the last postwar generation of middle-class, small-town Protestant elites. America was turning away from men of "entrepreneural appetites and republican zeal," men who admired Lincoln and Mazzini and in coalition with the Protestant clergy would work for a genteel reform. New elites, robber barons and city bosses, would serve the people and be models of "careful imitation."

Jane Addams was thus doubly estranged, first as a result of her gender and second as a result of her class. Paternal authority was, of course, generally responsible for her predicament. She was a daughter and she was a daughter of the outdated middle class. Later in life, Addams was to understand an aspect of her dilemma. The liberated women of her day were liberated from the home, but then they were also liberated from the positive elements of their class and gender. They had "departed too quickly from the active emotional life led by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers.… somewhere in the process of 'being educated' they had lost that simple and automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness." They could not imitate their mothers. Nor could they imitate their fathers. A vague desire for service in the world has no outlet. "The girl loses something vital out of her life to which she is entitled. She is restricted and unhappy; her elders, meanwhile, are unconscious of her situation and we have all the elements of a tragedy."

These truths, this awareness of estrangement, are autobiographically learned. Addams had entered college but it took her eight years after her graduation "to formulate my convictions in at least a satisfactory manner.…"

During that time she had been "absolutely at sea so far as my moral purpose was concerned." She had suffered through two major crises during this period. In 1881 her father died. Addams experienced the kind of estrangement that no political theory can ever remedy.

She does not directly discuss the loss but she gives an account of the grief she had felt at the death of the family nurse many years before: "As I was driven home in the winter storm, the wind through the trees seemed laden with a passing soul and the riddle of life and death pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old and to die, everything came to that, and then a mysterious journey out to the Unknown. Did she mind faring forth alone?" The father was dead but the daughter was alive and in imitation of him. Addams herself tried to fare forth alone in life. She enrolled at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia but developed a severe spinal condition that left her "literally bound" to bed for six months. An operation helped but the procedure made it impossible to have children. Jane Addams had a nervous breakdown, "traces" of which haunted her long after her work had begun at Hull House. She attempted to find solace in religion. Theological speculation only worsened her depression. Baptism into the Presbyterian church helped somewhat. She "longed for an outward symbol of fellowship." She visited some farms in the West where she had invested some of her inheritance in mortgages. The expectation had been pastoral but instead she witnessed "starved hogs," "despair" and children "not to be compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared but half-human." She immediately sold her shares. In the summers Addams lectured to women's groups and took courses in European art history. She wintered in Europe although the trips always failed to raise her spirit.

In 1887 she finally did undergo a conversion. She witnessed a bullfight. The entertainment does not horrify her and, on the contrary, "the sense that this was the last survival of all glories of the amphitheater, the illusion that the riders on the caparsoned horses might have been knights of a tournament, or the matador a slightly armed gladiator facing his martyrdom, and all the rest of the obscure yet vivid associations of historic survival, had carried me beyond the endurance of any of the party." Later that evening she came to see the reality of this "disgusting experience and the entire moral situation which it revealed." The next day she made up her mind to carry out her plan for a settlement for the poor, "whatever happened." No longer would she be tied to the "ox-cart of self-seeking," her "passive receptivity" had come to an end; she was finished with the "ever-lasting 'preparation for life."'

The account of the bullfight, at first reading, offers a puzzling conversion. In the months preceding the occasion Addams had witnessed far more horrifying sights. She had seen children that looked only "half-human," the poor fighting for food "which was already unfit to eat." What the bullfight had achieved and the sights of urban poverty had not was a realization that her search for culture was a futile quest. She had attempted to find personal meaning in sight-seeing and collecting objets d'art. The application of this cultural knowledge to the bullfight so disgusted her that it produced a conversion and sense of commitment that church membership or the medical profession could not. But, most important, Addams told a whole generation of middle-class women that "somewhere in the process of 'being educated' they had lost that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness." Their lives were incomplete because the pursuit of education had only added to their class ennui. Their lives were unsatisfactory because they were "smothered and sickened" with social advantages. It was like eating a "sweet dessert the first thing in the morning." Jane Addams knew these assertions were true because she had lived them. Likewise she knew the truth of the solution. After the bullfight experience, Addams's life became a totally public one. Service had been justified as an alternative to class boredom, as a kind of relief from personal problems.

Up to this point the autobiographical lessons of Addams and Gilman are fundamentally the same. Both women's identity had been determined by paternal authority. Both suffered as a consequence. Both fought bravely to discover an independent self. Both failed, only to finally succeed in reconstructing a personality beyond paternal power through dedication to service. But Addams's solution is different from Gilman's in very basic ways. Her life of service, her leadership in the settlement movement, her political theory, are not based upon an abolition of the "outer self" but upon a recognition of the personal as the basis for human community, however stunted and tortured this aspect of people's lives has become.

