Spirit in Action
Jane Addams: Spirit In Action - Louise W. Knight
Visit with Louise Knight, author of Jane Addams: Spirit In Action. Around a century ago Jane Addams stood at the head of the major peace & justice efforts of her day.
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Oct 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we're going to gather inspiration from the fruitful work of those who've gone before us. We'll be speaking with Louise W. Knight, author of Jane Adams, Spirit in Action. Given that this program is Spirit in Action, it was almost a foregone conclusion that I'd invite Louise Knight here to talk about the lessons of Jane Adams life and work. Jane Adams is associated with so much good work and progress in this country. Beginning in the early 1890s and by her death in 1932, she was a champion of diverse progressive efforts, suffrage, peace, fair labor laws, to name just a few. She was the leading force behind Chicago's Hall House, the first settlement house in the USA. Jane was a founding force of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the NAACP, and organized social work as we now have it in this country. Louise Knight has written an excellent book to help us understand the spirit behind all of this work. Before we speak to Louise, however, let's first listen to some music to put us in the mood. Many folks have recorded this coming song, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and numerous others, but we'll listen to a version here by Anne Feeney. She'll be my guest for both Spirit in Action and Song of the Soul in just a couple of weeks. So before we talk to Louise Knight about Jane Adams, here's Anne Feeney, performing Bread and Roses. ♪ ♪ As we come marching ♪ ♪ At the dawn of the day ♪ ♪ All the dark and the kitchen ♪ ♪ The middle of the grave ♪ ♪ I'll touch by the radiance ♪ ♪ That the sun discloses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ As we come marching ♪ ♪ So many women dance ♪ ♪ We cry through our city ♪ ♪ Their angels call for bread ♪ ♪ Our stomachs are empty ♪ ♪ But our hearts are hungry too ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ As we come marching ♪ ♪ We march to four men ♪ ♪ For their women's children ♪ ♪ And their mothers again ♪ ♪ No more shall we labor ♪ ♪ From birth to life closes ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ As we come marching ♪ ♪ We bring greater days ♪ ♪ The rising of women ♪ ♪ And no both the rates ♪ ♪ No more shall we labor ♪ ♪ While the rich man reposes ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ As we march to four men ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ ♪ Oh, hear the people singing ♪ ♪ Bread and Roses ♪ Louise, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - My pleasure. - And I wanted to get down right away to what influenced you to write the book on her. Why did you focus on Jane Adams? - Well, obviously she fascinated me. I read a memoir by her, her famous book, "20 Years at Hall House in College." And that was when I first knew I was interested in her. And I think it was two things. One was definitely the sort of spiritual flesh, philosophical, moral quality to the voice of her book that drew me. It was also sort of a exploring, experimental kind of mind. I liked that a lot. And then also I was interested in the fact that she seemed to be trying to figure out how to move from the life she was born to a new life that she was trying to design for herself with great difficulty. And I think I was very fascinated by that because it related to my own questions in my 20s. - You said you ran into her in college. Is this at a period where women's role in society is especially being looked at? Is that why it was featured in college or was it some other course? - Now there's a course about progressive intellectuals and probably the fact that there was a woman's book included reflects the fact that the women's movement was happening and the professor probably said, gosh, maybe I should include a woman. So I think I can credit the women's movement with introducing me to Adams because 10 years before he probably would have just had all men. - The fact that she wrote 10 books I think means that she left some evidence behind her of her movement. Women used to be largely ignored by our history books except in some very cameo roles like Betsy Ross's Sower of the American Flag. Was Jane Adams an exception in terms of historical documentation? Was it easy to get a lot of information on her? - It was fairly easy because she did leave a lot of writings, not only her books, but also a large number of published essays which had been speeches as well as typed manuscripts of other talks and these have all been made available on a very large microfilm of her papers so that they are accessible to anyone who can go to a library that has that particular 90 real microfilm. And then of course this reflects the fact that she was a professional writer. She earned her living through writing and speaking. And so those are the kinds of people who do supply if they don't throw it all away. And of course there's always the published material. A great deal of documentation, at least about their thought. The question of how much you know about their private life depends on how many letters were saved, how thoughtful their friends were about writing about who the person was, what she was like. But that material is always tainted with a great amount of affection. It's usually very praising and so it's not always that useful. But there were very few women that wrote as much as Adam's did or spoke as much as Adam's did in the time of her peak years. There were some though. She was definitely not the only one. