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10 Can Jane Addams serve as a role Model for Us today? harriet hyman alonso In January 2002, I began a quest to see if I could find in Jane Addams a role model for peace-minded people (including myself) in these confusing times following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the unleashing of the U.S. military on the Middle East. I was particularly interested in finding a historical voice that could help me bring hope to my distressed students. My journey began when I was asked to present a paper on Addams and peace at the February 2002 Jane Addams symposium held at Swarthmore College. Because of the close proximity of my workplace to the World Trade Center and the trauma that ensued, I felt a deep need to connect September 11 to that paper, which I did by discussing the “Reverberations of the 1915 Hague Conference on 2002.” That exercise led me to intensive reading. From January 2002 to May 2003, I read almost every one of Addams’s books (in print or not), four biographies, and innumerable speeches and articles on peace.1 Yet, less than two weeks before presenting a second paper on the topic at another Jane Addams symposium (this time at the University of Dayton, Ohio), I could not formulate any thoughts on the relevancy of her ideas to today’s world. My problem was that I was trying to fit Addams into the pigeonhole of heroism rather than really evaluating her thoughts objectively—if that is possible for a women’s peace historian who has been studying Addams for more than twenty years and who considers her one of the most radical feminist pacifists of all time. Eventually, I wrote that paper— and then this article. However, I still find myself thinking about Addams each time U.S. foreign policy takes a new twist or turn. My first task in trying to evaluate Addams’s credentials as a twenty-firstFischer_Addams_text .indd 203 10/29/08 10:26:31 AM century role model was to look at her road to pacifism. Was it an exemplary journey with no contradictions or did Addams have to do a great deal of soul searching? For example, much has been written about Addams’s father and her close identification with him. At first, biographers presented him as Addams did in her writings—as a Quaker; more recently, biographers have discovered that he was not a Quaker at all but more of a Quaker-sympathizer.2 This seemingly minor fact has confused many a historian regarding Jane Addams’s own identity. How important did she consider having a Quaker heritage (no matter how quasi) to her pacifist image? Apparently, it was quite important, but even more so was the fact that John Addams was a good humanitarian, a man who was passionately against slavery (and therefore a social-justice man). However, much to many a peace activist’s chagrin, he funded a regiment to fight in the Civil War, an action his daughter later related in the most admirable terms. As a young woman, she also enjoyed the military parades and exercises she witnessed during her two European jaunts and appeared to have great interest in visiting U.S. battlefields and war memorials. At first, this portrayal of John and Jane Addams’s interest in the physical symbols of war seems puzzling and even disconcerting when seeking out a role model for peace. Does this mean that neither of them had a true pacifist bent, but rather that Jane used that image later in life in some way to explain and legitimize her pacifist actions? Not necessarily. Because of my ten years spent working on the family history of the abolitionist leader and war resister William Lloyd Garrison, I have a different, and I believe more complex, reading of this fascination with militarism, one that I think points in a positive direction.3 Jane Addams (like many children born somewhere between the mid-1830s and 1865 who had antislavery activist parents) can be categorized as an “abolitionist child.” What this means is that, even though she was born in 1860 and obviously not able to actually recollect the war, her father most likely explained the necessity of this particular “just” war to end slavery. Many abolitionist children found themselves either joining the Union army or refusing to do so on the moral ground of being nonresisters or conscientious objectors , but even these folk supported those who...

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