The Education of Jane Addams

PERHAPS as a final tribute to a nineteenth century individualism soon to be extinguished by the New Deal, Americans of the late twenties and early thirties frequently amused themselves in endless polls and competitions to find America's greatest men and women. The definitive order of greatness was never discovered, but in every poll Jane Addams did well. Included in Mark Howe's list of six outstanding Americans, she received Good Housekeeping's seal of approval as the greatest living American woman. But in 1933 the National Council of Women failed her. They declared her the second greatest American woman. First was Mary Baker Eddy. (1) Jane Addams, who treasured such symbols of fame, may well have felt considerable pique at being so linked with the founding mother of Christian Science. The two women certainly appear very different types. Where Mrs. Eddy achieved power through establishing a churchl, Jane Addams, except for one brief episode, was never involved in organised religion; where Mrs. Eddy exploited the world of the spirit, Jane Addams consciously entered the grubby world of the slum; where Mrs. Eddy sought to cure bodies through faith, Jane Addams' solution was better housing, higher wages, and better garbage disposal. Later historians have reinforced the contrast. Some have viewed Jane Addams as an energetic feminist, which Mrs. Eddy decidedly was not; Christopher Lasch, in the most widely accepted interpretation, has seen Jane Addams as the first of a new class, the intellectuals, whose animus was a revolt against middle class gentility and particularly against the constrictive atmosphere of the 19th century family. (2) MIrs. Eddy for all her interest in the mind, was no modern intellectual, nor did she reject the family. It is against such interpretations that this paper is leveled. In my view the National Council of Women may have spoken truer than they realized by joining Mrs. Eddy and Jane Addams. For Jane Addams' career was shaped by the same problem that impelled Mrs. Eddy: How did an ambitious egotistical woman in 19th century America break through the incredibly limited bounds which the domestic piety tradition had established for women. Woman's sphere was the home and family, but achievement could only be

Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies

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