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Article Excerpt
When Jane Addams (1860-1935) wrote Twenty Years at Hull-House in 1910, she understood autobiographies were deliberate constructions in the sense that an author depicts her identity and events in the text to shape the reader's perception: "It has ... been hard to determine what incidents and experiences should be selected for recital, and I have found that I might give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a totally misleading impression of the whole, solely by the selection of the incidents." (1) Addams suggests that the inclusion--or exclusion--of certain events might misrepresent her life, which appears to be partly her intention. But Twenty Years at Hull-House, like autobiographies of other social activists of her time and ours, extended her social advocacy, which for Addams included welfare, education reform, peace activism, women's rights, workers' rights, and the settlement house. She promoted this advocacy with the careful metaphor and rhetoric of motherhood: she compared herself to a mother, building on her popular national reputation as "The Mother of Social Work," and she infused the text with maternal language and imagery. (2) Such a choice makes strategic sense, even though Addams was not a biological mother. At the turn of the century, no conventional social role existed for a woman like her: an unmarried woman who lived with like-minded colleagues in the Chicago slums so that she might improve the lives of the poor and improve society overall. The "misleading impression of the whole" is her figurative motherhood, obscuring her transgressions of middleclass expectations of gender and her critique of the limits placed upon women of her day. But maternal metaphors and rhetoric also function on a deeper level in the text. Addams uses these persuasive tools to cast a mold for transforming society. They enable her to model through the autobiographical self a shift from individualized, male-centered power to interdependency and mutuality--in short, a redistribution of power for a more just society.
Twenty Years at Hull-House was not the first autobiography to advance radical social change. On the contrary, the text is part of a long-standing social activist literary tradition that includes narratives of former slaves, such as Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Harriet Jacob (1813-1897), and Sojourner Truth (179?-1883), who advocated abolition within the pages of their autobiographies, in addition to the many women during Addams's lifetime who wrote autobiographies in service of their reformist causes: suffragists Abigail Scott Duniway (1834-1915) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), Addams's colleague Florence Kelley (1859-1932), anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940), contraceptive advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells, labor activist Mother Jones (1843-1930), among others. Though Addams takes her place among the ranks of women activist autobiographers, the task of writing such a text was not without its challenges and special considerations, particularly as she negotiated the depictions of herself as a woman reformist. Her awareness and concern over striking the balance between the inclusion of events and the risk of writing a "totally misleading impression of the whole" speak to her sensitivity to her reading audience and her understanding of how to use rhetorical devices.
Addams's sensitivity is evident in the success of her first autobiography. Twenty Years at Hull-House was first published serially in The American Magazine and one chapter was published in McClure's Magazine---both large-circulation publications--before coming out as a book. Portions were also published in the Ladies Home Journal, which had a tremendous circulation at the turn of the century. (3) Biographer Katherine Joslin describes the anticipation of her readers as they awaited each issue of The American Magazine featuring the autobiography: "Readers followed the story in serial form, anxious for new installments--her awkward childhood in Illinois, her relationship with her politically savvy father, her female education at Rockford Female Seminary, and her neurasthenic discomfort with leisure class travel." (4) With this level of reader engagement, the text testifies to the strength of Addams's reputation at the time, bur it also points to her awareness of how to write for her audience.
