Jane Addams: Spirit in Action [Hardcover]

Louise W. Knight (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2010

In this landmark biography, Jane Addams becomes America's most admired and most hated woman—and wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a leading statesperson in an era when few imagined such possibilities for women. In this fresh interpretation, the first full biography of Addams in nearly forty years, Louise W. Knight shows Addams's boldness, creativity, and tenacity as she sought ways to put the ideals of democracy into action. Starting in Chicago as a co-founder of the nation's first settlement house, Hull House—a community center where people of all classes and ethnicities could gather—Addams became a grassroots organizer and a partner of trade unionists, women, immigrants, and African Americans seeking social justice. In time she emerged as a progressive political force; an advocate for women's suffrage; an advisor to presidents; a co-founder of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP; and a leader for international peace. Written as a fast-paced narrative, Jane Addams traces how one woman worked with others to make a difference in the world. 32 black-and-white illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was one of the leading figures of the Progressive era. This "pragmatic visionary," as Knight calls her, is best known as the creator of Hull House, a model settlement house offering training, shelter, and culture for Chicago's poor. Addams also involved herself in a long list of Progressive campaigns. Her rhetorical skills as both speaker and writer made her internationally recognized as a supporter of civil rights, woman suffrage, and labor reform. Using brief quotes and contextual details, Knight (Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy) describes her subject's journey from a Victorian upbringing that stressed family duty through her practice of lofty "benevolence" as a young woman to the confidence to unhesitatingly risk her substantial reputation advocating pacifism during WWI. Her continuing peace activities earned her a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, but antagonized many longstanding supporters. In this well-supported and appealing portrait of an iconic American, Knight emphasizes Addams's struggle to redefine Victorian womanhood and claim her right to "possess authority in the public realm" and "exercise authority" as a lobbying feminist who helped women acquire the right to vote. 32 illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Jane Addams’ life story never becomes irrelevant. With the passage of time, her reputation and her remarkable accomplishments have only increased in stature. As the cofounder of Hull House, the first settlement house in America, she gained a level of independence, influence, and respect seldom achieved by a woman in the late nineteenth century. As the twentieth century dawned, Addams began translating her own heartfelt spirit of democracy into both social and political action. In addition to helping the immigrant residents of her working-class Chicago neighborhood, she became a tireless advocate of labor unions, free speech, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and world peace. Knight, the author of Citizen (2006), provides the first full-length biography of Jane Addams in 35 years. She carefully traces Addams’ philosophical progression as she Addams evolvedfrom a passive reformer into an active collaborator, who tirelessly worked with, not for, others to usher in a new era of democracy and social justice. --Margaret Flanagan

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (September 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393071650
• ISBN-13: 978-0393071658
• Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 6.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #632,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louise (Lucy) W. Knight is a biographer living in Evanston, Illinois. In 2005 she published her first book CITIZEN: JANE ADDAMS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY (University of Chicago Press, 2005), an in-depth exploration of Addams's formative years, through age 40. The book traces how she struggled to find a purpose in life and how her passion for democracy was deepened by experience. Knight's second book, a full life biography of Addams entitled JANE ADDAMS: SPIRIT IN ACTION, was published by W. W. Norton in 2010, and highlights her emergence as a leading political leader and her national and international struggles and achievements. Previously, Knight worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., and as a fundraiser at Duke University, Wheaton College (Mass.), and United South End Settlements in Boston. Beginning in 1993, when she founded Knight Consulting, she has worked as a consultant to nonprofits and foundations. For more information about her as an author, see www.louisewknight.com. For more about her as a consultant, see www.LKnightConsulting.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent history & insightful October 24, 2010

By G. Schechter

Format:Hardcover

Louise Knight's is a highly readable, very well-written book that captures in 200 pages the essence and scope of one of the greatest women the United States has ever produced: Jane Addams. Not only does one learn about the historical context in which Addams lived (and indeed, which she helped shape) from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries around labor reform, women's suffrage, immigration, peace, social philosophy, and new bottom-up tactics in effecting political change, but Knight provides intimate insights into the evolution of the upper-class-bred Addams into a woman of the people and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Knight takes nothing Addams said or did at face value, providing the historian's needed "detective work" to ferret out the whys and wherefores of Addams' actions.

