The Education of Jane Addams

Victoria Bissell Brown

University of Pennsylvania Press Politics and Culture in Modern America

432 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 in, 30 illus.

Paperback
9780812219524
Published: January 2007

$39.95

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

The Education of Jane Addams traces, with unprecedented care, Addams's three-decade journey from a privileged prairie girlhood through her years as the competent spinster daughter in a demanding family after her father's death to her early seasoning on the Chicago reform scene. It weaves her spiritual struggles with Christianity into her political struggles with elitism and her emotional struggles with intimacy. Finally, it reveals the logic of her journey to Chicago and makes biographical sense of the political and personal choices she made once she arrived there. The founder of Chicago's Hull-House and, later, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is portrayed here as a complicated young woman who summoned the energy to pursue public life, the honesty to admit her own arrogance, and the imagination to see joy in collective endeavor.

Introduction

1. Self-Made Man
2. The Predominant Elements of Her Character
3. Sober, Serious, and Earnest
4. Bread Givers
5. My Relations to God and the Universe
6. Cassandra
7. Claims So Keenly Felt
8. Scenes Among Gods and Giants
9. Never the Typical Old Maid
10. Some Curious Conclusions
11. The Subjective Necessity for the Social Settlement
12. Power in Me and Will to Dominate
13. The Luminous Medium
14. Unity of Action
15. What We Know Is Right

Epilogue

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Victoria Bissell Brown is Associate Professor of History at Grinnell College.

"The brilliance of Brown's The Education of Jane Addams is that Brown asks how Jane Addams became the Jane Addams of the litany of accomplishments."—Women's Review of Books

"A rich contribution. . . . Essential."—Choice

"Excellent. . . . Focused on the years between Addams's birth in 1860 and her emergence as the most widely acclaimed leader of the social settlement movement in the United States in the mid 1890s, The Education of Jane Addams provides a detailed, wonderfully complex analysis of Addams's ideas, life, and work."—Journal of American History

"A remarkably perceptive account of how the devoted daughter of a well-to-do mill owner and banker in a small Midwestern town became a heroic advocate for working-class residents of the city perhaps most identified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with industrialism and labor strife."—Iowa Heritage Illustrated