A new interpretive biography of the life and work of Jane Addams explores the intellectual movements that influenced her career, her creation of Hull House as a cultural and intellectual center, and her cultural, social, and political impact on her era. 25,000 first printing.

In this eagerly anticipated interpretation of the life and work of quintessential "public intellectual" Jane Addams (1860-1935), Jean Bethke Elshtain explores Addams's legacy thematically and chronologically, recounting her embrace of "social feminism," her challenge to the usual cleavage between "conservative" and "liberal," and the growth of Chicago's famed Hull House into a thriving cultural and intellectual center. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy is a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most extraordinary figures in American history.

Jane Addams was a prolific and elegant writer. Her twelve books consist largely of published essays, but to appreciate her life work one must also read her previously uncollected speeches and editorials. This artfully compiled collection begins with Addams's youthful Junior Class Oration on women as "Breadgivers," features thoughtful examinations of topics as diverse as "Tolstoy and Gandhi" and "The Public School and the Immigrant Child," and even includes popular essays on "The Subtle Problems of Charity," from The Atlantic Monthly, and "Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?" from Ladies' Home Journal. Along with the writings themselves, Elshtain's insightful commentary offers powerful evidence of Addams's remarkable ability to frame social problems in an ethical context, her unwillingness to succumb to ideological dogma, her political courage, and her lifelong devotion to civic and moral life.

Using a rich array of newly available sources and contemporary methodologies from many disciplines, the ten original essays in this volume give a fresh appraisal of Addams as a theorist and practitioner of democracy. In an increasingly interdependent world, Addams's life work offers resources for activists, scholars, policy makers, and theorists alike. This volume demonstrates how scholars continue to interpret Addams as a model for transcending disciplinary boundaries, generating theory out of concrete experience, and keeping theory and practice in close and fruitful dialogue. Contributors are Harriet Hyman Alonso, Victoria Bissell Brown, Wendy Chmielewski, Marilyn Fischer, Shannon Jackson, Louise W. Knight, Carol Nackenoff, Karen Pastorello, Wendy Sarvasay, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Camilla Stivers.

American society is often described as one that celebrates self-reliance and personal responsibility. However, abolitionists, progressive reformers, civil rights activists, and numerous others often held their fellow citizens responsible for shared problems such as economic exploitation and white supremacy. Moreover, they viewed recognizing and responding to shared problems as essential to achieving democratic ideals. In Democratic Responsibility, Nora Hanagan examines American thinkers and activists who offered an alternative to individualistic conceptions of responsibility and puts them in dialogue with contemporary philosophers who write about shared responsibility. Drawing on the political theory and practice of Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Audre Lorde, Hanagan develops a distinctly democratic approach to shared responsibility. Cooperative democracy is especially relevant in an age of globalization and hyperconnectivity, where societies are continually threatened with harms—such as climate change, global sweatshop labor, and structural racism—that result from the combined interactions of multiple individuals and institutions, and which therefore cannot be resolved without collective action. Democratic Responsibility offers insight into how political actors might confront seemingly intractable problems, and challenges conventional understandings of what commitment to democratic ideals entails. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, especially those who look to the history of political thought for resources that might promote social justice in the present.

Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s Southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party. A unique history of the American conservative movement, Mothers of Conservatism shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital.