Addams Jane - Jane Addams: spirit in action

I N JULY 1933 the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler had recently been appointed chancellor of Germany, and the possibility of war hung over Europe. People on both sides of the Atlantic were worried about rampant nationalism, unemployment, and starvation and wondering why they found themselves in such a troubling and dangerous situation. Jane Addams, who had become the second woman and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few years before, gave a speech in which she addressed these issues, but also took up what she thought was an underlying problemmental conformity.

At seventy-two Addams was willing to be blunt. She told her audience, hundreds of women attending an international congress of women in Chicago, that it was dangerous when people clung to old ideas, whether they did so out of loyalty to tradition or fear of appearing radical. What people needed to do now, she said, was imagine new possibilities while also seeing life as it was. Such free and vigorous thinking, she promised, would liberate new sources of human energy and make it possible to build a bridge between those things which we desire and those things which are possible. It was the advice of a rare kind of persona pragmatic visionary. Addams was integrating both sides of her worldview into one profound message: If you think for yourself in choosing your hopes and then are realistic about what it will take to achieve them, you will release your own spirit into action with wonderfully useful results.

This book is the story of how Jane Addams (18601935) did just thathow she increasingly thought for herself, released her own spirit, and, working with others, accomplished remarkable things. She cofounded Hull House, the nations first settlement house (and one of the earliest community-based nonprofits) in Chicago, and in time became one of the nations most effective reform leaders, as influential in her day on both the national and the world stages as Eleanor Roosevelt was in hers. She worked to end child labor, support unions and workers rights, protect free speech and civil rights, respect all cultures, achieve womens suffrage and womens freedom, and promote conditions that nurtured human potential and therefore, she believed, the spread of peace. She served on the founding boards of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union, advised every president from William McKinley to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wrote ten books, gave hundreds of speeches, and was one of the greatest American women this nation has yet produced. Indeed, in 1912eight years before the federal amendment giving women the vote became lawthere were wistful discussions of her running for president. For the last third of her life, as founding president of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom, she was known worldwide as an advocate for peace and women, and in 1931 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

But a biography is about more than a persons accomplishmentsor failures. It is most of all a story about what she learned, or not; about how and when a person stretched herself, or was stretched, and what wisdom was gained, or refused, and why. It is about the quests of the human spirit. We seek these stories everywhere, wanting to know more about how others tackle the burden and bliss of being human. Sometimes we find the stories in conversation, other times in movies, television, or radio, and still other times in theater, blogs, or books. Biographers want to know these stories, as well as to share them. I have written this book, first to know Jane Addamss story, and then to share it.

J ANE, TWO AND a half years old, stands at the door. Her mother is inside, but no one will let her in, and she is desperate. She pounds on the door with her fist. Then she hears her mother say, Let her in, she is only a baby herself, and the door opens. She runs to her mother, who is in bed, and receives tender words; a gentle hand reaches out to comfort her.

The mother, Sarah Weber Addams, had had a serious accident the night before. Seven months pregnant, she had gone out on a cold January night to help a neighbor give birth to a child and had fallen on her way up an icy hill. Though she attended the birth, she collapsed soon after from internal bleeding. The next day she began premature labor, and the day after that she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. Then she slipped into unconsciousness.

Throughout the two days the family had gathered at her bedside. Sarahs five children, including Jane, were there. Sarahs husband, John, had been out of town the night she fell, serving as a state senator at the Illinois State Capitol, but a telegram had summoned him home to Cedarville, and now he was there too. While most of the family talked and moved about, Jane stood still, never taking her eyes off her mothers strangely quiet face. Suddenly Sarah sat bolt upright, her eyes filled with terror. Jane, the first to notice, shrieked. Abruptly Sarah lay back down and was soon unconscious again. In the days that followed, she was able briefly to recognize John and say the Lords Prayer, but five days after her fall she was dead.

Sarah Weber Addams, Jane Addamss mother

Sarahs death devastated the family; it was also a blow to the close-knit town of Cedarville. She was loved, especially among the large number of German immigrant families who lived nearby, for her generous neighborliness. Her obituary in the local German-language newspaper praised her for her constant willingness tohelpthe suffering and remarked how she was always present when sympathy was needed or required. (Both she and John, despite his Anglo last name, were of mostly German descent.)

Many people came to Sarah Addamss funeral, but Jane was not allowed to go. Perhaps the family regretted having let her into her mothers bedroom. Her initial exclusion from her mothers presence and later from the ritual of shared grieving, and the familys subsequent refusal to speak of their great sorrow, left scars. For the rest of her life Jane remembered her desperate effort to be admitted to her mothers bedroom. She told her nephew the story when she was seventy-three. In 1910 she railed at parents who did not let their children see the difficult realities of death and suffering. Perhaps I may record here, she wrote in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull House , my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow. Young people themselves often resent this attitudethey feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.