The central focus of Addams's teaching is based upon her image of immigrants as a "household of children whose mother is dead." Addams saw in the immigrant what she saw in herself, for she too was an immigrant, herself adrift from parental power, from the security of her class and the sorority of her forebears. In nearly all her analyses of political and social life she was able to capture the nature of the immigrant's estrangement and at the same time to discover aspects of her life that deserved to be preserved, even treasured, as that estrangement was overcome. In a sense, Addams had developed a praxis of social life, an achievement that Gilman, or for that matter, American liberal reform in general, never attained.

Addams included her essay "The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements" in her autobiography. She had openly promoted the settlement house as a solution to personal problems. Youth, "so sincere in its emotion and good phrase and yet so undirected, seems to me as pitiful as the other great mass of destitute lives."

Christopher Lasch has argued that the essay exposes Addams's motives as a reformer. Addams's efforts to help the poor were motivated not by the outrageous conditions of the city and still less by feelings of class guilt. What animated Addams's entry to public life was her desire to avoid a sense of ennui. But to this, Addams readily admits. It becomes the central thesis of her autobiography. The important question here is how Addams sought to overcome her personal problems and what she saw as the same problems that troubled middle-class women.

The early stages of Hull House did exhibit an attempt to simply enlarge the audience of middle-class women. There were teas, discussion groups, and art appreciation classes. But the young volunteers soon provided the sorts of services that the residents needed. They washed newborn babies, prepared the dead for burial, nursed the sick, minded the children, provided shelter for battered wives. Hull House was a dynamo of invention. Some efforts were, of course, unsuccessful. Addams confessed that she was never able to find a social alternative to the saloon. One of these attempts deserves special attention because it illustrates Addams's concern with estrangement and its transcendence through the expansion of social life. Addams had been concerned over the estrangement between immigrants and their children. Why, she asked, "should that chasm between fathers and sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made so unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewildered immigrants?" The Italian mothers who came to Hull House despaired over the "loss" of their "Americanized children." Walking down the street she had noticed "an old Italian woman, her distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe." The woman's face brightened as Addams passed by and she held up her spindle for her to see and yelled that after she had spun out some more yarn she was going to knit a pair of stockings for her goddaughter. Addams was so struck by the moment that she decided to set up a labor museum at Hull House. She invited immigrant women to demonstrate their crafts. Lectures were arranged to illustrate the industrial history. The museum afforded parents the opportunity to be teachers, "a pleasant change from the tutelage in which all Americans, including their own children, are so apt to hold them."

The museum also had its impact on Addams herself:

In some such ways as these have the Labor Museum and the shops pointed out the possibilities which Hull-House has scarcely begun to develop, of demonstrating that culture is an understanding of the long-established occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts with which they have solaced their toil. A yearning to recover for the household arts something of their early sanctity and meaning arose strongly within me one evening when I was attending a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish family in the neighborhood, where the traditional and religious significance of the woman's daily activity was still retained. The kosher food the Jewish mother spread before her family had been prepared according to traditional knowledge and with constant care in the use of utensils; upon her had fallen the responsibility to make all ready according to Mosaic instructions that the great crisis in a religious history might be fittingly set forth by her husband and son. Aside from the grave religious significance in the ceremony, my mind was filled with shifting pictures of woman's labor with which travel makes one familiar; the Indian women grinding grain outside of their huts as they sing praises to the sun and rain; a file of white-clad Moorish women whom I had once seen waiting their turn at a well in Tangiers; south Italian women kneeling in a row along the stream and beating their wet clothes against the smooth white stones; the milking, the gardening, the marketing in thousands of hamlets, which are such direct expressions of the solicitude and affection at the basis of all family life.

Addams was no narodnik. Twenty Years at Hull House contains its share of comments on what Marx had complained of as the "idiocy" of village life. But it is precisely these liberal antipathies toward the pre-modern world that make Addams's sentiments so important. She knew the value of literacy, hygiene, and economic mobility as much as any American but she would not forsake these peasant women nor cut their children adrift from their own autobiographical past in the name of liberal emancipation.

In all of her essays Addams strove to find the element of sociability beneath the disintegrative aspects of immigrant life. She was willing to search for social functions in institutions she abhorred. She noted that the city machine, for all its corruption and systematic greed, provided important personal relationships for displaced urban people. The aldermen gave presents at weddings and christenings, bought "tickets galore" for benefits for widows, distributed turkeys at Christmas. Addams asked, "Indeed what headway can the notion of civic purity, of honesty of administration, make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness?" These were not the "corrupt and illiterate voters" of which the reformers complained. But neither was Addams prepared to defend a system that ultimately must be judged as one that exploits a "primitive" people. If men of "low ideals and corrupt practice" win the hearts of the people because they stand by them in basic ways, then "nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards."

