Jane Addams: Thinking and Acting Locally and Globally

Jane Addams. A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. Introduction by Katherine Joslin. 1912; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xxxii + 108 pp. ISBN 0-252-07092-5 (pb).

Jane Addams. Democracy and Social Ethics. Introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. 1902; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xxxviii + 127pp. ISBN 0-252-07023-2 (pb).

Jane Addams. Peace and Bread in Time of War. Introduction by Katherine Joslin. 1922; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xxxiv + 159pp. ISBN 0-252-07093-3 (pb).

Jane Addams. The Long Road of Woman's Memory. Introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. 1916; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xxxiv + 84pp. ISBN 0-252-07024-0 (pb).

Jane Addams. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Introduction by Allen F. Davis. 1909; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. xxx + 162 pp. ISBN 0-052-00275-X (pb).

Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull House. Edited and with an introduction by Victoria Bissell Brown. 1910; reprint, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1999. xii + 276 pp. ISBN 0-312-15706-1 (pb).

Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, and Alice Hamilton. Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and its Results. Introduction by Harriet Hyman Alonso. 1915; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xl + 152 pp. ISBN 0-252-07156-5 (pb).

Victoria Bissell Brown. The Education of Jane Addams: From Heroine to Democrat in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 408pp., ill. ISBN 0-8122-3747-1 (cl).

Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Barbara Bair, and Maree De Angury, eds. The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, vol. 1, Preparing to Lead, 1860-81. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. lii + 650pp; ill, maps, charts. ISBN 0-252-02729-9 (cl).

Allen F. Davis. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. 1973; reprint, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2000. xxi + 339pp., ill. ISBN 1-56663-296-X (pb).

Jean Bethke Elshtain. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xxii + 328pp., ill. ISBN 0-465-01912-9 (cl).

Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed. The Jane Addams Reader. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xi + 488pp. ISBN 0-465-01915-3 (pb).

James Weber Linn. Jane Addams: A Biography. Introduction by Anne Firor Scott. 1935; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xxvi + 457pp, ill. ISBN 0-252-06904-8 (pb).

Jane Addams left behind instructions that her tombstone read: "Jane Addams of Hull-House and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom" (WILPF). This simple inscription encapsulated her work of almost fifty years—a career of settlement house and social reform that segued into leadership in the global movement for world peace and women's rights. Along with the arrival of the new millennium with its complicated layers of globalization has come a renewed interest in Jane Addams. Whether this is a result of our need for role models from the past or a new interdisciplinary expansion in the study of women's history, I cannot say, but in 2002 alone, numerous avenues led to Addams. In February, Swarthmore College sponsored a symposium titled "Rediscovering Jane Addams" which included panels of historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists. This was followed in November with the "Exploring Jane Addams: Twenty-ninth Annual Richard R. Baker Colloquium in Philosophy" at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, which included the same mix of disciplines along with scholars of rhetoric, communications, and performance. By the time this review appears, two new Addams biographies will have been published and two previous biographies reprinted. In addition, the University of Illinois Press has committed itself to reprinting Addams's books and collections of her papers. Add to this at least two other biographies near completion and another conference (this one at Hull-House) in the planning stages, and you get the picture of how, at long last, Addams is...