On Jane Addams’s Feminist Pragmatism

What power did Jane Addams see in a group of elderly female Hull-House clients who came searching in 1913 for a purported “Devil Baby”? Kristen Renzi argues that Addams uses the tale as a catalyst for her depictions of cultures that explicitly challenge the modern tendency to discount the past in the name of progress. Temporally and ideologically, Addams can be situated at modernity’s threshold, for her work exhibits ties to both nineteenth-century femininity and twentieth-century public intellectualism. Through The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916), Addams not only overtly analyzes the ways in which women experience, remember, and give meaning to their gendered realities, but also uses the Devil-baby tale to query her own “threshold” position. Her equal investment in both modern possibilities for women and traditional, explicitly feminine forms of knowledge provides a model of considering a feminist recovery that, far from objectifying relics of the past, demonstrates the contemporary socio-political needs and possibilities that can only be understood through a pragmatic turning backward.