The education of Jane Addams

"When she penned her autobiography Twenty Years at Hull-House in 1909, Jane Addams was one of the most famous and influential women in the country. Committed pacifist and champion of social progress, she was also deemed by the contemporary media to be the only saint America had produced. Writing from that lofty perch at the height of the Progressive era, Addams aimed to use an attractive, accessible life story as a vehicle for advancing her reform philosophy rather than for self-revelation. The result, as historian Victoria Bissell Brown shows, leaves an intriguing gap between the sleek, engaging tale she told in her autobiography and the more intricate and challenging story that emerges from her papers and the actual events of her life." "The Education of Jane Addams traces, with unprecedented care, Addams's three-decade journey from a privileged prairie girlhood through her years as the competent spinster daughter in a demanding, fatherless family to her early seasoning on the Chicago reform scene. It weaves her spiritual struggles with Christianity into her political struggles with elitism and her emotional struggles with intimacy. Finally, it reveals the logic of her journey to Chicago and makes biographical sense of the political and personal choices she made once she arrived there. The founder of Chicago's Hull-House and, later, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is portrayed here as a complicated young woman who summoned the energy to pursue public life, the honesty to admit her own arrogance, and the imagination to see joy in collective endeavor."--Jacket.