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a major public intellectual of the time. There of course Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in the first decade or so of the 20th century. But they left voluminous papers and writings and speeches and letters. So there were certainly others. But Adams is right up there in terms of documentation. You said that she earned her living through writing and that became apparent as the book went on that that became more and more important. I had thought though that she was basically a rich heiress and that is certainly what launched her. Did that change? Did she get rid of all that money? That's a good question and an important one because she did start with family and wealth. Her father was an agricultural businessman in Northern Illinois, with owned a lot of land, a lot of production facilities in wheat and lumber and woolens and he was a banker. So he wasn't massively wealthy like Rockefeller but he was definitely quite prosperous. And she inherited a portion of his estate when he died when she was 21. So she did start with wealth. But what happened when she founded the settlement house in Chicago, Hull House when she was 29, she of course started to spend money not only to support her own living expenses but it's clear she spent down her inheritance slowly over time. And by 1894, which is when there was a serious depression in this country, she was writing to a friend just like other people who had lost their income 'cause of course she lost money when the value of her assets also declined. But she had spent so much of it on Hull House and on the neighbors and on capital expenditures that she said it's clear I'm never going to be comfortably prosperous again. Within a few years, it's very clear she has no money except the money she earns. And she really becomes a woman who has to support herself through her work. - You talked about her father both in the book and you just mentioned him about him being really pretty well off. I think I saw in Wikipedia that he was Quaker. You talk about him sending her to, I don't know, Presbyterian Sunday School or something like that. So I'm trying to sort out what he was. He was part of this perfectionist religion at the time. It made sense to me when he was wealthy. There was this thing about Quakers when they came to the new world. It was said that Quakers came to the new world to do good and they did well. And he seemed to be one of those folks. Talk a little bit about him. He was very influential in her life and her point of view, wasn't he? - Absolutely. It's widely circulating on the internet and in children's books and a few other places that he was a Quaker. The way I describe it is that he was, and Adams also would say a Quaker tendencies. We can document that his mother was a Quaker. We also know that he was importantly influenced by the Hicksite Quaker movement. He grew up in Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia where the Hicksites were so influential and had just emerged as an influential section of Quakerism when he was a boy. He brought with him to Illinois from Pennsylvania when he migrated west with his new bride in 1844. He brought with him the journal of Mr. Hicks. And we know that that was in his library. So I read the journal and also read up in scholars' works about what was the Hicksite Quaker movement. What I learned fit very much together with what I knew about John Adams as a person in his own religious faith. And that is that he was really an independent thinker when it came to what he believed religiously or spiritually. It's probably the case that he converted to an evangelical faith in his early 20s because there was several, this was the second great awakening and he writes like that. He prays on his knees. The diary we have that he kept when he moved west tells us about what his religious faith was like at that time and it was very spiritual and very devout. It reads like an evangelical Christian's diary. His mother sent a letter home which also reads the same, I mean his wife, Jane's mother sent a letter home that reads the same way. And so it's pretty clear that they had both joined that movement and yet that movement as you know was heavily non-denominational though there were certainly denominational branches of it. But the main part of the movement was really not concerned about whether you're a Presbyterian or a congregationalist or a Methodist and it wasn't about the dogmas of the different churches even though those were very strong you know the parts of society. So John Adams did not join a church in Cedarville, the small town where he settled and where Jane Adams grew up because he did not want to sign up for a denominational dogma because he wanted to work it out for himself. And so he was a Quaker in the sense that Mr. Hicks had significantly influenced his thinking. He really believed along with Hicks that you should have a honesty with your own soul about what you believe and what you don't believe and that you shouldn't say you believe what you don't believe. And he instructed Jane in that same teaching and she tells that story in her memoir so we know that. He also though was a politician. He was elected to the state senate in Illinois. And so he did what Benjamin Franklin did. He made donations to all the churches in town. He helped with all the construction projects because he was a wealthy man. And he attended the Presbyterian church most faithfully because he was raised in the German Reformed church but he also went to the congregational church sometimes. And so it's clear that he was his own man when it came to religion. So it's not correct to call him by any denomination including Quaker but he was a devout Christian and he cared deeply about his own religious beliefs and he used whatever was available in the different faiths to construct his own faith. - I thought that Jane Adams was an amazingly complex spiritual religious and her class placement is particularly astounding to us of the early 21st century. We don't even think about class these days. I think, and it's certainly not in the way that they used to think about it. When she started Hall House, I can say I was a little bit aghast at the idea of what she wanted to do or what the settlement houses were doing. My point of view, they were going to go offer culture to the lower class people and by that means make their lives better. And I felt myself being kind of offended 'cause I think I'm kind of a lower class person. How did you react to that whole thing? - Well, it's an important question. I think that your reaction makes a lot of sense and because it does convey an attitude of that working people are somehow deficient or inferior. There's sort of two pieces to this idea that I had to spend a lot of time sorting out. So I would divide it this way. On the one hand, it's important to remember that working people are often, especially in her day, they have no chance to get a good education, they have to go and earn a living either in the fields, as peasants back in Europe or in a factory in Chicago, working 10 and 12 hour days. And not all of them, but many of them wish that they could read great literature, know about art, they have the same longing anyone else does in any other class to know more about the wealth of human creativity and enjoy beauty in various forms. So on the one hand, I think it is kind of sending to think that working people aren't like everybody else in aspiring to enjoy the fruits of civilization, which is how they would have put it back then. There are people who think it's a horrible thing to offer that kind of thing to working people because why shouldn't they be offered it? It's not their world. I think that's a different kind of kind of tension. At the same time, it's absolutely true that Jane Adams, when she arrived at Hull House, did feel superior in that sense to working people because she did have that education. She had traveled in Europe. She had read widely in the great minds of English literature. She did feel superior. It was very tricky for me to sort that out because by the time she writes her first book in 1902, which is more than 10 years after she founded Hull House with her friend, Ellen Gates Star, she has moved past that. You cannot find that readily in her books that she wrote after the turn of the century. So it was quite a puzzle for me to sort it out. But one thing I realized is that she developed a real antithesis. She really didn't like the idea of self-righteousness. And that arises right around the middle of the 1890s after she goes through the trauma of the Pullman strike and watches George Pullman, the president of the company, act very self-righteously towards his workers. He will not even talk to them about their starvation wages that he's paying them. I think it caused her to suddenly see in a new light a moral quality that in fact was also in her father. The obituaries of her father are consistent in saying that he absolutely knew right from wrong. And that's a clear sign of a self-righteous person. And Adams had grown up admiring a self-righteous man, not thinking self-righteousness was a bad thing, but rather a good thing because we're talking the middle of the 19th century. Nowadays we have a different attitude. So it took her a while to sort that out and watching George Pullman be so cruel to his workers and cause a whole nation to go into upheaval because there was a sympathy strike that shut down much of the railroads and it was a huge national trauma. All because George Pullman wouldn't sit down and negotiate with his workers. So she writes about this in a amazing essay called A Modern Layer where she talks about his self-righteousness and his selfishness and his moral rigidity and his inability to listen to his workers and respect their ability to think for themselves and have desire to shape their own working experience at its factory. And it is the beginning of her understanding of the moral dangers of self-righteousness. And then for the next several years, it comes up repeatedly. It's very interesting. It's clearly on her mind. And she's working her way through to understanding that she has to abandon what she inherited from her father, which was a belief in absolute right and absolute wrong. And she does work that out. She decides and writes about it that there is no such thing as absolute right and absolute wrong. But there's a lot of very gray areas. And she says, the virtues of her fathers are not enough. We have to keep up with our times and let more out our own morals evolve with the times. So she wasn't saying that his morality wasn't good for his time, but it was not right for her time. That was a huge amount of growth that she did in that realization. And it was the beginning of her understanding that a whole lot of things that were the strengths of working class people who lived around her, who she got to know so well, she could see them. Because she was no longer saying, well, they don't have a college education. They're not civilized in the way I was trained. And so I will think that they don't know as much as me in some basic way. And she arrived at the opposite conclusion, which was that they had a great deal to teach her. Now, a lot of people have not really been aware of this change in her understanding and not understood it. And so it's been important to me to-- I describe it in detail in the first book I wrote about Adams, which was about the first half of her life. It's four of your pages. And it's called "Citizen, Jane Adams, and the Struggle for Democracy." And it really tells the story and the kind of detail you need in order to capture what happened. And it goes up through when she's age 40. The new book covers her whole life. So it includes the years I'm talking about in the first half of her life that are covered in detail in "Citizen." And of course, it includes "Spirit and Action" also includes the second half of her life. People are interested in knowing about this transformative experience. They should definitely look at "Citizen" because it's told there in more detail. But for me, it was a really aha moment to realize this. And it really helped me see that she was-- what you would expect a wealthy person to be when she arrived on Halstead Street. And even though she was committed to the idea of social democracy, which she writes about from her very first days at Halhouse, and she certainly treated her neighbors with great social equality from the beginning, that's not the same thing as experiencing yourself as simply human like them and seeing them as having as much to teach her as she had initially thought she had to teach them. Now, she did realize that she needed to learn about their lives. So she was open-minded to learning. But this was a pretty deep learning, the abandonment of the idea that she was morally superior. I think that's a really important story. And it certainly made me think a great deal more about what unexamined assumptions I carry around with me because I was born to an upper-middle-class family. And I went to college without giving it a second thought. I did not have a lot of context socially with working people. And I think that's one reason that I was interested in Adams because she was breaking through a barrier I wanted to break through. I felt very frustrated and isolated in my prosperous upper-middle-class life in a very homogeneous suburb of Chicago. And I was frustrated the way Adams was frustrated in her own life. So I think that it was good for me to start to think about these issues. And I hope that my readers will find it useful, both if they read "Citizen" and also if they read Jane Adams' "Spirit in Action." I think for people of my background, it's a really important thing to think about. We are speaking with Louise W. Knight. She is author of a recent book, "Jane Adams, Spirit in Action." She's got a previous book also about Jane Adams. You are listening to a radio program called Spirit in Action. And we very comfortably are sharing that title today. My website is northernspiritradio.org. You can hear all my programs from the last five years. Find links to my guests, including to Louise W. Knight and her book, "Jane Adams, Spirit in Action." You were just saying, Louise, some more about how Jane progressed during her time at Hall House. I read in the book that when she came there, she thought that all those common people really needed was culture to lift them up, that she didn't really have to worry about their material well-being. That was kind of irrelevant on the important plane, the philosophical plane, I guess. Those are my words, not yours, of course. Talk about what Hall House started out as being, what it was doing there in Chicago and what it turned into. I think because of her learnings, the mission and the service that Hall House provided was radically modified. - Yeah, it's very interesting transformation that it goes through. I should explain what a settlement house is because it's often misunderstood or was. They do still exist, but they've changed some more. But back when Adams founded Hall House, and it was one of the earliest settlement houses in the country, a settlement house was a place where educated young people could live. And it was located in a working class neighborhood, an immigrant neighborhood. So, in other words, these upper middle class people were dropping themselves into a completely different world that they knew nothing about. And that was the idea. Separate, there was the no blessable aspect of they had gone to college, they had read great literature, they could offer classes in literature, music, and bring the culture to the working people. That was part of it, but Adams emphasized was that if you live in a democracy, it's a very wrong thing for you to live a life isolated in your own class. Precious people, that's the kind of life they lead. And so she wanted to create a place for herself and also other people to live that would introduce them to other Americans, the rest of the nation, and know more about what their lives were like and broaden their social sympathies. And that's an idea that was very popular amongst the moral philosophers of the day. It was very important to have a broad social sympathy, and this was a way to live a life around that idea so that you weren't alienated or distrustful of people whose backgrounds were different than your own. So that was that main idea. Of course, they did create clubs for children and adults around themes that the neighbors thought. They offered a kindergarten, they had music classes, they had lectures, they had gymnasium, so kids could play sports. It was an amazing place after a while. Eventually, it grew into a 13 building complex that filled a city block. It was the most lively, fun, fascinating place in Chicago. So when people came from all over the city, of course, the neighbors came and thoroughly loved it. I mean, there were many children whose lives were changed by the opportunities they encountered at Hall House and the friendships they formed and the opportunities, they suddenly began to realize that if they wanted a higher education, they were encouraged to think about how to get it. Adams often arranged for scholarships at the University of Chicago and so, you know, the ones that wanted that were given opportunities. It was just a place where you could sort of find anything you wanted. And that was Adams' vision too. However, what happened was, in addition to being good neighbors, which was what she thought of they were doing. And of course, if someone was sick or ill or needed help in a crisis, they were very good neighbors to their neighbors. They knew them socially, this was not a matter of, you know, after a while, it was not a matter of, you know, the wealthy women over there, maybe they'll be able to fish us out of this problem. It was much more, you know, Jane Amz will help us because we know her and she's helpful. And so they did that. But they never wanted, as you mentioned, to address material needs. Adams was a classic, upper middle-class person. She thought the material conditions were really not so important. What mattered was people's spirits, you know, what they're flowering of their human potential, and she didn't understand that if you have very limited material resources, i.e., or living in poverty or on the edge of poverty, it's very difficult to have much of the rest of a life going on. And that's what she learned during the depression of 1893-97. And she writes about it. It's clear that she suddenly understands that material conditions can significantly affect your spiritual state. It seems obvious to anyone who doesn't have the background she had, but it was a lesson for her. And one of the things she saw was the working people, they were unemployed, their families were thinking into serious poverty. You know, many times they were men who were unable to support their families. And these men would commit suicide or lose their minds, go into the poorhouse, which was also the insane asylum, because they could no longer cope with the humiliation of their failure to take care of their families. And that was what really taught her, that material conditions matter a lot. It was partly also her experience with the trade unions, because they were educating her about their need for wages, but refusal of employers to negotiate with employees about wages. And so she began to absorb and embrace what you would call a more materialistic reform agenda. You know, fighting for the rights of unions to organize, working on issues like the length of the working day, the eight hour day was mere dream in the minds of workers at that time, but labor unions were organizing to get bills passed in state legislatures. Adams helped to lobby the Illinois state legislature to get a bill passed for the laborers in the sweatshop industry. So she began to work on these kinds of issues. And that's how she became really the person that we know is so famous in the sense that she became a national leader in the progressive reform movement and was active on many issues. And it grew out of the lessons that she learned on Halstead Street. - You know, after reading the whole book, I'm still not quite sure why Jane Adams was such an influential figure at the time. What do you think it was that catapulted her from a person of some local significance there in Chicago to this, you know, eventually any organization that she was affiliated with, they immediately appointed her president. - Or tried to. She didn't accept very many of those, only in the peace movement. Well, I was hoping I had conveyed the why, but of course, part of it is a little mysterious. I think that there were a couple of aspects to it. On the sort of practical level, she was a writer and a public speaker. And if you wanna become famous, that's the way to go. Because people read her books, people read her essays and articles which were widely published in all sorts of publications. Women's magazines, trade union journals, church publications, and there were a lot of those. She, her name was in circulation a lot because she was a writer and a speaker. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is she was at the front of a brand new, hot idea, which was the settlement house movement. And so that made her interesting copy in the newspapers 'cause people wanted to know, what is the settlement house movement? Who is this leader of this famous Chicago settlement house? So that was a piece of it. But another piece of it was what you might call the persona that came across in the public eye. She was obviously a person who was thoughtful, non-judgmental, open-minded, interesting because she had all these interesting experiences, getting to know working people, that people of her class didn't have. She told many stories about the people she knew in her neighborhood, and that was interesting to other people of her background. She was someone people were interested in because of her unusual life. And then, I think finally, the last piece is that she did take leadership positions in a couple of major organizations. One was the National Federation of Settlement Houses, and another was the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, which was sort of what became the National Council of Social Work years later. And those are people who worked in prisons, people worked in the Sanos silums, people who worked in the settlement houses, sort of people doing social work in a broad sense. So she did have leadership positions in those two organizations. But the other thing is she got to know many prominent people so that put her into another high-level circle of society if you want to put it that way. So there were many factors. But I think the biggest one was that she was speaking around the country and writing and being published. You know, I think another possible factor is the historical flow that was going on at that point. At certain points in history, when the world is changing, there's a person who becomes emblematic of the change. And one of the things that's really interesting to learn from history is about the ebb and flow of the liberal and conservative tides that are going on in society. I think that her rise in activism was at a time when progressivism was also growing. And so I think she maybe kind of became the poster child of that progressivism. As opposed to the last 16 years of her life, which was a period of war and conservatism, do you have any lessons from watching that liberalism conservatism ebb and flow in her life for what we're seeing today? - Well, before I address that, I'd like to address the first part of your statement. There were many progressives who were active during the progressive movement. I think what made her maybe more emblematic, as you say, is that she had so many different reform interests, but underlying that was how famous she