Abstract
In writing a half-life biography of Jane Addams, the author faced the difficult decision of choosing a point of view from which to interpret her life. She knew that somehow she would have to find a way to be wiser than Jane Addams—at least the adult Jane Addams—and she was not sure, given the narrowness of her life when compared to hers, that she could. Eventually, however, the author realized she could compare Addams to herself. By 1899, when the biography ends, after 10 years at Hull House, Addams’s ideas about the morality of the labor movement, the adaptability of social ethics to their times, and about her own class’s presumed superiority to working-class people had changed from what she had believed in 1889. Addams’s continuing determination to face her own moral confusions and revise her ideas shaped her life and offers an example from which many can learn.