To provide but two of many examples, Knight notes that in a speech Addams gave in 1896 following the violent Pullman strike, Addams used the word "power" in what was for her a new context, that of "Pullman's 'power' to build the town of Pullman and... his failture to recognize the legitimacy" of his own workers'/tenants' demands. Knight: "'Power' was a word Addams had previously used to refer to character. Growing up, she had dreamed of achieving that kind of personal power, but she had no conscious experience with other kinds of power. Sheltered within her family, she had not seen the power the family's wealth gave it economically and socially, nor seen the other kinds of power her father's influence as a politican created. She lived on the safe side of impersonal power, oblivious and innocent. Why did she see it now?" With this question, Knight takes the inquiry (and the reader) even further, finding clues in a related speech Addams delivered where Addams experienced a "moment of blinding insight" in which she recognized, through the lens of examining the oppression of women, that social hierarchy of any kind is the source of all conflict. She quotes Addams as describing women, in a dramatic metaphor, as "chained down by a military code," leading her down the path of realizing that hierarchy in action -- not just men over women, but boss over worker, native born over immigrant, war lord over civilian -- is wrong. (See pp. 94-96). Viewed in this way, it becomes easy for the reader to understand how it was that Addams always seemed so new and contemporary. She never allowed herself to become a prisoner of dogma and formality.

Knight provides the same sort of probing analysis of Addams' thought and action in discussing a book Addams wrote toward the end of her life, "The Excellent Becomes the Permanent," a collection of speeches Addams gave at memorial services. (See pp. 258-9) Knight: "[Addams] said in her introduction that she intended the book to answer a question she was often asked: Did she believe in life after death?... She never actually answered the question in the book..." However, "her book title gave her real answer: Achieving moral excellence was the path to living eternally.... The addresses in 'Excellent' capture, for the most part, the way each person being memoralized had lived with just that kind of bold passion."

One might say by extension that Addams herself lived with "bold passion." Knight writes in this segment that Addams "liked to treat herself as a mystery to be studied." Louise Knight has expertly unravelled the "mystery" that is Addams by delving into the motivations and evolved thought processes that led to Addams' very brave, often unpopular actions.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Jane Addams: Progressive!!! September 30, 2010

By Jan Huttner

Format:Hardcover

Last night I listened to Bill O'Reilly denigrate "Progressive Values" on Fox News. But if YOU are the least bit confused by the term "Progressive Values," if you wonder if YOU want to be called "a Progressive" yourself, then this really is the book for you!

Me, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind how Jane Addams would vote in November if she were here to do so in person.

Quoted from the Postscript: "On the whole, history confirmed that the fears of conservatives were unfounded. The end of child labor, which Congress banned in 1938, did not force major industries out of business; women's ability to vote did not destroy the family; federal old-age pensions, the federal minimum wage, and state unemployment insurance did not destroy the American capitalist system... On the other hand, seventy-five years after her death, many of the problems worked on by Addams and other reformers, of both genders and of every class and race, remain unfinished..."

Enthusiasm gap??? Not if YOU read THIS book!!!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Jane Addams - The "Spirit" of Progessive Values October 20, 2010

By Maryland Reader

Format:Hardcover

I enjoyed this book so much I feel compelled to do a review. There is nothing about Jane Addams upbringing that would predict her leadership roles in women's sufferage, civil rights, and as an advocate for child labor laws, education and international peace. Her family was well-to-do, but not robber-baron wealthy, yet she founded Hull House with her own funds, thereafter supporting herself from writing and speaking engagements.

I found her personal philosophy and ethos (and lapses) fascinating. She sought to reconcile herself to what she was often already doing or advocating, yet somewhat unusually for that era, her compulsion toward public service was not based on traditional religious beliefs.

While the book paints a full picture of her range of intellectual and advocacy pursuits, it doesn't shy away from her failings. To give an egregious example, in 1899, a rash of lynchings occurred across the country and not just in the South. Perhaps because of a lack of personal knowledge, perhaps because of her own prejudices, her writings and advocacy were intended for white Southerners as an audience and took a tone of concern about the lack of due process of the mob, not the lynching itself or the torture, inequality and innocent victims of lynching. In the same year, her protests regarding the Filipino-American war did not take on the outdated tenents of "benevolent assimulation."

Louise Knight has woven the story of this complex, intelligent woman with her internal ethical debates into a highly readable book that presents Addams and her advocacy within the frame of her time's events. She met and corresponded with Presidents, intellectuals and leaders of her day, as well those emigrants using Hull House resources. A really interesting, engaging book I enjoyed.