was. And I haven't mentioned that she was also a leader of the suffrage movement in the years just before World War I, which gave her a great deal of prominence also. But the other reason that she became so famous, which I haven't mentioned yet, is because she looked to reporters from day one, from the first days at Halston Street, like the epitome of a very popular stereotype. In fact, such a popular stereotype that it's with us to this day because people can't let go of it when they think of Jane Adams. And that was that she was a wealthy saintly do-gooder who was a woman, of course. She cared about the poor, she cared about the children of the poor. And that is the piece about her that is always remembered and invoked, and that's how she's described in a sentence. What this book is trying to show is that, while she knew working people well and cared about their futures, she wasn't actually primarily focused on the poorest of the poor. The Christian missionaries in the cities were focused on the poorest of the poor. Her neighbors were working people who might slip into poverty for one reason or another, but they were not the poorest of the poor. And her focus was on working people. She was focused on how to make their lives better, and she was not primarily a do-gooder, although she initially had that instinct at the very beginning. She was really about democracy. And democracy is about citizens working together to make the nation a better place. And that's how we should remember her. But part of the publicity, even in her own life, while she was alive, was around this image of the saintly do-gooder female who worked with the poor. Newspapers in particular tended to like to report on her that way in Chicago. But around the country, she was increasingly publicized as a major political figure, which is what she was. I'm trying to show in this book that Jane Adams was one of them-- she was the leading political woman of her day in a day when there were hardly any truly political women. In fact, it was considered unfeminine to be partisan. And she became a leader of the Progressive Party. And that shocked and upset a lot of people, because women weren't supposed to do that. So she was really at the cutting edge of women in politics, the history of women in politics. Jane Adams is a major event in that story. And that's never been really truly acknowledged, I think. And that's the part of her, I think, should be remembered. And indeed, progressives at the time who were all stripes from moderate to far left to radical, that's how they knew her. And that's how they thought of her. And newspapers did cover her that way as well. You're absolutely right that during and after World War I, her popularity tanked. She believed in nonviolence. She was a Tolstoyan. She had read his Christian writings. And she could not believe that war was the right way to resolve a dispute. She was mortified that the government was instructing young men to go out and kill other human beings. And so she became known in the eyes of American citizens once the United States entered the war in 1917 as a traitor to her country. That's partly because Woodrow Wilson made sure everyone knew that they had to be a passionate patriot in order to be a citizen. So she had a very difficult time during World War I. And then the 20s were equally conservative and negative about her peace work. It was the opposite of the progressive era, which roughly is somewhere in the 1890s starting in the States through 1914 when World War I breaks out. But the 20s were conservative. And many of the progressive reforms that had been put in place, some of them got dropped like the Children's Bureau. And additional attempts to end child labor were defeated and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. So it was a difficult time then, too. Adams had a very thoughtful attitude towards what she called the times. And this was not a phrase she invented, of course, or an idea that she created. It was a very dominant thought of the 19th century. Many of the people she read in her 20s talked about the times and how important it was to be part of the times. And that if a person connects with their times, then they will be able to accomplish a great deal. And her life certainly illustrates the truth of that observation, which is a fairly common, sensical one. And then what happened to her during World War I in the 1920s was, of course, she was completely out of step with her times. And she paid a very difficult price for that. I think she understood that, however. She knew there was nothing to be done about it. It was simply the situation. One of the things that's made me think about is how the times do change. And of course, the older I get the more perspective I have on that, just in my own life. And it's very difficult to be a progressive if the times are not progressive. I think as far as today goes, obviously, when President Obama got elected, there was a real surge of progressive energy surfacing at the national level. But there's been a whole lot of progressive reform going on at the state level for quite a while. I think there is a building progressive movement, which is not to say that the conservatives aren't doing their best to redirect the times. And I'm not predicting the outcome of the November elections or anything. But I do feel there's a very strong and strengthening progressive movement. And it's what elected Obama, and it's still there growing and pushing. And it will be very interesting to see whether it can push and grow some more in the coming five or six years. I don't know, but that's what I feel. I feel like it's really coming. - We're speaking to the author of Jane Adams, Spirit and Action. Her name is Louise W. Knight. She joins us today. I think she's out in California at the moment, though that's not hometown. She's part of the Central Time Zone, just like I am. I think you're so right, Louise, about