No institution could agitate Addams's middle-class progressive morality more than the "gin palaces" of Chicago. These huge dance halls were places where youth gathered in which "alcohol was dispensed, not to allay thirst" but to "empty pockets." The places confused "joy with lust, and gaiety with debauchery." But Addams knew that these "lurid places" were a reflection of the modern city. Daily labor had become "continually more monotonous and subdivided." Children had been gathered "from all the quarters of the earth as a labor supply for the countless factories and workshops." Young girls were valued for the products they manufactured. Society did not care for "their immemorial ability to affirm the charm of existence."

Progressive reformers had been able to see two cities in Chicago, one that was represented by the old class of wealth and status and one that was represented by the poor immigrant. But Addams was able to see two cities from the vantage point of the settlement. The new economic structure had convulsively produced a new class ripped from traditional culture. The young people who walked through the city streets after a day in the factories would have attended a dance on the village green or a peasant festival had they not been gathered from across the country and the world to "work under alien roofs." The city "sees in these girls only two possibilities, both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by day their new and tender labor power in its factories and shops, and then another chance in the evening to extract from them their petty wages by pandering to their love of pleasure." But Addams saw another city among the poor and displaced which was not economic in character although it had been perverted by the commercial hegemony over all aspects of urban life. The gin palace was meeting, albeit in a "pathetic" way, basic social needs. Addams's description captures this second, and submerged feature of the city:

As these overworked girls stream along the street, the rest of us only see the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here. She demands attention to the fact of her existence, she states that she is ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most precious moment in human development is the young creature's assertion that he is unlike any other human being, and has an individual contribution to make to the world.

She continues her story of the girl as she enters the palace and young men "stand about vainly hoping to make the acquaintance of some 'nice girl.'" "They look eagerly up and down the rows of girls, many of whom are drawn to the hall by the same keen desire for pleasure and social intercourse which the lonely young men themselves feel." Of course, Addams knows well that these desires may conclude in only a one-night stand but she is able to see that closing of the palaces without providing some substitute only destroys an outlet, however imperfect, for social life. "Even the most loutish tenement-house youth vaguely feels this, and at least at rare intervals reveals it in his talk to his 'girl.'"

It is, I believe, Addams's discovery of this social aspect of the new city that permitted her to make a connection between the personal and the political quite different from that made by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For Addams affirmed herself (her "outer self), fractured and threatened as it had become in her own youth, through an appreciation of the struggles of the displaced. Their estrangement was also hers, but more positively, their victories over anomie and economic exploitation were hers as well. Two incidents, minor in themselves, illustrate Addams's development in this regard. She had been called to come quickly to the house of an old German woman who was resisting resettlement to the county infirmary. She found a "poor old creature" who had "thrown herself bodily upon a small and battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly that it would have been impossible to remove her without also taking the piece of furniture." She looked like "a frightened animal caught in a trap" and despite the assurances of Addams and a group of neighborhood women, she would not move. Addams concluded:

To take away from an old woman whose life had been spent in household cares all the foolish belongings to which her affections cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed is to take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life itself. To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she may take them out when she desires occupation, but that her mind may dwell on them in moments of revery is to reduce living almost beyond the limit of human endurance.

There is in Addams a frank assessment of the intrinsic value of possessions; these were after all "foolish belongings." But the utility of things owned is not the standard of measurement. This old woman saw the dresser and its contents as a means by which she could retain a conception of herself. From that realization on, Addams found that the old women whom she began to invite to Hull House as a vacation from the poor house had many "shrewd comments on life" and made "delightful companions."

A second incident occurred shortly after Addams had started her settlement. It is not mentioned in Twenty Years at Hull House but is reported autobiographically in an essay. A "delicate little child" had been deserted in the Hull House nursery. Addams had been able to find that the infant had been born ten days before in the Cook County Hospital but she could not locate the "unfortunate Mother." After a few weeks the child died and Addams made arrangements for burial by the county. A wagon was scheduled to arrive at eleven o'clock. At nine, Hull House was the scene of protest by neighborhood women. They had taken up a collection "out of their poverty" to pay the costs of a funeral. Addams is able to see two moralities encapsuled in the situation*. Her first reaction was defensive. After all, "we instanced the care and tenderness which had been expended upon the poor creature when it was alive." The infant had received the attention of a skilled physician and trained nurse. Where, Addams asked "the excited members of the group," were you when the baby was alive? "It now lay with us to decide that the child should be buried, as it had been born, at the county's expense." Unstated in Addams's defense is the accusation that the community had abandoned an illegitimate child and that the "professional" thus has assumed proprietary interests over those whom it serves. But her remarks are prefaced by confession of the "crudeness" of her position: "We did not realize that we were really shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community.… We were only forgiven by the most indulgent on the ground that we were spinsters and could not know a mother's heart." There is certainly a note of self-deprecation in the concluding response, but Addams is more concerned that sentiments in "the mother's heart" were a collective overlay of biological function. "No one," she insists, "born and reared in the community could have possibly made a mistake like that."

