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This review ran in the Chicago Tribune
on Sunday, July 18, 1999.
A REVIEW BY TARA FITZPATRICK
A USEFUL WOMAN: THE EARLY LIFE
OF JANE ADDAMS
By Gioia Diliberto
"Woman wishes not to be a man
nor like man, but she claims the same right to independent thought
and action. We still retain the old ideal of womanhood--the Saxon
lady whose mission it was to give bread unto her household. So we
have planned to be breadgivers throughout our lives, believing that
in labor alone is happiness, and that the only true and honorable
life is one filled with good works and honest toil. We will strive
to idealize our labor and thus happily fulfill women's highest mission."
Jane Addams, from an address to her class
at Rockford Female Seminary, 1880
At the time of her death in 1935, Jane Addams was arguably the most
celebrated woman in America. The founder of Chicago's famed Hull-House,
a leading voice in progressive reform, as well as a best-selling
author and the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Addams
had lived long enough to see the impact of her "good works and honest
toil," not just on Halsted Street, but on national social policy
under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. She had fearlessly taken on
Chicago's ward bosses and industrial elites. She had championed
the settlement house movement, a model for social service that embraced
the nation's rapidly increasing cultural and ethnic diversity. She
had campaigned for women's suffrage and been the first woman to
second the nomination of a presidential candidate--Theodore Roosevelt
in 1912. She had broken with many of her progressive allies to protest
U.S. involvement in World War One and then the punitive terms of
the Versailles Treaty. She had rejected what she called the "family
claim," and lived in romantic companionship with women throughout
her long life. And yet, Gioia Diliberto argues in her engaging new
biography, some part of Jane Addams was forever the Victorian "Angel
in the House," employing the genteel tradition of womanly service
to change the world.
Service, yes; but self-sacrifice, no. As readers of Addams' autobiography,
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) already know, Jane Addams
believed that she and the other women who chose to live among the
destitute on Halsted Street helped themselves at least as much as
they helped the immigrants they had come to serve. "We have in America,"
Addams wrote in 1892, "a fast growing number of cultivated young
people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties.
They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way
is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about
them heavily." Her own generation of college women, who came of
age in the 1870s and 80s, seemed especially vulnerable to the paralyzing
depression from which Addams herself suffered throughout most of
her twenties. In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams recounts
her own youthful feelings of purposelessness: "You do not know what
life means when all difficulties have been removed! I am simply
smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet
dessert the first thing in the morning." The cure, for Addams, was
to assert what she called "the solidarity of the human race," and
to recognize that, "without the advance and improvement of the whole,
no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or
material individual condition." Addams' Hull-House, which opened
its doors in 1889, was designed to provide the laboratory for this
bold experiment in building a genuinely democratic community.
As Diliberto vividly describes, Chicago in 1889 was a city of terrifying
contrasts. While Marshall Field, George Pullman, Philip Armour and
Cyrus McCormick amassed great fortunes, half the children born in
the city that year would die by the age of five. By 1890, Diliberto
reports, 68% of Chicago's population was foreign-born, and another
10% had foreign born parents. Cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid
fever were epidemic in the immigrant wards west of the Chicago River.
For a group of well-bred young women from solid Midwestern families
to decide to find their purpose by living among the immigrants and
working to establish "common intercourse" with them was both unprecedented
and brave. Of course, charitable visitors had for decades ventured
into America's immigrant slums, to distribute alms, preach temperance
and Protestant virtues, or remove children from "unfit" parents.
What Jane Addams and her companions were doing was different: they
lived among the poor with the conviction that they would not only
tutor but learn from their immigrant neighbors.
This is not to say that all of Addams' early efforts at Hull-House
successfully avoided an air of quaint Victorian do-goodism. Addams
was a great believer in "refinement and cultivation," though she
was steadfast in believing that these qualities would be imperiled
if they were not universally adopted. Hull-House offered an eclectic
array of classes, lectures, and cultural programs. Addams and her
companions opened the first kindergarten in the city; built the
first playground; taught vocational skills in several languages;
established a cooperative boardinghouse for working women; and sponsored
lectures on social problems and cultural evenings for different
ethnic groups. As the settlement house's reputation spread, ambitious
young women, including Florence Kelley, Harriet Monroe, Julia Lathrop
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, came to live and work at the settlement.
Together, the women of Hull-House took on the city's political machine,
demanding and achieving cleaner streets, safer factories, more protection
for women and child laborers, and better conditions in the city's
poorhouses, hospitals, and prisons.
Because of Addams' unimpeachable respectability, and that of the
settlement movement she led, the women of Hull-House were able to
challenge both the wretched conditions endured by the immigrant
poor and the traditional strictures they themselves faced as middle-class
women. On the one hand, Addams and her companions were committed
to the transformation of social life and women's work in the world.
On the other hand, as Diliberto argues, Addams never entirely abandoned
her commitment to genteel refinement and justified women's activism
in terms of a maternalistic model of sympathy and selflessness.
According to Diliberto, "'Duty above every other consideration in
the world,' was the motto the Hull-House women lived by."
Diliberto implicitly ascribes Addams' conflicting attitudes about
women's proper place to her private and family life, detailing her
staid Victorian upbringing, her physical and emotional problems,
and the long series of crises suffered by her parents and siblings,
who repeatedly exerted a "family claim" on her time and energies.
While Diliberto does not present a strikingly new interpretation
of Addams' life and work, this compellingly written and evocative
study gives us a clearer perspective on Addams' personal concerns
and desires than Addams' own published writings permit. One is left
to wonder, however, whether Addams' appeal to women's duty traditional
was, in fact, more strategic than Diliberto's "Angel in the House"
interpretation allows. Twenty Years at Hull-House describes, after
all, Addams' creation not just of a career for herself and handful
of her friends, but essentially the creation of a new profession
for women: social work. It chronicles in microcosm the movement
of educated women into the new social sciences at a time when those
sciences were beginning to question the very relationship of nature
to nurture. If women's "special nature" was learned rather than
innate, then men too might one day learn the lessons of duty and
usefulness. Moreover, as Jane Addams' own career so dramatically
demonstrated, the sphere requiring women's attentions could now
be boundless: from the tenement kitchen to the halls of Congress.
Tara Fitzpatrick is a historian and director of foundations and
corporations at Mount Holyoke College.
A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane
Addams By Gioia Diliberto (New York: A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner,
1999), 302 pp., $26.
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