In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

R e F l e c t i o n Frances J. Ranney I begin to write within thirty seconds of my first reading of Kate Ronald’s response to my essay about my now much-loved Fontia R., and my first thought is simply—what a wonderful response! And then I take a break for lunch because, as always, Kate has given me a lot to think about. There is no indication in Fontia R.’s file that anyone involved in the case—least of all Fontia R. herself—ever thought of her situation as anything other than a charity case. And yet, if Luella Hannan’s original plan to buy and maintain a home in Grosse Pointe for her worthy and formerly wealthy clients had been carried out, she may very well have created a place of dignity where some Jane Addams-style civic housekeeping could have taken place. Perhaps—but the worthy and currently wealthy neighbors made sure it didn’t happen. And why, I ask myself, did I not think to read Jane Addams? The idea that philanthropy could be thought of as interpretation is one that it seems to me we should take seriously today. Though I suggest in my chapter that the prosperous felt more free in the Progressive Era to openly blame “the poor” for their own poverty, it is quite clear from our public discourse that we still, as a culture, hold such beliefs very dear. Perhaps it is American short sightedness, or our insistence on individuality and responsibility, or our lack of a sense of history, or our outright panic over “socialism”—whatever the causes may be, claims of the privileged that they have worked hard for their privileges deny the joint inheritances of both poverty and plenty. If we were, indeed, to think of philanthropy as interpretation, we might be akin to a group of Australian citizens that I, along with my colleague Ruth Ray, met at the Australian Women’s Studies Association conference a number of years ago. We were presenting papers on our findings in the Hannan archives, and had included the word philanthropy in the title of our panel. Suffice it to say that our panel was not particularly well attended, and when we discussed that circumstance with other attendees at the conference, we learned that in Australia A Case Study in Resilience 179 philanthropy is, if not a dirty word, at least one that carries a negative connotation. Why? Well, in the terms Kate has provided me, it’s because Australians believe that it is the job of the civic body to do its own civic housekeeping! I am attracted to the idea of philanthropy as interpretation for a number of reasons. First, of course, it involves the contributions of people who would otherwise be thought of as charity cases in solving what are clearly systemic, not individual, social problems. Second, it is alluringly rhetorical in its emphasis not only on interpretation, which I see as the lesser half of what rhetoric can do, but also on production. Let me explain: in the classical (Aristotelian) sense, what we may call the “art” of rhetoric was a techne, a term that may be translated as art, craft, or expertise, and that Aristotle proposed was the habit of mind characteristic of those who engaged in poiesis, or “production.” Those who produce rhetorically must draw on the materials available to them in any given situation, meaning not only that they cannot “import” materials that are not ready to hand but also, and significantly, that they must work with the inherent properties of those ready-to-hand materials. Doing so requires a quickness of wit that, in the case of subordinate peoples (or, at any rate, those who are less powerful than others present in a given situation) may be characterized as mêtistic. And who, pray tell, is Mêtis? In Greek mythology, she was the first wife of Zeus, a clever and beautiful goddess who employed trickery and forethought to fool many gods—among them Zeus himself. She took many forms, the myths tell us, in part to avoid Zeus’s amorous advances. Zeus eventually won that struggle, however, and Mêtis became pregnant with a daughter. She foretold that she would also have a son by Zeus, one more powerful than his father—at which the concerned god swallowed her up so that he later gave birth to their daughter, the mighty Athena, through his forehead. Thereafter...

Share