Jane Addams by Louise W. Knight

Author:Louise W. Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Jane Addams in 1910

Many conservatives found her views troubling, if not horrifying, but others respected and listened to her. Her friend in the Women’s Trade Union League Margaret Dreier Robins noticed. She told her, “In all America I know of only one person who can reach the honorable conservatives of this country and rouse from them a rallying cry and that is you.” In a 1910 editorial, on the occasion of Addams being named an honorary member of the Chicago Association of Commerce, the Chicago Tribune noted that while conservatives had once foolishly considered her “an anarchist” or “a dangerous meddler,” most people now understood “the enlightened conservatism of her views…and [her] work[.]”28

Why had she become such a popular figure? Certainly her ideas had appeal. People were drawn to her vision of a generous-spirited, inclusive, more socially and politically democratic United States. And there was also the fame-generating nature of two of her main occupations of speaking and writing. Since 1889 she had been steadily and increasingly in the public eye—lecturing, recycling her speeches in a wide variety of publications, writing her own books. Finally there was the appeal of her personality.

People attending a lecture remembered her understated but compelling presence. They recollected her “earnestness,” her “eager voice,” and her “deep eyes.”29 Her niece, Alice’s daughter Marcet, wrote, “She made no effort to be oratorical…yet…from the first word to the last she held the complete attention of her audience.”30 One resident thought she was the “finest impromptu speaker” he had ever heard.31 Addams stood with her hands behind her and spoke in a natural tone of voice. Because of her elocution training at Rockford, everyone, even those in large audiences, could hear her (without a microphone, of course).

Then there was the way she made her arguments. She did not accuse, characterize, or judge. She interpreted. Although she supplied facts and endorsed principles, she often focused on matters of the heart—not on sentimentality, for which she had an aversion, but on “spiritual” matters, as she liked to refer to them: the human feelings of responsibility, compassion, and affection; the human longings for freedom, meaning, and connection. There was something magical about the way she could pry open closed minds and let light—in the form of empathy—flood in.

Her radical form of goodness needed labeling and containing. The popular stereotype of a “good woman”—a saint—came readily to mind. An Atlanta journalist struck the obvious note, writing in 1907, “In the hearts of thousands of Americans, high and low, Miss Addams justly ranks as Saint Jane.”32 Her friend John Burns, the British labor organizer, declared her “the first saint America had produced.”33 One newspaper reporter compared her with Joan of Arc. Another quoted a professor who had said: “She has attained the heavenly beauty of the Madonna[,] for she has borne the suffering of the people.”34 Kind, inclusive, interested in the “spiritual” side of human relations, she certainly fitted the female version of a saint better than did, say, the impatient Florence Kelley. It also helped that she was an upper-middle-class woman who worked among “the poor.

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