the historical currents and that we can learn so much from them. I highly recommend that people read your book because they'll start to get a glimpse of what it looks like to have the world be different and how it changes from that. We take for granted all of the labor laws that we have in place now, minimum wage and 40-hour work. We can, of course, you don't abuse children for labor. All of those things. We take for granted that women have the vote and for almost all of her life, Jane Adams did not have the vote. So to put yourself in that place where you don't have those rights and how you're going to get the society to reform in a way that those things are in place is what this book teaches us and the incredible work that Jane Adams did in that effort. Were there any of the areas of her activism that surprised you? Maybe you didn't even talk about 'em in the books. Maybe she was, well, one of the things that you kind of downplayed but you eventually mentioned straight up in the book is her love relationships were with women. There was no gay liberation, I think, of the time. Was that generally known? Did that undercut her standing in society if she was, oh my gosh, loving a woman instead of a man? Well, in the 19th century, there was a societal idea called a Boston marriage. It was when two women lived together for life. My own theory, I don't know if this is true, is that I think it may have partly been a side result of so many men dying in the Civil War. But it indicates it was not unusual in the second half of the 19th century and these are usually women who were fairly prosperous so they could afford to form a household together. They had the money to pay for the expenses. They didn't need to get married, in other words. At that time, that was an accepted model for women and yet there was no assumption implicit that there was any sexual-possible relationship there. There's no question that some of the boss quote, Boston marriages undoubtedly involved sex. But there were others that didn't. You can't really tell, of course, but probably. And yet their devotion and commitment to each other was very clear and very loving. In the case of Jane Addams, when she moved into Hull House with her friend Ellen Gates Star, it seems quite likely that they, too, were thinking of themselves as a partnership. In the early letters, when they're first there, you can see that they're sort of relating to each other's family as if there are a family, too. They shared a bed, although that's not unusual for friends, but it certainly is typical of a Boston marriage. You know, you just get the feeling this was meant to be a partnership and that would be permanent. What happened was that they grew apart. They were an interesting pair because Ellen Gates Star was very witty, sharp-tonged, judgmental, enthusiastic person. And Jane Addams was kind of the opposite. She didn't have much of a sense of humor. She really tried very hard never to be judgmental, and Ellen admired that a lot because she felt she was too judgmental. Addams was not a feisty personality. You know, as you met her, she was a soft-spoken person. So they kind of admired the qualities each other had, which is often the basis of an initial infatuation, as you might say. But eventually, Ellen especially grew impatient with all Jane's broad-mindedness, and Jane I think probably had some difficulty with Ellen's judgmentalness, because Ellen was always trying to say, you know, why don't you do this? You need to be doing that. She was a bit bossy. So they grew apart, I think it was mutual, and Ellen had other people that she became involved with. She was an impetuous person, and she speaks in her letters about falling in love with one person or another in a very playful way. Jane Addams was not that kind of person, so she met another person, a younger woman, named Mary Rose Smith, who did not live as a resident at Hall House, the way Ellen did, but who came to Hall House as a volunteer often. And they, over time, became very close, and became lifetime partners. They only lived together in the summers, because they eventually bought a summer home in Bar Harbor. But Jane would spend a lot of time at Mary's house. Mary was very wealthy in Chicago, writing or resting. They would travel together. Mary would spend a lot of time at Hall House. So they were together quite a lot, and they were a lifetime partnership, and they thought of themselves that way. So the question everybody would like to know is, what about sex? Because we are a highly sexualized society, and that seems a very important question to us. The answer is, we don't know. We do know what Addams attitude towards sex was at certain key moments in her life, sexuality, I should say. And she was a Platonist, which is an idea that is very alien to our culture. But what Plato believed was that you should sublimate your sexual desires, your lust, and take that energy and raise it up into a love of beauty. And that is what the Platonic ideal of love is. And there were lots of heterosexual couples who had that belief. It wasn't just between two women or two men that this idea could be applied. It was very popular in the educated circles of the 19th century. In other words, Mary couples who were male female often didn't have sex except, or at least they thought, they shouldn't, except to create children. So it was an unusual time. It was a very spiritual age, maybe we could say. So in that context, it seems unlikely that Addams would have flung herself into a physical relationship. On the other hand, we don't know what happened. And it seems likely to assume that there were some struggles, moral struggles with this issue, at the very least. And indeed, there's a passage in one of Jane Adams' books, which I quote in my book, where she says, it is not an easy thing to sublimate this desire, this physical desire. And so it really sounds like she herself struggles with it. And that's