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Odds are, you probably have only a vague notion of who Jane Addams is. And perhaps a vague notion too of Hull-House, the Chicago settlement for which she is most famous. But when Addams died in 1935 she was arguably the most well-known woman in the United States. In fact, “some went so far as to compare her to her hero, Abraham Lincoln,” writes University of Chicago professor Jean Bethke Elshtain in the introduction of her recent book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy. At her death, in fact, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution proclaiming Addams “the greatest woman who ever lived.” If Addams today is largely forgotten, she is a woman Americans would do well to reacquaint themselves with.

In some ways a new book on Jane Addams could be seen as more suited to the world we lived in on September 10 than the one that is supposed to have changed so radically since then. What makes the woman so inspirational is the contributions she made to America’s civil society by aiding the poor and immigrants of Chicago. Having seen, in recent months, the mobilization of armies of compassion—many folks never even having been asked to join the cause—the need for such inspiration might seem much less obvious than was once thought. We understand the whole hero thing now, at least to some extent. Another factor that distances her from us is Addams’s decision to be a pacifist during World War I, a choice that in the light of the current war on terrorism may tarnish her legacy in the minds of many people today who might otherwise find her an inspiration.

Nonetheless, now that the site where the World Trade Center once stood has been cleaned up and September 11 has begun to take its place as a horrible moment in history rather than a still-open wound, Elshtain’s portrait of Addams may be even more relevant than it was on September 10. Through this intellectual portrait of one of Elshtain’s heroines—which is clear from the tone of the book—the author reclaims Addams for American history and for civil-society-minded intellectuals. Elshtain reintroduces us to someone who understood and valued American participatory democracy and offers her up as a model for citizenship.

Laura Jane Addams was born in 1860, just before the Civil War, in Cedarville, Illinois. When Jane was two and a half, her mother died while giving birth to her ninth child. Jane would be one of four Addams children to live to adulthood. “Her childhood gave her a secure foundation of rough-and-ready egalitarianism,” Elshtain writes. It was from her politically active father, John Addams, that Jane learned how to be an engaged citizen.

With her father’s encouragement, Addams was an avid reader as a child. Among the first generation of American middle-class girls to attend college, she studied at Rockford Female Seminary. The eight years after her graduation included extensive traveling, sickness, and the death of her beloved father. When Addams was twenty-nine, Hull-House opened its doors, in September 1889—and they remained open. (“The door to Addams’s childhood home was never locked,” Elshtain writes, “a tradition coming from her father’s Quaker background.”) The idea behind Hull-House was, as Elshtain puts it, to move into “a ‘big house’ in a congested quarter of Chicago in order to establish a settlement based on the model of Toynbee Hall in London.” Addams wanted to meet the needs of poor Irish, Italian, Greek, and Russian immigrants of the community—providing public kitchens, showers, and classes—while giving shelter to those new to the country.

Far from a government-run, essentials-only entitlement program, Hull-House was not just shelter from the streets for immigrants and the poor, it was also a meeting place for intellectuals. Hull-House was rather like Grand Central Station in that regard, with a philosopher’s café of sorts in the middle of it all. “It was the function of settlements to bring into the circle of knowledge and fuller life, men and women who might otherwise be left outside,” Addams wrote in her second autobiography, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930).

“If you were a resident” of Hull-House, Elshtain explains, it would not be at all unusual of a day to move from reading George Eliot to debating Karl Marx, to washing newborns, to readying the dead for burial, to nursing the sick, to minding the children. Participating in the “humblest services” helped residents share in what Addams declared those “simple human foundations” laid down long ago, without whose fulfillment no human life could exist.

