Jane Addams
Democracy is learned by living and working alongside others, and social ethics grows from shared experience in neighbourhoods, not from above.
Placement
Founder of Hull House in Chicago and Nobel Peace laureate: democracy is a way of living together, learned in neighbourhoods; social ethics grows out of shared experience, not from above.
Key ideas
- Democracy as social ethics
- The settlement house as experiment
- Sympathetic understanding
Influence
Influenced by 2
Leo Tolstoy
influenced by
Addams visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in 1896 and, in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), weighed his ideal of bread labour against the work of the settlement. J. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), “Tolstoyism”; SEP “Jane Addams”
Evidence: AI draft
Leo Tolstoy › 1828–1910
John Dewey influenced
influenced by
Dewey lectured at Hull House and sat on its board; Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) shares his view of ethics as social and experimental. J. Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902); C. H. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism (1996); SEP “Jane Addams”
Evidence: AI draft
influenced
Dewey wrote in 1894 that Addams’s view that social antagonism is unreal had made him rethink the Hegelian dialectic of opposition. J. Dewey, letter to Alice Chipman Dewey, Oct. 1894; C. H. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism (1996); SEP “Jane Addams”
Evidence: AI draft
John Dewey › 1859–1952
Works
Charity, family, industry, education, politics: in each sphere ethics must become social and democratic.
Peace will come not from treaties but from the cooperative life of immigrants in industrial cities.
Position
Addams is now counted among the founders of American pragmatism, alongside her friend John Dewey. “Democracy and Social Ethics” argues that ethics must grow from individual to social: the charitable visitor who judges the poor by her own standards, the father who decides what his daughter may do, the employer who provides for his workers without consulting them – each fails because he does not take the experience of others into account. Democracy for Addams is not a form of government but a way of living in which people learn from one another across class and ethnic lines. Hull House was the laboratory. Long remembered as a social worker, she is now read as a philosopher.
Life & context
Jane Addams (1860–1935) grew up in Cedarville, Illinois, studied at Rockford Seminary and, after years of illness and travel, founded Hull House in 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr: a settlement house in an immigrant district of Chicago, where educated women lived among the poor and ran clubs, classes, a nursery and political campaigns. She led the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Further main works
- Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
Appears in
- Journey ‘How Society Became Thinkable’ · Stop 9 of 12
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