As a writer, she understood not all audiences perceived her automatically the way she wished to be perceived, so Addams took care to present her objectives in accessible ways, and Joslin suggests, "We might think of her books as imaginative autobiographies.... She stitched into her story the experiences of hundreds of Chicagoans, people she met in the street, vivid characters who told their stories to her as though giving her permission to tell them to us. In these vignettes she plotted fates in ways that fiction writers have always done" (2). Addams had read widely and had written about literature, (5) and she was experienced in anticipating a range of receptions from the familiar audiences in women's clubs to skeptical neighbors in the working-class community surrounding Hull House. In Addams's article "The Subtle Problems of Charity" (1899), she explains the challenges encountered by the "charity visitor" when interacting with less privileged people; the article reveals her ability to gage an audience's receptivity:
Add to this a consciousness in the mind of the visitor of a genuine misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of her charity and by their neighborhoods. Let us take a neighborhood of poor people, and test their ethical standards by those of the charity visitor, who comes with the best desire in the world to help them out of their distress. A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient. The neighborhood mind is immediately confronted not only by the difference of method, but also by an absolute clashing of two ethical standards.... (6)
In this passage, Addams locates the "incongruous" moral and emotional responses to the same gesture of generosity when enacted by members of two different classes. By contrasting the two distinct responses, she shows her awareness of the need for careful presentation to achieve one's objectives. From here, we can draw parallels to her understanding of the levels of receptivity among different reading audiences, some of whom required particular rhetorical strategies to make activist arguments effective.
In an earlier essay "Cassandra" (1881), Addams identifies the special need for women with an unpopular social "vision" to be mindful of assumptions and prejudices they might encounter in society. This vision, she suggests, stems from women's unique "feminine trait of mind--an accurate perception of Truth and Justice." Addams believes that the public is not always ready to hear a woman's perspective, especially as it may clash with popular or patriarchal visions of the social order. She emphasizes this point by drawing a comparison to Cassandra in Greek mythology:
The world looks upon such women with mingled pity and contempt; they continually reinact [sic] the fate of the fearless, unfortunate Cassandra, because they failed to make themselves intelligible; they have not gained what the ancients called auethoritas [sic], right of speaker to make themselves heard, and prove to the world that an intuition is a force in the universe, and a part of nature; that an intuitive perception committed to a woman's charge is not a prejudice or fancy, but one of the holy means given to mankind in their search for truth. (7)
Here, Addams shows herself to be acutely aware of the dangers facing women who fail accurately to size up the rhetorical situation. On one level, she claims success depends on the ability to articulate or "make themselves intelligible" to their audiences, but on another level, success depends on women's claim to authority or the "right of the speaker to make themselves heard." The effectiveness of one's argument, it would seem, relies on two things: one's rhetorical abilities and one's moral assertion to claim the right to speak.
Later in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), she more directly addresses the challenges facing women who advocate for radical social change, and she claims the public lays heavy moral expectations upon these women: "Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that the radical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in his personal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviation from the established standards." (8) In the early twentieth century, "deviation" from the conventional social order was complicated by several things for the woman reformer: the public nature of the reformist role, the radical nature of the social cause, and the decision to marry or not. The reformer, then as now, required a reputation above criticism, since these other considerations increased, or invited, heightened criticism from within conventional venues. To claim authority, or simply to claim protection from society's harsh judgment, Addams, like many of her contemporary women activists, drew upon the role of motherhood, relying on the rhetoric of moral authority offered by the role. (9)
In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams defines the mother as a figure of intuitive wisdom, benevolence, morality, and guidance: "We often come to a realization of the truth of Walt Whitman's statement, that one of the surest sources of wisdom is the mother of a large family" (232). The mother, she claims, is innately wise. The implication is her wisdom is proportional to the number of children she has. Addams does not qualify this assertion beyond attributing it to Whitman, but her assumption stems from the Victorian essentialist belief in women's inherent morality. The mother of a large family is wise because she is innately moral--a natural guide for her children and husband, and she grows wiser as her familial responsibilities multiply.
More than a source of wisdom, though, the mother instills the wish to survive: "We are told that 'the will to live' is aroused in each baby by his mother's irresistible desire to play with him, the physiological value of joy that a child is born, and that the high death rate in institutions is increased by 'the discontented babies' whom no one persuades into living" (TY, 231). Inspired by "the physiological value of joy" of childbirth, the mother in turn inspires her child's desire to live. Her presence is essential to the survival of the child, contrasted by the high rate of...
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