Abstract
Jane Addams, in both her thought and activism during the Progressive era, was focused on human problems at both local and global levels and asked of each level what a democratic attitude of radical social justice could bring to felt indeterminacies. She employed a philosophical method associated with American pragmatism, made her own as a relational and feminist approach—inseparable from her lived experience as a woman and advocate of social reform domestically and internationally. The historical context of the Progressive era and Addams’s experience of it, her part in the American Settlement movement and her leadership of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom are discussed to illuminate her human-centered, democratic social approach to international relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Her father, to whom Addams was devoted, was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party and an Illinois State Senator, who in that office supported the campaign of his friend, Abraham Lincoln, to the US Senate.
- 2.
A recent edited volume by Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, Pragmatism and Justice (2017, 6) addresses the “conspicuous silence” in Pragmatism on the idea of justice . The editors are convincing on the why of it, writing that its focus on the concrete over the abstract, its distaste for a priori theorizing, and its “deep and persistent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied” all contribute. However, justice remains a prominent feature of Addams’s thought and activism despite its failure to resonate with what one finds on the concept in the twentieth century literature that John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) spawned. This chapter will illuminate justice considerations at the center of her radical social ethics.
- 3.
In accordance with her father’s wishes, Addams attended Rockford Seminary, a school that trained girls for teaching and missionary work. It had been her aim to attend Smith College and earn a BA. However, a year after her graduation from the Seminary she returned to be one of the first of its students confirmed with a BA after it became Rockford College.
- 4.
Her lifelong health problems began when she contracted tuberculosis of the spine as a child, leaving her spine curved and partly rigid (Knight 2005, 36).
- 5.
Dewey named his daughter Jane after Jane Addams and dedicated his 1935 book Liberalism and Social Action to Addams’s memory. When Dewey’s young son Gordon died overseas, Addams held a memorial service at Hull House; her eulogy for Gordon is printed in The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (Addams 1932).
- 6.
- 7.
These were Oxford and Cambridge graduates typically, since Settlement houses in England were sponsored by these Universities.
- 8.
Addams writes that between Halsted Street, where Hull House was located, and the river “live about ten thousand Italians: Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Further south, these Jewish colonies merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world. To the northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of their long residence in America, and to the north are many Irish and first generation Americans” (1892, 226–7).
- 9.
In his 1902–03 “Lectures on the Sociology of Ethics”, Dewey recommends reading Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics for its presentation of “a series of concrete social-ethical problems, in a very concrete way, and at the same time in a way that presupposes general principles” (Lecture 9, October 16, 1902, 2303). In Lecture 22, Dewey returns to the point, saying, “the most original and powerful part of this book is the clear statement, - which I cannot recall as ever having been stated before so definitely, - that democracy means certain types of experience, - an interest in experience in its various forms and types…You set out with an interest in life,—in experience; in life because it is the experience of people. Hence the demand for becoming acquainted,—for making that a part of your experience” (emphasis added; November 18, 1902, 2379–80). Dewey was well acquainted with democracy as “a way of life” lived in Hull House, serving on its board and providing lectures there. He wrote to Addams of his first visit in 1892, “[m]y indebtedness to you for giving me insight into matters there is great…Every day I stayed there only added to my conviction that you had taken the right way” (quoted in Davis 1973, 96–7).
- 10.
It is perhaps interesting to note that another interest of Addams’s in relating the story of this activity is to share, “[t]here has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities” ( Addams 1923, 243).
- 11.
Addams writes that this idea was associated with the original Settlement movement in England where inspiration for Hull House was found (1923, 38).
- 12.
Addams was a co-founder with Chrystal Eastman of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
- 13.
Dewey and Addams both accepted Darwinism and were influenced by his theory of evolution. Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist and follower of Darwin who saw in evolution cooperation as well as struggle, spent time at Hull House in 1901.
- 14.
This was a view consistent with the evolutionary anthropology of her day. More on the imprint of ancient race memory can be found in her book, The Long Road of Women’s Memory ( Addams 1916). Marilyn Fischer (2004, 87) notes in her review of the 2002 edition with introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried that mention is made in a Los Angeles Times review of The Long Road of a blurb on its slipcover saying, “[t]he underlying purpose of the book is to show wherein modern civilization goes back to old tribal customs, to explain, in other words, the scientific theory of race memory”. Fischer critiques Seigfried for not providing in her introduction, context for this science known at the time of publication, which is not as recoverable today for the contemporary reader.
- 15.
