Brown, Victoria Bissell. The Education of Jane Addams. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. viii + 418 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth) ISBN 08122-3747-1.

     Jane Addams's stature as the founding mother of the settlement movement, tireless advocate for social welfare reform, pacifist and first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, pragmatist and democratic ethicist, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, have made her one of the most well-known women in American history. But despite our familiarity with the details of Addams's life, we have much to learn about her from Victoria Bissell Brown's new biography, The Education of Jane Addams. Through Brown's careful attention to rarely used sources about the Addams family and Jane's private life, a portrait emerges that is at once comfortably familiar and startling fresh.

     The book is aptly titled, as it explores the influences that shaped Addams's growth from a privileged, "ambitious, arrogant youth caught up in heroic dreams of individual triumph" to a warm and sympathetic woman who "folded ambition for herself into ambition for democracy" (6). All the usual episodes from Addams's early life are here—her childhood spent in Cedarville, Illinois, her devotion to her father John Huy Addams, her relationships with her stepmother Anna Haldeman Addams and stepbrother George, the years at Rockford Female Seminary, and time spent abroad before her momentous decision to open Hull-House. But Brown dwells on them in rich detail to show how they shaped Addams's personality and to emphasize that nothing about Addams's life made the road to Hull-House a given. Exploring as well the wider culture in which Addams matured, Brown succeeds admirably in her goal to shake Addams loose from the mythology surrounding her and locate her first thirty-five years "in a particular family and school, in a particular set of class and gender constraints, and in a particular grouping of ideological and emotional dilemmas" (9).