| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. By Jean Bethke Elshtain. (New York: Basic Books, 2002. xxii, 328 pp. $28.00, ISBN 0-465-01912-9.)

Jean Bethke Elshtain has written a dense and detailed analysis of Jane Addams's ideas. The organization of the book is roughly chronological with long topical excursions. It is all here: the long "'snare of preparation'" (p. 15), as Addams gradually found her vocation; the warmth of Hull House and its openness to many ideas, to people of all ethnic backgrounds. Elshtain emphasizes Addams's fundamental goal: to make the social and economic aspects of society, not just the political, "'democratic'" (p. 108). Jane Addams was particularly concerned with the effects of urban life on what she regarded as the positive "'spirit of youth'" (pp. 129–32). As Walter Lippmann wrote about Addams at her death, "she had compassion without condescension" (p. 249). Elshtain's last section is on Addams's precipitous fall from being beloved and honored to being scorned because of her pacifism during World War I.

Elshtain is hardly rescuing an unknown from obscurity. Addams has been extensively written about, and anyone who knows the literature will find the general picture familiar.

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