Jane Addams and Charlotte P. Gilman
 

Revised 2/8/98 for class 2/10/98
 
Introduction:
 
* Gilman and Adams were exact contemporaries (1860-1935) [see photocopy handout, not online). For on-line biographies see:Addams; and Gilman
 
See also the following Websites:
 
Addams:
 
General
 
Hull House as a Feminist Initiative. Page created for course on American Political Thought at Eastern Illinois University
 
Writings
 
"Democracy or Militarism" (1899)
"A Modern Lear" (1912)
Spirit of Youth [selected chapters]
"The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (1892) OR version scanned for this course
 
Gilman: (small sample: as Alta Vista search reveals, Gilman may be said to have "a Web of her own."
 
C.P. Gilman Page [University of Toronto]

Bibliography of primary and secondary sources 

Reference sources. List of Reference works on Gilman.

Student Site on Yellow WallPaper [University of Texas-Austin] interesting materials regarding the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," including text.Herland. Text of Gilman's Utopia novel.
 


**Both women were writing at a time when women's suffrage was becoming an issue, but were ambivalent or indifferent to suffragism and contemporary feminism. Intellectually, both drew on "antiformalist" ideas, although for different purposes, raising questions as to the gender bias of the antiformalist program. Both experienced the traumas that faced young women college graduates in the 1880s as the "family claim" reasserted itself. Neither were academics, but as a settlement worker and a lecturer/author were not immune to the pressures toward "professionalization" that were reshaping American culture. The following is based especially on Addams, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (1892) and the selection from Gilman, Women and Economics. (1899) in Hollinger and Capper, Am Intellectual Tradition. Their careers raise two general issues: (1) Gendering of "science" and "social science" (2) Varieties of early 20th century "feminism"
 

I. Gender, Science and Social Science
 
"Instead of destroying the old prejudices that restricted women's lives, social science in America merely gave them new authority. By a curious circular process, the insights of psychology and anthropology and sociology, which should have been powerful weapons to free women, somehow canceled each other out, trapping women in dead center." --Betty Friedan(1963)
 
* three senses in which "science" is gendered? Feminist critique as it developed from the 1960s the 1980s highlighted three ways in which a field can be said to be gendered:
 
a. exclusion, whether the result of overt discrimination or the subtler means by which women are excluded or marginalized. Several different explanations:
 
(i) earlier literature talked about male "prejudice" "Sexists to a Man" thesis. But soon developed more.
 
(ii) professionalization as explanation: Professionalization--and men's club thesis.
 
(iii) . Control theme. For Her Own Good
 
b. choice of subjects, in its methods, and in its results. E.g. male interest in "social mobility."
 
c. By the mid-1980s, emphasis turned to a radical critique values of "rationality" and "objectivity" (e.g. communal vs. Agentic to Fox-Keller)
 
 
A. Darwinism and gender? Discuss of argument in Degler, In Search of Human Nature, ch. 1.
 
B. Gilded Age "science" and women (see R. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres; and Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual science : the Victorian construction of womanhood (1989),.
 
C. Social Science and Women
 
1. Early expectation it would be a "female sphere"
 
2. Lester Ward
 
3. Bellamy, Looking Backward . an evolutionist case for increasing independence of women
 
4. The founders: women and sociology in the universities
 

II. Jane Addams.
 
A. Analysis of "Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements"
 
1. According to Addams, what is the source of the crisis young women of her generation face. Overcivilization and too much leisure? or not enough of it. Examine her attitudes toward "civilization" and "learning."
 
2. Leisure? compare to Jackson Lears "weightlessness" (cf Lears, No Place of Grace ch. 1 which we have mentioned briefly) . Is the problem she identifies unique to women? Or have special implications for women?
 
3. What uses does she make of evolutionary theory? relation to Lamarck vs. Darwin and developing discussion of neo-Darwinism (Weissmanism in the 1890s). "Race memory"? unused limbs? =Huxley?
 
4. Any telltale gender references? to what degree if at all is problematic gender identity a factor in Addams' thinking? "great mother breast of humanity"?
 
5. source of her educational ideas? (cf. Lester ward relation to common school tradition). Who was Pestalozzi?
 
6. attitudes toward religion? debts to idealist tradition? Who is Besant?
 
7. examples of antiformalism?
 
8. In what ways/senses does Hull House, as a distinctive institution, satisfy the "subjective necessity"? Need/value of social psychological explanations of humanitarianism? why this generation felt need so intensely? comparison with today?
 
B. Life and Career
 
1. Youth and Early Development [based on Dominck V Cavallo, "Sexual Politics and Social reform: Jane Addams from Childhood to Hull House," New Directions in Psychohistory [see Binder History 44] )
 
2. Hull House (see Sklar, Kathryn K. "Hull House in the 1890s," Signs 10 (1985): 658-77)
a. For Addams description see "Objective Value of Social Settlements"
 
3. Addams and Social Science (based on Mary Jo. Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School (1988); and K. Sklar, "The Hull House Maps," in Bulmer, Martin et al. The Social survey in historical perspective, 1880-1940 (Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1991)[ ISBN 0521363349 HN29 .S645 1991]
 
4. Addams and popular culture (based on her Youth and the City Streets )
 
III. Charlotte P. Gilman
 
A. Analysis of selection from Women and Economics
 
(note: these questions were designed for a longer selection from W&E and may not all be relevant to the selection in Hollinger/Capper)
 
1. uses of evolution? cf. Addams? debts to Ward?
 
2. attitudes toward consumerism? sex?
 
3. appeal of "science" ? relation to "culture of professionalism" (Bledstein)
 
4. her proposals. Is she anti-family? contemporary feminism?
 
B. Gilman: background and career (based on Berkin, C."Charlotte P. Gilman," in Portraits of American Women , ed. Barker-Benfield and C. Clinton.)
 
1. significance of her family background? relation to Catherine Beecher.
 
2. Her personal crises as compared to Adams' subjective necessity? any similarities?
 
3. Experience with S. Weir Mitchell (as fictionalized in "The Yellow Wall Paper"
 
4. Second Marriage
 
5. Career and later writings.