Jane Grey Swisshelm : An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884, and: Jane Addams: A Writer's Life (review)

Two new biographies of social revolutionaries—one written by an historian and one by a literary critic—continue the feminist project of interpreting and recontextualizing an expanded nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American canon. Although hitherto neglected by history, Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) followed a line of important nineteenth-century American women into the newspaper business, publishing and editing four newspapers between 1847 and 1866, in which she supported abolition, temperance, and women's rights. Margaret Fuller, perhaps the most distinguished of women journalists, was hired in 1844 by Horace Greeley for the New York Tribune. In 1850 Greeley also hired Swisshelm, who became the first woman to serve as a Washington, D.C., correspondent. She returned to Washington in 1863 as a clerk and nurse and, in 1865, began the short-lived Reconstructionist, which was put out of business by an arsonist. Jane Addams (1860–1935), born into privilege almost two generations after Swisshelm, began the settlement house movement with her creation of Hull-House in the slums of Chicago. She worked tirelessly for social reform, woman's rights, and peace, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

The strength of historian Sylvia D. Hoffert's Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life lies in its innovative organization. She twists her story "like a braid" with each strand offering a different context for Swisshelm: religion, marriage, property, work, abolition, and woman's rights. The organization works well; as Hoffert proceeds chronologically through each topic, "parts of the story . . . appear, disappear, and then reappear" (8). Without being repetitious, she is skillful in building her readers' knowledge base, preparing us for the richly contextualized topical movement of her text. Each topic sheds light not just on Swisshelm but on the social mores within and against which women of the time built their lives. Hoffert lets her topics build upon and intersect one another, emphasizing the complexity of any discussion of a woman's cultural and historical position. For example, Swisshelm's long and unhappy marriage, filled with rancor and court battles over money, provides an axis of analysis of the economic condition of married women. Similarly, Swisshelm's move into the workforce ruptures both marriage and workplace as sites of male hegemony.

Hoffert makes clear that Swisshelm "is not entirely appealing to write about" (195). She was outspoken but could deliver sarcastic personal barbs. She supported abolition and rights for freedmen, but advocated displacement and even extermination of Dakota Indians. Perhaps most surprising, she advanced the rights of women, but held conventional ideas about their domestic nature. Her eccentric and abrasive personality, combined with a certain rigidity, kept her from forming alliances with other women in the suffrage movement and often alienated her from her only child, the more conventional Zo Swisshelm Allen.

Where Swisshelm seemed to fight lonely battles every step of her life, the private Jane Addams could easily be obscured by the network of organizations and movements within which she labored. The task of Katherine Joslin's Jane Addams: A Writer's Life is to reclaim the private woman long neglected by biographies that extol the public icon and to reposition Addams as a writer among literary figures. She does both admirably.

Although she begins her book with an example of "biography by omission," recounting how Addams did not meet Henry James when they both sailed for Europe on the S.S. Servia, Joslin proceeds to give us, in rich detail, the crucial meetings that did take place during the course of Addams's life: with Tolstoy, with William James, and with the writings of Virginia Woolf. Moreover, Joslin's excellent discussion of the literary artistry of Addams's writing is what makes her case for Addams as a literary figure; she does not need near misses with Henry James. Joslin makes the...