Addams on Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, and African Americans

In this paper, I will restrict the discussion to Addams’s writings during the twentieth century’s first decade, when she developed most of her thinking on cultural pluralism. By 1910, Dewey had not yet moved to cultural pluralism, Boas’s cultural relativism had not yet penetrated the intellectual world, and Mendelian genetics had not yet replaced Lamarckian assumptions regarding heredity.The Great War was yet to shatter illusions about Western civilization’s strength and rightness

Engaging in Feminist Intercultural Dialogue as Spiritual Transformation: A Reply to R. Aída Hernández Castillo

The author responds to criticism of her book Jane Addams\u27s Evolutionary Theorizing

Feminism and the Art of Interpretation: Or, Reading the First Wave to Think about the Second and Third Waves

Cory, my daughter, accuses me of having no thoughts of my own. I was talking with Jeremy [“Cory, what do you call him? partner? significant other? boyfriend?” “Mom, I just call him Jeremy.” Alright, then.]. Jeremy asked why I was an almost pacifist. Without even breathing, I launched into Addams’s arguments for pacifism, fully attributed to her, of course. That’s when Cory accused me of having no thoughts of my own. So, if I have no thoughts of my own, inhabiting Addams’s thoughts is not a bad substitute. Remembering how Addams viewed much of her work as interpreting American institutions to immigrants, and interpreting the immigrant poor to middle-class Americans, I thought about a former colleague who often came to me for interpretive advice. She had been born and educated outside the United States and found Midwestern youth culture particularly baffling. One day she exploded, “Those students who slouch in the back of the classroom, baseball caps pulled over their eyes, they are so disrespectful! Are they insulting me because I am a woman of color?” How to answer this? All of the following statements are true: yes, they are insulting you in the sense that they are defying you to interest them in philosophy. But, don’t take it personally. And, yes, the fact that you are a woman of color no doubt enters into it. But then, White male colleagues report finding similar back rows in their classrooms. My advice was to rearrange the chairs into circles, squares, nested rectangles, or any configuration that eliminates back rows. Feminists in the university need to do interpretive work and need to have interpretive work done on their behalf. Newer faculty need to have the institution interpreted to them; the university needs to have newer feminists interpreted to it. Before launching into some observations and perplexities about interpretation, first a word about vocabulary. I started drafting this paper using the terms, “younger faculty” and “older faculty.” Then I remembered. The first woman the University of Dayton Philosophy Department hired came straight out of graduate school. She was forty-five. I started my tenure-track job at age forty-two and received tenure just shy of fifty. We were already old when we were young. Scratch an older woman faculty member, and you get a story. So, instead of “younger” and “older,” I’ll use the slightly unwieldy terms, “newer colleagues” and “more established colleagues.” In an attempt to preserve confidentiality, I’ve silently elided colleagues from my department, other departments on campus, and other universities

Caring Globally: Jane Addams, World War One, and International Hunger

Several feminist philosophers, including Virginia Held, Joan Tronto, and Fiona Robinson, see the need for, and the potential of, care ethics for achieving far-reaching political and even global transformation. Tronto recommends that care be used as a basis for political change and a strategy for organizing (Tronto 1993, 175). Held advocates that the ethics of care should transform international politics and relations between states as well as within them (Held 2006, 161). During and immediately after World War One, Jane Addams attempted to do just that. She sought to bring perspectives and moral sensibilities that have since been theorized in the ethics of care to bear on concrete, international problems. She worked with the U.S. Food Administration to meet the needs of Europeans who faced malnutrition and starvation because of the war and advocated that the League of Nations adopt as its first and foundational task feeding all those made hungry by the war. In her work on behalf of these organizations, Addams presented a theoretical framework of global ethics that connected women\u27s care-giving activities with structuring international institutions principally in response to basic human needs. After briefly describing current views on care\u27s potential for international ethics, I will describe how Addams tried to place American women in relations of caring connection with the hungry in Europe. I will then show how she used the proposed League of Nations as a focal point for an international ethic based on meeting human needs. I will conclude by projecting how Addams would respond to contemporary concerns about extending care into the international arena, specifically concerns about how to care for those far distant, and about how to avoid maternalism/paternalism or imperialism in one\u27s efforts to care. To avoid anachronism, I do not claim that Addams\u27s theory was an ethics of care. Her conceptual framework relied upon outdated conceptual apparatus, particularly nineteenth century theories of evolutionary anthropology and psychology. However, Addams\u27s patterns of thought are strikingly similar to those used by contemporary care theorists, and her responses to their concerns may be helpful today

