A Trained Imagination

In the eyes of many, Jane Addams was a wealthy woman who devoted her energies to helping the poor and downtrodden, a Lady Bountiful who did good in Chicago a century ago. This new biography demonstrates the inadequacy of this picture by giving us the real Jane Addams: a social inventor with the kind of vision rarer today than ever, a woman who understood the ethical consequences of political choices, a leader who could speak truth to power and, withal, a skillful rhetorician and a superb writer.

In part one, "The Given Life," Louise (Lucy) W. Knight describes Jane Addams's coming of age, the struggle to find her way, the personal and public circumstances helping to form the decisions leading to those achievements that earned international fame for her and that constitute the subject of part two of Citizen, "The Chosen Life." A biographer must, of course, distinguish the personal and particular forces from the typical—or fateful—ones that determine the course of his subject's life. The temptation to overpsychologize a character as complex as Jane Addams's is as compelling as it has been to see her life in reductive sociological terms. Lucy Knight avoids both hazards. The final third of the book is given to notes, bibliography, and an afterword, "Scholarship and Jane Addams," in which her reputation from her death in 1935 until the present is examined. This survey constitutes a fascinating history of attitudes toward biography. The author situates her own book, "a half-life," in this context: "Citizen is intended to show how Jane Addams was born to one life and chose another and how she was transformed by that choice."

The account of Jane's family is marked by a generous understanding that encourages the reader to ignore dismissive judgments about her rearing. John Huy Addams, a friend of Lincoln's, was a wealthy manufacturer whose social conscience was informed with an evangelical piety. This gentle tyrant encouraged his daughter to serve the less fortunate, with special emphasis on education, while simultaneously vetoing Jane's intense wish to attend Smith College. Lucy Knight's detailed account of familial relationships reminds us that the circumstances in the last years of the nineteenth century in which intelligent women, yearning for independence, found themselves were much closer to the 1790s than they are to our time. But emerge they did, these women, despite the barriers that make today's talk of glass and other kinds of ceilings seem frivolous.

At the nearby Rockford Female Seminary, which was substituted for Smith, Jane was passionately interested in oratory. Lucy Knight's professional expertise in the field of rhetoric enables her to explain the importance of this practice, nowadays as outmoded as elocution. The orator is a rhetorician; he practices the art of persuasion. Jane energetically undertook to learn this art and at one time entered a contest as the only woman in an otherwise all-male cohort. She was chagrined to come in fifth (William Jennings Bryan placed second). Jane's rhetorical skills would prove essential to her subsequent endeavors.

Like Virginia Stephen, Jane turned to her father's library; finding there Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, and Arnold, she made these sages her mentors. At Rockford she read classical authors, both Latin and Greek, in the original. The question that fired her interest was how intuition, usually seen as the antithesis of reason and sentimentally attributed to women, could gain auctoritas. Lucy Knight identifies three emblems Jane Addams depended on as she sought to address that question. Breadgivers represented women's role in both the home and in the public arena. The biographer shrewdly analyzes how this metaphor served Jane rhetorically: it "allowed her to keep shifting her perspective"; she had learned from Emerson's "artful impenetrability" how "to embed controversial ideas in a soft cushion of conventionality."

The story of Bellerophon provided Jane with a second emblem as she deployed allegory in interpreting myth. Knight explicates: "'Social reformers' (Bellerophon) should employ their 'idealism...