Jane Addams, an incredible role model for our time
These days, everything puts me in mind of Jane Addams. Many of the social problems we face today — the fraying social fabric, widening inequality, anxieties over immigration, concentrated poverty — are the same problems she faced 130 years ago. And in many ways her responses were more sophisticated than ours.
Addams was born to an affluent family in Cedarville, Ill., in 1860. She was a morally ambitious young woman who dreamed of some epic life of service without much idea about how it might come about. In her teenage years, she earnestly set to reading — “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Addams took a Grand Tour of Europe and found herself in a vegetable market as the leftovers were being tossed to a crowd of paupers, who stood with their grasping hands upraised. The image had a powerful effect on her.
In London, she visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house where rich university men organized social gatherings with the poor in the same way they would organize them with one another. Addams returned to Chicago and set up Hull House, a U.S. version of the settlement idea.
As today, it was a time when the social fabric was being torn by technological change. Addams moved her family possessions, including paintings, books and heirloom silver, into a large mansion in a blighted district. The idea was to give the dispossessed the same sort of cultivated home environment that she had known and create a network of family and neighborly bonds. Before long, 2,000 a day were streaming through the place, taking and teaching courses, offering and receiving day care, doing the housekeeping, conducting sociological research.
This was not rich serving the poor. It was rich and poor, immigrant and old stock, living and working in reciprocity, and as a byproduct bridging social chasms and coming to understand one another.
There were classes in acting, weaving, carpentry, but especially in art history, philosophy and music. Addams was convinced that everyone longs for beauty and knowledge. She believed in character before intellect, that spiritual support is as important as material support.
High culture was her way to elevate the desires and tastes of all who passed through. Residents were surrounded with copies of Rembrandts and presented with Greek tragedies and classical concerts. One new immigrant walked in and Addams handed him an Atlantic Monthly and recommended an essay he could barely understand. But it was a sign of respect and equality, and access to a different world.
Our anti-poverty efforts tend to be systematized and bureaucratized, but Hull House was intensely personal. She sought to change the world by planting herself deeply in a particular neighborhood. She treated each person as unique.
Addams had amazing capacity to work from the specific case to the general philosophy, and had the ability to apply an overall strategy to the particular incident. There are many philanthropists and caregivers today who dislike theory and just want to get practical. It is this sort of doer’s arrogance and intellectual laziness that explains why so many charities do no good or do harm. Addams, by contrast, was both theorist and practitioner.
In her day, like our own, public life was dominated by men who saw politics as a competition between warriors and who sought change through partisan chest thumping and impersonal legislative action.
Addams was certainly political, but she defended the primacy of the “woman’s” sphere. People are really shaped by dense intimate connections. People thrive in “familied contexts.”
Tough, Addams believed we only make our way in the world through discipline and self-control. Tender, she created an institution that was a lived-out version of humanist philosophy. In today’s terms, she was a moral and religious traditionalist and an economic leftist, and an incredible role model for our time.