Reading Dewey’s Political Philosophy Through Addams’s Political Compromises

Both John Dewey and Jane Addams believed that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. While their vision of democracy is rightly called radical, the processes through which they proposed to cure the ills of democracy are in large measure conservative, in the classical, Burkean sense of the term. To show this, I first explain how well their political philosophies line up, particularly their proposals for political reconstruction. I then use Addams’s experiences as a delegate to the 1912 Progressive Party Convention as a test case in real time for Dewey’s proposals for political reconstruction. The compromises she made there demonstrate the Burkean conservative character of the process of pragmatist change, as well as reveal how the tragic resides within pragmatist efforts at social reconstruction

Response to Comments on \u27Addams on Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, and African Americans\u27

The author thanks Denise James and Charlene Haddock Seigfried for their thoughtful comments on her paper. Although they respond in different ways, they both picked up on questions and uncertainties that arose as she wrote the paper. For some years, she has been trying to write about essays Addams addressed to African American audiences. For this paper, she decided to deal only with Addams’s writings between 1900 and 1910 in order to compare her essays for African American audiences with what she wrote at the same time for wider audiences. This approach enabled her to sort out when Addams’s writing aligned with thinking in the dominant culture and when it departed from that

Addams’s Methodologies of Writing, Thinking, and Activism

To understand Addams’s texts, readers need to attend both to her evolutionary methodologies and to her interpretive strategies. Addams was an evolutionary scientist and sociologist in the days before natural selection became merged with genetics and before sociology adopted a stance of positivistic objectivity. Like other intellectuals at the nineteenth century’s turn, Addams addressed contemporary social problems by locating them within their evolutionary histories and proposing ways of moving society toward healthy equilibrium. She used specific social theories as tools, selecting the ones best suited for each given social problem. Evolutionary theorizing served as foundation and framing for her writings. Addams employed evolutionary thought in the service of “interpretation,” that is, to make the lives of her urban immigrant neighbors intelligible to her largely Anglo-Saxon, middle-class audiences. For this, Addams employed late nineteenth century rhetorical and literary conventions. Her aim was to persuade her audiences to alter their perceptions of the poor and oppressed and work with them for social reforms. Addams’s theorizing is still of use today as a model of multi-disciplinary thinking, its integration of abstract theory with concrete social issues, and its ecological character.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1122/thumbnail.jp

Addams and Dewey: Pragmatism, Expression, and Community

Chicago in the 1890s was home to two remarkable institutions, started by two remarkable activist-philosophers, experimenting with ideas and with social change. The first was Hull House, a social settlement, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. The second was the Laboratory School, an experimental school opened in 1896 by John Dewey, along with teachers Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards. Interaction was constant between the residents of Hull House and the teachers of the Laboratory School, as the participants learned from and taught each other. Through Hull House and the Laboratory School, Addams and Dewey formulated, tested, and enacted central tenets of classical American pragmatism

Interpretation\u27s Contrapuntal Pathways: Addams and the Averbuch Affair

In March 1908 the Chicago Police Chief shot Lazarus Averbuch, a young, Russian Jewish immigrant, claiming self-defense against an anarchist plot. Jane Addams refused to join the public\u27s outcry of support for their chief, declaring that she had the obligation to interpret rather than denounce the incident. Her analysis of Averbuch\u27s killing, given in her essay, ““The Chicago Settlements and Social Unrest,”” provides a focal point for seeing how interpretation functions as a unifying theoretical category for Addams, bringing together her activism, her style of writing, and her philosophy of social change. Addams\u27s conception of interpretation is multi-faceted and dynamic; the interweaving lines of contrapuntal music give a fitting metaphor. I analyze the essay\u27s presentation of interpretation in terms of three contrapuntal voice-lines: as dramatization, as mediation-advocacy, and as reconstruction

Jane Addams on Autonomy and Responsibility

Addams understands autonomy and responsibility from the perspective of American pragmatism. Like her collaborator and friend, John Dewey, Addams believes one ascertains an idea\u27s meaning and truth by applying it in practice. Hull House was founded explicitly as a pragmatist test for her ideas on ethics and social change (Lagemann 1994, 77). Verifying philosophical ideas rests on two methodological prerequisites: concrete experience and sympathetic understanding. Addams repeatedly stresses how emotions serve as the starting point for ethical change, although they need to be cultivated and guided by experience and reason. In addressing social problems, Hull House residents first gathered statistics and empirical data, but then interpreted the data in light of their direct experience as neighbors of the poor. This method would give them sympathetic knowledge, which Addams calls the only way of approach to any human problem (1912a, 11)