Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (review)

Louise Knight describes her chronicle of the first 40 years of Jane Addams's life as an exploration of "the years of her becoming" (1). As I read Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, the phrase stayed with me and struck me as particularly apt. As Knight suggests, Addams was a complex public figure not easily understood, either by her contemporaries or by scholars. Too often characterized—even in her own time—as a upper-middle-class "do-gooder" who was dabbling in social justice, Addams's legacy has yet to be fully recognized. Knight sets for herself the task of understanding and recovering Addams's contributions. By choosing to go beyond her public essays, autobiographical writings, and speeches, and delving into the personal journals and correspondence of Addams, as well as those of her friends, family, and colleagues, Knight carefully and thoroughly constructs a portrait of a woman evolving, both personally and publicly.

Key to appreciating both the construction and content of Citizen is the argument Knight makes in the afterword. In reviewing scholarly writing on Jane Addams, Knight claims that in Addams's early years (through 1899), her contributions to society could be found in one of three areas: "her role as co-founder and head of Hull House, her role as a leader of reform, and her role as a public intellectual" (411). Certainly, each area is significant and worthy of discussion in and of itself. The danger of this type of categorization, Knight argues, is that scholars use the categories to isolate, "sui generis" (411), Addams's accomplishments. As an alternative, Knight works with the premise that one area must necessarily inform the other areas, thereby requiring a type of deep contextual investigation. Knight uses personal journals and correspondence as the primary lens through which to view Addams's public writings and ultimately her actions. In other words, instead of using the "finished products" found in her books, like Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes or Democracy and Social Ethics, as the text from which both to understand and to assess Addams's contributions, Knight traces the moral and intellectual struggle facing Addams as she makes choices about how to live her life.

In the first part of Citizen, "The Given Life, 1860–88," Knight lays the groundwork. Readers have no doubt about the significant influence of Addams's family. Specifically, Knight underscores the importance of John Huy Addams, Jane's father, and demonstrates how he wielded considerable authority over her early religious and moral development. In addition, John's success as a businessman and politician allowed him the luxury of making sure his children, Jane included, were well-educated citizens. Because her mother, Sarah, died before Jane reached the age of three, Knight describes a shared closeness between Jane and her father that was disrupted when John remarried in 1868. Knight also delves into the relationship between Addams and her stepmother. She contends that because Anna Hostetter Haldeman Addams believed women ought to adhere to traditional norms of feminine decorum, Jane often found herself at odds with the ideas and expectations of her stepmother. Indeed, Knight identifi es many ways in which Anna's dominant personality shaped Jane's actions as a young adult, and how Jane's decision to found Hull House created a semipermanent break between the two women. Though occasionally laborious, by the end of "The Given Years, 1860–88," readers have a clear view of a woman who was constrained in certain ways by her upbringing, but then rejected the shackles of those ideological constraints. As Knight writes, Addams's doubts about her new path "had not fallen away or been dissolved by fate; they had been removed by Jane herself" (176).

In some senses, "Part Two: The Chosen Life, 1889–99" provides a much more compelling story than the first part of Citizen. Whereas the background provided in the first part of the book...