Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (review)

Progressive Era reformer Jane Addams is recalled best as synonymous with the U.S. settlement house movement, having cofounded the nation's first and largest settlement house, Hull House in Chicago in 1889. President Barack Obama, himself a proud former community organizer in the City with Big Shoulders, points to Addams as inspiring the engaged, immediate grassroots approach to social transformation he heralded as a chief bona fide in his presidential bid. But Addams's boundless reforming spirit led to a list of nearly Herculean career accomplishments in controversial campaigns for free speech, peace, civil rights for women and racial and ethnic minorities, and on behalf of workers, including child laborers. Addams was the first American woman (and second globally) to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and cofounded the NAACP, the ACLU, the first national women's trade union organization of the twentieth century, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which she led as its first President. Vice President of the premier woman's suffrage organization (NAWSA), she also served as a board member of myriad influential socially progressive groups. Courted for support by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, with whom she sometimes openly sparred ideologically, Addams herself occasionally was hoisted as a presidential prospect despite being denied, as a female, the right to vote. Honors bestowed on her far-reaching lifework continue: in 2006, ten prominent historians placed her among the 100 most influential figures in U.S. history.

The common temptation to perceive greatness as imprinted at birth, however, is skillfully disabused in Louise Knight's meticulous, insightful, and often poignant biography, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action, which traces the complicated odyssey of a well-heeled idealist—initially conflicted by her material privilege, disappointed by gender-codes confining her ambitions, and haunted by familial ghosts and duties—into the pantheon of U.S. political idols. Of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, Knight weaves into Addams's arresting tale her early baptism into public speaking, writings that shaped her expression in public forums, rhetorical strategies she employed, and platform failures as well as successes. A prolific speaker, Addams penned ten books despite an exhausting schedule and the pressures of persistent ill health and complex familial duties. Knight's biography is a tour de force and merits space on the shelves of anyone, scholar and citizen alike, interested in mining national progress and identity through tales of individuals who devoted their lives to charting a new national course.

Chapter 1, "The Dreamer," recounts significant early imprints on Addams, forming the admixture of trepidation and confidence that marked the first three decades of her life. The daughter of the township's wealthiest industrialist, who also was a state legislator with strong views on moral duty, Addams lost her mother and sister when she was two and six years old, respectively; at four, she suffered spinal tuberculosis that left her self-conscious of her crooked back; and at eight, she experienced a seismic familial shift with her father's remarriage to a stern and demanding widowed mother whose constant fury nurtured Jane's early tendency to conflict avoidance. Forbidden to attend Smith College, she nonetheless was exposed to texts by and about women at Rockford Theological Seminary, including work by Margaret Fuller. Following exposure to Cicero and others, she inaugurated the seminary's intramural public speaking event and competed as the first woman in the Illinois intercollegiate oratorical contest, placing fifth behind second-place winner, William Jennings Bryan.

Chapter 2, "Freedom Seeker," reveals ways material privilege fails to vaccinate against common human struggles. Following the assassination of President Garfield by a deranged family friend and her brother Weber's institutionalization for paranoid schizophrenia, her father died during a vacation he had taken to ameliorate stress. Overwhelmed by pressing familial duties, including the care of her hostile, dependent stepmother, Jane suffered a nervous collapse that was diagnosed as moral failure—a diagnosis that she internalized. A European jaunt to...