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"Most Americans of middle age or older," Jean Bethke Elshtain observes, "have heard of Jane Addams. Didn't she have something to do with immigrants and social work?" Founder of Hull-House, the pioneering Chicago settlement house inspired by a Christian impulse to "share the lives of the poor," extraordinarily influential among young women as a model of what women could accomplish, defender of the immigrant and advocate for children, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize, Jane Addams has largely slipped from public consciousness since her death in 1935. In a new book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life, Elshtain brings Addams vividly into focus and shows why her life and work are profoundly relevant to the challenges Americans face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Herewith an excerpt.
In 1915, Otis Tufton Mason, then curator of the Department of Ethnology in the United States National Museum, published Woman's Share in Primitive Culture. This text provided scholarly confirmation of views that Jane Addams already held about the centrality of women's role in the creation and maintenance of culture. Mason's book appeared in 1915; although Addams had been expounding views consistent with Mason's well before that date, his book bolstered her convictions.
The overriding theme limned by Mason is that women did not languish in the backwater as men charged forth to create culture and make history; rather, if one looks at the world of primitive culture (by which he means cultures prior to written languages and with a tribal structure of one sort or another), one finds women food bringers, weavers, skin dressers, potters, beasts of burden, jacks-of-all-trades, artists, linguists, founders of society, and patrons of religion. The "founders of society" category is especially important in light of the fact that the dominant Western political tradition features only male founders of polities. Mason, however, gestures toward female foundings. He believes there is substantial anthropological and paleontological evidence that women were the creators of settled social life. This thesis belied then-ascendant Social Darwinism, with its accounts of societal origins in a brutal survival of the fittest.
By contrast, and in light of his evidence, when Mason sees women pass before him, he sees not "an abject creature. … the brutalized slave of man," but a creature whose ability to do almost everything helped to create a "higher law of culture. … the law of co-ordination and co-operation." Women were inventors. Women domesticated animals. Women were the cultural carriers of weaving and of textiles in general—and this is a vital dimension of civilization. Women harvested what nature offered and invented orderly cultivation. They were the "first ceramic artisans and developed all the techniques, the forms, and the uses of pottery." Women were the first to "conceive the idea of shelter for herself and her helpless infant." Women invented dyes and the arts of decoration; women linked necessity—protecting the body—to beauty. Lastly, the mother-child pair was the first linguistic unity.
Because motherhood requires stability, women were the primary agents of stable matrimony—an enormous advance for civilization and for women themselves. Women were prophetesses and mourners. They helped create religion. Women were teachers and friends. They had "their share in determining the relation of geography to history, in the conquest of the three kingdoms of Nature, in the substitution of other forces to do the work of human muscles, in the elaboration of industrial aesthetic arts, in the creation of social order, in the production of language, in the development of religions." Surely, Mason argues, the progress of civilization and of "intellectuality" should not be "opposed to childbearing." Indeed, if such a sentiment becomes prevalent, a society is doomed. For both pedagogy and the body politic had their origins in female-generated activity.
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