Jane Addams

Jane Addams (b. 1860–d. 1935) is considered one of the founding figures in American pragmatist philosophy, social work, and sociology. The daughter of a prominent American politician from Illinois, Addams grew up in a privileged environment that included graduating from college, an opportunity not afforded the majority of women at the time. Addams cofounded one of the earliest social settlements of the Progressive Era, Hull House in Chicago. The settlement began with an unfocused commitment to social amelioration and would evolve into a dynamo social projects. Living there for the remaining nearly fifty years of her life amid one of the most significant migrant influxes that the United States has known, Addams led a community of mostly women who pioneered improving community welfare in education, recreation, labor, sanitation, health, criminal justice, and the arts. An accomplished writer and speaker, Addams engaged the public through academic articles, popular articles, books, and speeches amid her community activism. She would become a friend and colleague of John Dewey, William James, and George Herbert Mead, influencing them as much as they did her. A dominant theme of her work is the idea that democracy is more than a system of government and entails a moral way of being with one another. Addams’s first book was Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), and the title reveals her abiding belief that democracy was a social morality that is in ongoing need of enrichment. A relational social democracy underpins Addams’s social analysis. Her writings address various social and political subjects, including education, peace, labor organizing, child labor laws, race, women’s rights, philanthropy, sex trafficking, and familial relations. Internationally, Addams is best known for her work on peace. She was the first American woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931. Able to adapt her message to audience and context, Addams also wrote about events such as the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the murder trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti during the 1920s, as well as about people such as Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, and Julia Lathrop. In the spirit of American pragmatism, Addams would draw more prominent social themes from individual experiences she confronted, as she did in finding psychosocial forces at work in the proliferation of “Devil Baby” stories among immigrant populations in the summer of 1916. Consistently recognized for her outstanding activism, her intellectual work was overshadowed by prominent male figures during most of the 20th century. However, a reclamation of Addams’s unique contribution began in the 1990s, and in the 2020s, Addams studies are growing as more scholars find inspiration in her methods and writings.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Kaufka Walts

Emerging research brings more attention to labor trafficking in the United States. However, very few efforts have been made to better understand or respond to labor trafficking of minors. Cases of children forced to work as domestic servants, in factories, restaurants, peddling candy or other goods, or on farms may not automatically elicit suspicion from an outside observer as compared to a child providing sexual services for money. In contrast to sex trafficking, labor trafficking is often tied to formal economies and industries, which often makes it more difficult to distinguish from "legitimate" work, including among adolescents. This article seeks to provide examples of documented cases of child labor trafficking in the United States, and to provide an overview of systemic gaps in law, policy, data collection, research, and practice. These areas are currently overwhelmingly focused on sex trafficking, which undermines the policy intentions of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000), the seminal statute criminalizing sex and labor trafficking in the United States, its subsequent reauthorizations, and international laws and protocols addressing human trafficking.


Author(s):  
Virginia Yans ◽  
Ji-Hye Shin

Jane Addams (b. 1860–d. 1935), along with Ellen Gates Starr, was cofounder of Chicago’s Hull-House, a model American settlement. Addams was a social reformer, author, and public intellectual. During her Hull-House residence from 1889 until her death, Addams led national and local childhood reform efforts for child labor, juvenile court, and public health legislation, the playground movement, public-school teaching innovations, and the abolition of childhood prostitution. When Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr arrived in Chicago, European immigrants and their children constituted three-quarters of its population. Hull-House, located in an immigrant slum, offered innovative well-babies clinics, a day nursery, a playground, and children’s art, drama, and music classes to neighborhood residents. Addams passionately insisted that the future of American democracy depended on the education, protection, health, and well-being of its youth, including immigrant and minority youth. Hull-House attracted many middle- and upper-class professionals: juvenile justice reformer Julia Lathrop, labor reformer Florence Kelley, and educator and philosopher John Dewey were drawn to Addams’s settlement as a hands-on reform experiment designed to “test the value of human knowledge by action” (see Lasch 1982: p. 187, cited under Papers, Autobiographies, and Collected Writings). They saw themselves involved in a mutually beneficial reciprocal relationship with immigrants and their children intended to make both sides of the Hull-House democratic experiment better citizens. Addams and Dewey maintained that democracy required continuing moral responsibility and receptivity to others—whatever their class, race, or gender. Far from a simple matter of individual freedom or a particular set of political institutions, they understood democracy as a way of life. In her Hull-House programs, her writings, her educational and juvenile delinquency reforms, and her suggestions for training immigrant children for industrial labor—indeed in all her efforts—Addams consistently argued the importance of the child’s potential and value as a participant in social democracy. Aware that children of poor families faced dull, unrewarding futures as unskilled factory laborers, Addams called on educators to assist students to appreciate their “social and industrial value.” At the same time, Addams cajoled industrial employers for their abuse of child laborers and, far ahead of her time, insisted on the propriety of federal powers protecting children (see Addams and Lagemann 1985: 124–135, cited under Writings on Children and Education). During her lifetime and even in the 21st century, Jane Addams is regarded as one of the United States’ most outstanding citizens and child advocates.