“If Hull-House does not have its roots in human kindness, it is no good at all,” Addams wrote in her last book The Excellent Becomes the Permanent, posthumously published 1932. These “roots” were at the heart of Hull-House’s kindergartens, daytime nurseries, playgrounds, boys’ and girls’ clubs, cooperative boardinghouse, theater workshops, music schools, language classes, reading groups, and more. Addams passed on to Hull-House residents the civic-mindedness that she acquired from her father. She held Lincoln’s Birthday celebrations, distributed copies of German immigrant Carl Schurz’s Appreciation of Abraham Lincoln (1891). In Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Addams wrote an entire chapter on Lincoln’s influence on democracy and her vocation. Democratic government, she wrote, is “the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.” Elshtain writes that “Hull-House’s objective value lay in its capacity to help create strong citizens through a variety of means, methods, and media. If this sounds archaic or even corny to us, that is probably because we do not share Addams’s sense of urgency about the creation of strong citizens.”

Hull-House was a vocation for Addams, according to Elshtain. Addams never married and never gave birth. “Some distortions of Jane Addams’s life and work are the result of change over time in popular images of American womanhood,” Elshtain writes. “What in the Catholic tradition is called a vocation—associated historically with vows of chastity, poverty, spiritual devotion, and a life lived in community with cobelievers—was embraced, altered, and mingled with potent maternal imagery in Jane Addams.” Her vocation, however, was strongly based in Protestantism. Four years before opening Hull-House, in the summer of 1885, Addams joined the Presbyterian church. Her Protestantism was thoroughly American: “Perceiving Jesus of Nazareth as a forerunner of the Founding Fathers, she recast him as a proto-democrat bearing a saving message with egalitarianism at its heart,” Elshtain writes.

Hull-House was praised far and wide by the turn of the century, but Addams was not universally admired. Elshtain writes,

But irritation also began to surface among some observers in response to her defense of anarchists following the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. A few years later, her activities took a more partisan turn, when she served as a delegate to the national convention of Progressives and as a member of the party’s platform committee in 1912. At the national convention, she seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for president. Her peace activities, first lauded, later exposed her to public ridicule and scorn. She opposed U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 and broke with most of her fellow Progressives on this issue. She spearheaded the American Woman’s Peace Party, which became a founding section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Never easily labeled politically, Addams and Hull-House always had critics, on both the Right and Left. “Hull-House was consistently denounced as the home of do-good bourgeois women who tried to salve their guilty consciences through meager palliative steps that in fact did no good and only deepened the ‘false consciousness’ of the masses, who would otherwise be gearing up for a social revolution,” Elshstain writes of Addams’s left-wing critics. As for attacks from the Right, Addams endured a decade or so of unpopularity for her pacifist stance during World War I. In 1931, however, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Although there may be an increased interest in Addams today, if Elshtain’s project is any indication, her accomplishments are still not fully appreciated. In 1990, for example, Life magazine included Addams as one of “The One Hundred Most Important Americans of the Twentieth Century,” describing Hull-House as a “center providing meals. Job training. Education and even a home for Chicago’s immigrant poor.” But this sounds rather like a government entitlement program, and Hull-House was far superior to that. Elshtain provides a likely explanation for this lack of understanding. “Perhaps,” she writes, “we are so accustomed to thinking of the poor as clients rather than citizens, as recipients of social provision rather than active architects of their own destinies, that we have lost a civic vocabulary rich enough to accurately and fully describe the reality of Hull-House.”

Remembrances such as the one in Life also describe Addams simplistically as a suffragette. This, too, shortchanges her—she was much more sophisticated a thinker than that epithet suggests. In addition to Hull-House’s many successes, Addams left a large body of writing, including a dozen books and more than five hundred essays, articles, and speeches, some of which Elshtain collected in a companion volume, The Jane Addams Reader. In describing Addams, Elshtain quotes Addams contemporary George Eliot, who wrote in Middlemarch (1872) that the “growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.” That is a good description of an important part of Addams’s life—but only a part. She was a thinker as well as a doer. “Although Jane Addams has had her day, she has yet to receive her due,” Elshtain writes. Elshtain’s book is certainly a start, and for us it is something more: a crash course in the long-lost art of making lost souls into productive citizens through compassion.



Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 336 pages, $28.00



This review appears in the current issue of American Outlook magazine.