The essay is based on a lecture Addams gave at a summer school in Plymouth Massachusetts with those involved in the early days of the American Settlement movement ( Addams 1923, 113). The essay was originally published in Philanthropy and Social Progress, but much of it is reproduced as Chapter VI of Twenty Years at Hull House she says, because it was “impossible to formulate with the same freshness those early motives and strivings, and … it was received by the Settlement people themselves as a satisfactory statement. Here I will refer to the original published essay” ( Addams 1893).
- 16.
Drawing upon McKenna (2001, 86), Hamington (2007, 173) identifies Hull House as a feminist, process utopia. A process utopia is context in which a series of realistic goals are set out in a manner such that once fulfilled, possibility for the next among the “ends-in view” to be achieved is enhanced (McKenna 2001, 86).
- 17.
WILPF News-sheet 1, May 26, 1919. Swarthmore College Peace Collection Microfilm Reel 102:128.
- 18.
Anne Marie Pois (1988) provides a compelling account of the democratic organizational process exhibited in US WILPF during these years with insights into the workings of its International Executive as well.
- 19.
As Dewey (1937, 220) wrote of it, “what we call intelligence be distributed in unequal amounts, it is the democratic faith that it is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute whose value can be assessed only as it enters into the final pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all”.
- 20.
WILPF would grow to 33 countries with national sections. From its early history, WILPF strived for diversity; however, it was not successful in altering the overwhelming majority of its white, well-off, and well-educated American and European membership.
- 21.
For example, Emily Balch, International Secretary of WILPF, wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 15 November 1934 urging him to use the power of his office to end lynching in America (Balch to Roosevelt 1934). This was a matter of the peace work of the WILPF, because as Balch argues in the letter, “every example of lawlessness and violence in one country reacts in every other” and closes by saying that the Nazis justified their persecution of the Jews with reference to the treatment of Negros in America.
- 22.
According to Emily Balch, WILPF was the first international body to issue “considered criticism” of the Covenant of the League of Nations and condemnation of the Peace Pact (Balch 1938, 9–10). Their critique is reported in the New York Times, 15 and 16 May 1919.</CitationRef>, 9–10). Their critique is reported in the New York Times, 15 and 16 May 1919.
- 23.
Addams (1893), 8, writes that literature in general has an important role in motivating a “desire to know all kinds of life” and fuels belief in the idea that knowing its diversity leads to “better social adjustment – for the remedying of social ills”.
- 24.
Addams’s book, Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) is where her international food politics and idea of peace as global democratic social justice is told through both the ancient starvation struggle and her work with WILPF during the war and immediate period after.
- 25.
Addams (1893), 11.
- 26.
Addams (1922), 77. Addams’s wish to give “poetry and significance” to this form of women’s helping does not presume an essentialist relationship between women and nutrition, but more. One intended to lend a general symbolic significance to the experience of women’s caring in all forms, and to inspire women to find roles for themselves in a global public sphere. Addams has been charged with gender essentialism in writing of women’s nurturing roles and peace; however, this does not take sufficient account of the role of experience in her pragmatism and its method. See MacMullan’s (2001, 95–102) response to this critique, arguing that she appeals to women to oppose war because women have wider familiarity with the costs of war due to their larger part in raising and caring for those who would be killed or broken by its effects, and because men, in their experience, have less cultural scope to oppose it.
- 27.
I use the words “democratic hope” intentionally to signpost a title by one of the most important “new” pragmatists, Richard Rorty (2005), who turned to the international—invoking sentiment and its uses in cultivating a global “human rights culture” (Rorty 1993). Like Addams, he is looking forward, positing an idea of social justice contingently held, and sources for affecting understanding in relation to it. There are good reasons to think about the parallels between the democratic social ethics of Addams’s pragmatism and Rorty’s own, both locally and globally, and their radical, critical intentions. Rorty credits Dewey’s influence on his thought, but he forgets Addams’s influence on Dewey. For a comparison of Addams and Rorty on “ameliorating injustice”, see Voparil (2017).
- 28.
Addams believed that war’s end would be best won by a neutral US brokering peace. See Addams, Balch, and Hamilton (2003).
- 29.
At a speech on the occasion of Dewey’s 70th birthday, Addams said, “[o]nly once in a public crisis did I find my road taking a sharp right angle to the one he recommended. That fact, in and of itself, gave me pause to think and almost threatened my confidence” (Addams 1929).
- 30.
WILPF , like Hull House, worked as a knowledge community, appointing referents to become experts in areas of League policy that WILPF wanted to influence; referents would conduct research, and organize site visits and conferences with relevant experts.
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Cochran, M. (2017). The “Newer Ideals” of Jane Addams’s Progressivism: A Realistic Utopia of Cosmopolitan Justice. In: Cochran, M., Navari, C. (eds) Progressivism and US Foreign Policy between the World Wars. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58432-8_7
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