Abstract
Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy is a collection of 10 essays that grew out of 2 conferences on Addams at Swarthmore College and the University of Dayton in 2002. “Scholars,” state the editors, “are finding startlingly fresh resources in Addams’s life and thought, applicable to contemporary challenges of war and peace, social and economic inequalities, and the responsibilities of citizenship” (p. 1). “It’s appropriate that this volume be multidisciplinary,” they continue—and list eight disciplines (from history to gender studies) and several orientations (from queer theory to international relations theory) that inform the book. Social work is noticeably missing.
In some ways, it is no surprise. The profession warmly embraces Jane Addams, but keeps her well contained in a package of benevolence. We rarely attach to Addams the intellectual excitement, political challenge, social innovations, and fierce debate that so defined her work and legacy, and that is an enormous loss. Social work students, in my experience, mostly yawn at textbook renditions of Addams’s life, but wake up considerably when offered scholarly, challenging accounts—my favorite being Knight’s (2005) long and wonderful biography, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.
This collection of essays is an important addition to scholarship on Addams, and several of the articles may well find their way into social work classrooms, including Victoria Bissell Brown’s “The Sermon of the Deed: Jane Addams’s Spiritual Evolution,” Louise Knight’s “Jane Addams’s Theory of Cooperation,” and Carol Nackenoff’s “New Politics for New Selves: Jane Addams’s Legacy for Democratic Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century.”
Shannon Jackson’s provocative essay, “Toward a Queer Social Welfare Studies: Unsettling Jane Addams,” will draw the attention of many scholars and students. Addams, despite her personal commitment to women, has come in for a good deal of criticism, often from feminists, for her “maternalist” politics and a rhetoric of family and motherhood that seems decidedly heteronormative. Troubled that Hull House’s “queer domesticity” has been so little examined and so little theorized (p. 160), Jackson eschews the maternalist critique and proceeds to examine “strains of settlement performance, specifically the everyday performances of ‘home,’ ‘family,’ ‘kinship,’ and ‘domesticity’ developed by reformers themselves, that suggest a connection between ‘Hull-House’s queer domesticity’ and contemporary concerns” (p. 144). At the heart of Jackson’s argument is the idea that at Hull House, “caring” was expansive—that is, not restricted to family. “It is in this imagined network of nonbiological obligation and extrafamilial connection that the social impulses of state welfare can start to look provocatively, and progressively, queer,” Jackson writes (p. 145).
My favorite chapter, however, was Karen Pastorello’s “‘The Transfigured Few’: Jane Addams, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, and Immigrant Women Workers in Chicago, 1905-15.” It is the story of the lifelong friendship between Addams and Bessie Abramowitz, a young Russian garment worker and a leader of the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx strike that so shook Chicago during 1910. While historians argue (probably justifiably) that Progressive Era middle- and upper-class women “allies” of working women’s struggles often patronized their sisters, Pastorella believes that at Hull House relations between residents and the working women who organized there were for the most part “genuine” (p. 99). The relationship between Addams and Abramowitz, Pastorello argues, was an example of how Addams opened herself to the experience of immigrant women and was transformed by it, becoming “permanently impressed with the kindness of the poor to each other.” It is this quality of Jane Addams—her association with the poor and her willingness to be transformed in word and deed by them—that most inspires me and often seems so lacking in contemporary professional social work.
Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy brings rich scholarship and contemporary relevance to social work’s door, although no social worker took part in its creation. While not at the top of my Jane Addams list—that spot remains occupied by Knight’s (2005) Citizen and The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, very well edited by Bryan, Bair, and de Angury (2003)—it is nonetheless an important addition to any social work library.