Jan/Feb 2002 Current Issues Features

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"Most Americans of middle age or older," Jean Bethke Elshtain observes, "have heard of Jane Addams. Didn't she have something to do with immigrants and social work?" Founder of Hull-House, the pioneering Chicago settlement house inspired by a Christian impulse to "share the lives of the poor," extraordinarily influential among young women as a model of what women could accomplish, defender of the immigrant and advocate for children, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize, Jane Addams has largely slipped from public consciousness since her death in 1935. In a new book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life, Elshtain brings Addams vividly into focus and shows why her life and work are profoundly relevant to the challenges Americans face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Herewith an excerpt.

In 1915, Otis Tufton Mason, then curator of the Department of Ethnology in the United States National Museum, published Woman's Share in Primitive Culture. This text provided scholarly confirmation of views that Jane Addams already held about the centrality of women's role in the creation and maintenance of culture. Mason's book appeared in 1915; although Addams had been expounding views consistent with Mason's well before that date, his book bolstered her convictions.

The overriding theme limned by Mason is that women did not languish in the backwater as men charged forth to create culture and make history; rather, if one looks at the world of primitive culture (by which he means cultures prior to written languages and with a tribal structure of one sort or another), one finds women food bringers, weavers, skin dressers, potters, beasts of burden, jacks-of-all-trades, artists, linguists, founders of society, ...