FINALLY finished! And dang...it was awesome. I cried at the end. Will write more once the semester is over.

In this compelling and perceptive portrait of Jane Addams, published on the 150th anniversary of her birth, Addams emerges unexpectedly as an iconoclast and a rebel. Finding herself living in a chaotic, unfair world, she turns her energies toward bringing people together around issues of social justice, and she became one of the nation's most influential political leaders of her time. Born to a wealthy family in small-town Illinois, Addams rejected her narrow world of privilege and the expectations that stifled women of her class in order to put her vague democratic and philanthropic ideals into action. At the age of 29 she moved into a newly industrialized, mostly immigrant, working-class neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, where she cofounded the nation's first settlement house, Hull House. ( )

A masterful biography of Jane Addams, a reformer who worked from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Addams was raised by rich and cultured parents, but she yearned to minister to the poor. After her father blocked her admission to Smith (the first college in the US to offer women a bachelor's degree) and she found medical school bad for her health, she resolved to work in a settlement house instead. From the English example, a settlement house was meant to be an oasis of art and learning in a low income area. Addams poured her personal fortune into founding Hull House in Chicago, making it the first settlement house in the US. Although she began by offering classes and a library, living amongst Chicago's poor opened her up to all the other areas she could be of use. She devoted the rest of her life to speaking, writing, protesting, organizing, and (eventually) voting for peace and social justice. Addams's true genius seems to have been in empathy, understanding, and helping others to become their best self: she was a masterful organizer, and founded and served on the boards of everything from the NAACP to the ACLU. She advised (or pestered) eight US presidents, pushed through laws at the state and federal levels, led Hull House until 2 years before her death, and worked on a truly international level when most Americans still considered "international" to mean "including Europe and Japan."

Before reading this biography, I'd had no idea of her scope and reach. She's famous in Chicago--I actually worked in a youth group that met in Hull House--but to me that settlement was the extent of her activities. I'd also had no idea how much she had thought about ethics and philosophy. Knight brings together her friendships, work, and words together to create a portrait that seems as real as a living being.

I love the postscript, both as a summing up of Addams's work and for its call to action, and have included most of it here:

On the whole, history confirmed that the fears of conservatives were unfounded. The end of child labor, which Congress banned in 1938, did not force major industries out of business; women's ability to vote did not destroy the family; federal old-age pensions, the federal minimum wage, and state unemployment insurance did not destroy the American capitalist system. The US's membership in the UN after WWII did not destroy the country's national sovereignty, although conservatives continue to claim that it has, or will soon.
On the other hand, seventy-five years after her death, many of the problems worked on by Addams and other reformers, of both genders and of every class and race, remain unfinished. At home, we still have poverty, obstacles to labor organizing, an inadequate minimum wage, discrimination against immigrants, unjust immigration policies, human trafficking, inadequate affordable housing, racism, and sexism. Around the world we sill have war, although the work of the UN has prevented or shortened some conflicts. And the injustices that burden women around the world continue...
Meanwhile, the two institutions Addams did so much to help create live on. Hull House is the largest social service agency in Chicago. WILPF, the oldest women's international peace organization in the world, is still headquartered in Geneva and still works for peace and freedom."

( )

this book would make an excellent New Yorker piece if better organized. ( )