Twenty Years at Hull House Book

This book has been read and reviewed a lot, so this won't really be a review so much as a short reflection. I came to Jane Addams late, after first encountering her sort of peripherally through the guy all educators are introduced to, John Dewey, one of her best friends, who wrote Democracy and Education and Experience and Education and close to 90 other books. One of the greatest thinkers of all time, with great ideas. But I am quite sure he would not have been able to write as he does without Addams.

Dewey, like William James, was a pragmatist philosopher, which is to say they were opposed to typical abstract analytical philosophy. Their approach was more. . . pragmatic or utilitarian. What possible effects in the real world do your believing one thing over another have? What good is it to think that way? So what? A show me anti-philosophy, more a method of thinking of ideas than philosophy, really.

But James and Dewey are, for all of their useful approaches and ideas, not that engaging as writers. They write as philosophers. Addams is a storyteller, a social worker, with no time for abstract discussions. Dewey and James talked and Addams walked, or she walked the talk. She DID pragmatism and they watched her do it and refined their ideas through her actions. She refined her ideas herself through her work there at Chicago's Halsted Street Hull House Settlement. She came in with ideas, realized she didn't know what she was doing, began to listen to everyone there in this community and shaped the settlement in terms of a conversation, not her own preconceived notions of social change.

And Twenty Years at Hull House, one of her several books, is a memoir of the first twenty years of her work with many other people. Addams won international acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize and she deserved all the honors she got, but she could not have done it without Marxist labor activist Florence Kelley and so many others who shaped and reshaped her views. They did it together. She was disrespected by the academics and the just foreign disciplines like sociology, and the University of Chicago in particular because she was a WOMAN and a storyteller in a time (that is also true today) when story was seen as less than rigorous and scientific. We need Addams more than ever.

My students in this most recent class were astonished by her story and feel in love with her and what she has to say today about social action and reform and justice for the poor, for immigrants. This happens every time I teach her work. Highly recommended for anyone doing work in similar areas.