Addams's development of a praxis between the personal and political achieves the status of political theory in her analysis of the Pullman strike. Her essays and the autobiography are always focused upon the problems of women. Men never receive the same empathetic efforts that characterize her accounts of children, young women, mothers, and widows. There is certainly an appreciation for "the sorry men" who "for one reason or other" have "failed in the struggle of life." But the emphasis is on "heroic women" who must deal with drunkards, domestic violence, and deserting husbands. The Pullman strike provided Addams with the opportunity to examine the nature of paternal authority.

George Pullman represented an alternative to the rapacious capitalist of the post-Civil War era. He had created a model company town for his workers. Successive wage reductions led to workers' pleas for arbitration. This Pullman refused. When railway employees would not work on Pullman cars, there were dismissals and then a massive strike which was broken by President Cleveland's deployment of federal troops to Illinois. The strike was broken. Many historians regard the strikers' defeat as a setback that would require labor generations to overcome. The Pullman strike had briefly showed the power of the labor movement (the railways west of Chicago had been shut down) and the American middle class was badly frightened. After all, had not Pullman spent large sums of money to provide his workers with modern plumbing and even a park, a theater, and a church? Is this, they asked, the reward for benevolent paternalism?

Addams, who was clearly sympathetic to the workers but also skeptical of the value of strikes, used Shakespeare's story of King Lear as the basis for her analysis of the incident. Pullman was a modern Lear and the strikers Cordelias. Shakespeare had described a domestic tragedy; Pullman had created an industrial one. Addams was struck by the "similarity of ingratitude suffered by the indulgent employer and an indulgent parent." The lesson of Lear had "modified and softened her judgment" of the workers.

"A Modern Lear" is a neglected masterpiece because it shows how the connection between the personal and political can be made. This, after all is said, is the goal of all American political thought. Addams never tells us that Pullman like Addams is an example of paternal authority: "The minds of all of us reach back to our early struggles.…" We all know what it might be like to kill our father: "We have all had glimpses of what it might be like to blaspheme family ties.…" We all have suffered from the bonds of paternal will: "The virtues of one generation are not sufficient for the next.…" The Lear analogy enabled Addams to see the character of her own struggles as a woman, but it also allowed her to appreciate the struggles of men against paternalism in the industrial sphere. The Pullman strikers may not have agreed that their position was analogous to daughters, but Addams saw a resemblance between them and the workers who first petitioned and then struck out against paternal authority and risked the charge of "ingratitude." Here were for Addams the counterparts to the "heroic women" of Halsted Street. These men were "self-controlled and destroyed no property." They were "sober and exhibited no drunkenness even though obliged to hold meetings in the saloon hall of a neighboring town."

This is not to say that the rejection of paternal authority presents no moral ambiguities. "Cordelia does not escape our censure. Her first words are cold, and we are shocked by her lack of tenderness. Why should she ignore her father's need for indulgence, and be so unwilling to give him what he so obviously craved?" So too the claims of the workers will consist of "many failures, cruelties and reactions." But Addams insisted that paternal authority, those bonds of bondage, must eventually be accommodated. Pullman and Lear were "tragic" examples of paternal authority. They had forgotten the nature of their trust. Lear had "ignored the common ancestry of Cordelia and himself." He could see Cordelia only in terms of signs of fidelity that he demanded. Likewise, Pullman's town became only "a source of pride and an exponent of power": "We can imagine the founder of the town slowly darkening his glints of memory and forgetting the common stock of experience which he held with these men."

Bonds of affection need not always be arbitrary exercises of power. The "family claim" (which Addams had also herself overcome autobiographically) must be "tested" by a commitment to a larger life. The daughter must pass this test by asserting her individuality and so must the father by realizing that the child can fulfill the family claim in all "its sweetness and strength" by enlarging it. The "adjustment of the lesser and larger implies no conflict." In all the affairs of society consent must eventually temper paternal power:

The man who insists upon consent, who moves with the people, is bound to consult the feasible right as well as the absolute right. He is often obliged to attain only Mr. Lincoln's "best possible," and often have the sickening sense of compromising with his best convictions. He has to move along with those whom he rules toward a goal that neither he nor they see very clearly till they come to it. He has to discover what people really want, and then "provide the channels in which the growing moral force of their lives shall flow." What he does attain, however, is not the result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain climber beyond the sight of the valley multitude, but it is underpinned and upheld by the sentiments and aspirations of many others. Progress has been slower perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because it is lateral.

Unlike Gilman, Addams taught that there must always be parents, that the "outside self is the "real self," and that the realization of the one depends upon the affirmation of the other.