10.28945/4630 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 485-516
Author(s):  
Laura Roberts

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine tough-love mentoring theory (TLM) as a potential way to address the problem of low graduation rates among doctoral students. Background: In order to address this purpose, the researcher presents the following: a) a validation study for assessment tools pertaining to TLM and b) a validation study of TLM theory and its two sub-theories: mentor integrity and trustworthiness sub-theory (MIT) and the mentor high standards sub-theory (MHS). Methodology: The researcher tested the validity of the mentor integrity and trustworthiness scale from the protégés’ perspective (MIT-P), the mentor high standards scale from the protégés’ perspective (MHS-P) and the protégés’ perceptions of their own independence (PPI) scale. The sample consisted of 31 doctoral protégés recruited with multi-phase sampling at four education-related doctoral programs in the eastern part of the United States. Contribution: The study provides evidence to support TLM as a strategy to address the problem of low graduation rates among doctoral students. In addition, the study contributes validation of assessment tools that can be used to measure doctoral protégés’ perceptions of their mentors. Findings: For each scale, the data show acceptable levels of internal consistency and evidence of content validity. The data are consistent with the TLM theory and its two sub-theories. The unique contribution of the current study is that it draws from the protégés’ perspective. Recommendations for Practitioners: The researcher presents a) strategies protégés can use to find trustworthy mentors with high standards and b) strategies program administrators can use for professional development of doctoral mentors. The researcher also provides the Right Angle Research Alignment (RARA) table to help protégés organize and manage the research methods section of their dissertation. Recommendation for Researchers: It is recommended that researchers use experimental methods to test TLM theory and the sub-theories, MIT and MHS. Impact on Society: This theory may be useful in business and in the arts and in other teaching relationships such as coaching and tutoring. The researcher encourages scholars to test TLM theory in these other contexts. Future Research: Further research questions that arise from this study are as follows: How can protégés find mentors who have high standards and who are trustworthy? What can doctoral program administrators do to help mentors develop high standards and trustworthiness?


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-204
Author(s):  
Lance Kenney

Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, daunting in its choice of subject matter, closely aligns itself with the ancient sense of the word ‘history’ as a fluid, almost epic narrative. The Metaphysical Club of the title was a conversation group that met in Cambridge for a few months in 1872. Its membership roster listed some of the greatest intellectuals of the day: Charles Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, amongst others. There is no record of the Club’s discussions or debates—in fact, the only direct reference to the Club is made by Peirce in a letter written thirty-five years later. Menand utilizes the Club as a jumping-off point for a sweeping analysis of the beliefs of the day. The subtitle of the book belies its true mission: ‘a story of ideas in America.’ Menand discusses the intellectual and social conditions that helped shape these men by the time they were members of the Club. He then shows the philosophical, political, and cultural impact that these men went on to have. In doing so, Menand traces a history of ideas in the United States from immediately prior to the Civil War to the beginning of the Cold War.


Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492095858
Author(s):  
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The author uses methods of intellectual history to construct the concept of the public from Addams’s books: Democracy and Social Ethics and The Newer Ideals of Peace, showing that all three authors, Lippmann, Dewey and Addams, discuss the same topic of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life. Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism. Her argument regarding the public, as constructed by the author, consists of two premises. First, public engagement is a method of democratic inclusion as well as social and political inquiry for Addams. She sees the extension of relationality across social divisions as a necessary method to understand society and materialise democracy. Second, Addams emphasises cooperative and reflexive involvement especially in the characteristic developments of a time. She considers industrialisation and cosmopolitanism as characteristic developments of her own era. Addams suggests an in-principle cosmopolitan concept of the public that includes marginalised persons and groups. Compared to Lippmann’s and Dewey’s accounts of the public, Jane Addams’s argument is more radical and far more sensitive to the social inequality and plurality of a drastically morphing society.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 456-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Copley Sabon

In response to increasing Latino new destination migration in the United States, Latino sex trafficking networks have emerged in many of these areas. This article examines victimization experiences of Latina immigrants trafficked by a regional network operating in the Eastern United States drawn from law enforcement records and interviews with legal actors involved in the criminal case. The stories shared with law enforcement by the Latina victims gives insight into their lives, experiences in prostitution, and the operation of a trafficking/prostitution network (all lacking in the literature). Through the analytical frame of social constructionism, this research highlights how strict interpretation of force, fraud, coercion, and agency used to define “severe forms of trafficking” in the TVPA limits its ability to recognize many victimization experiences in trafficking situations at the hands of traffickers. The forms of coercion used in the criminal enterprise under study highlights the numerous ways it can be wielded (even without a physical presence) and its malleability as a concept despite legal definitional rigidity. The lack of legal recognition of the plurality of lived experiences in which agency and choice can be mitigated by social forces, structural violence, intersectional vulnerabilities, and the actions of others contributes to the scholarly critique of issues prosecuting trafficking cases under the TVPA and its strict legal definitions.


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