about as far as I can go in terms of the physical side. But as John D'Amelio, the historian of sexuality, has written really any documentation, at least in the 19th century about sexual relations. So, unless you're Emma Goldman. So it's hard to know. But I do feel that the more important thing if not whether or not they had sex, but whether or not they were lifetime partners, whether or not they were committed to each other as a same sex partnership. And that they clearly were. And to me, that's the most important thing. - One of the stories you tell, or one of the items that you share that I found very interesting, was at one point, I guess, Mary-Rise Smith suffered from asthma or something. A doctor prescribed that she'd take up smoking. And her smoking evidently aggravated some lung problems that Jane Adams was having because she's living with a smoker now, who's been told to do that by a doctor. It's just amazing to think of the way in which scientific knowledge at one point tells you to do one direction and then you have to go the opposite direction later on. You know, I asked you before about the reforms that she was involved in. Were there some other ones you wanted to mention? - Well, there were several that I had not realized that she was involved with, that I mentioned some of them in the book, and there are others that I couldn't fit into the narrative. But she was opposed to capital punishment. She was a passionate, I do talk about this, passionate advocate of free speech and a member of the founding board of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on that board until her death. And also a founding member of the NAACP and served on that board until her death. But there's another reform she was involved with, which was the problem of sex trafficking. And I think we often think of that today as an issue that's modern. But a hundred years ago, there was a massive campaign in this country to oppose sex trafficking. And there was international sex trafficking going on. So there were women being imported to Chicago, seduced, drugged, forced into prostitution, coming from overseas, and vice versa. They were importing American girls to China in the early part of the 20th century. So Adams wrote a book called "A New Congence in an Ancient Evil," which was about the problem of forced prostitution and how it happened in the city. And she told a lot of stories. I think that's kind of an interesting fact, given that we're now working on this issue again. - And I've had guests on my show, Spirit and Action, exactly about that. What would you say if you had to pick out one area, and I know this will be difficult, one area that Jane Adams had the greatest effect on society. What primary item would be number one on the list of things she helped change? - Oh, that's a kind of question that historians don't like to answer. (laughs) You know, how do you measure the greatest effect on society? You know, is it effect on people of her own class? Is it effect on her, the allies in her political reforms, people in the working class? You know, is it effect on the material condition of their lives, on the spiritual condition of their lives? I don't know where to pick. I guess I would, I'm gonna say what I think her greatest effect should be on us now, rather than try and guess what it would be on her contemporaries. And I think it should be that a woman can do as much as she possibly can, regardless of the barriers that are in her way. And in her lifetime, what she showed was that women can become political. She embodied that through her fame and her activism. There were many other women who were doing a lot of active legislative reform work. She was not the only one by any means, and they were remarkable too. But because Adams became so famous, she became a national symbol of women's political potential. And I think that's what we should take away from her life today, because we're still not there yet. We've never had a woman president. We've never had a woman vice president. You know, we've had some candidates. We're wrestling with the idea, but we're not there yet. And we don't even have half of Congress being female, or half of any state legislature, or even half of the Supreme Court. So we're on our way, but Adams is still a good example to remind us of that. And that is to say that women need to be as much about making democracy a great government as men. - You know, we haven't talked much about you. And we've got just a couple of minutes left. I would, Louise, like to hear from you, what's important to you. I mean, you're a historian. You could be presenting the information on a subject that you have no feeling pro or con on. But I have a feeling that women's liberation, or these other issues are important to you. What is important to you? And could you talk about your own connection to religion's spirituality? And number three, I assume you've been to Hall House many times. Did you have a spiritual experience there? - Well, that's three questions, let's see. The first question was about what is important to me. I obviously do feel strongly about women becoming completely equal leaders in our democracy, completely equal political activists, completely equal in the legislative bodies. I think that's so important because women are half of humanity, and as long as we're not represented in the right proportions, our voices and views and experiences are not being woven into the fabric of our democracy. So that matters a lot to me. I'm sure that's the reason why I wrote so much like two books about Jane Adams. You ask about my own spirituality. I think I do feel like Adams that I sort of needed to figure it out for myself. That's not an unusual thing, especially in this day and age. Certainly the denominations don't have the dogmatic strength they used to have. I was raised in the congregational church. I went to Sunday school every Sunday and church every Sunday, and I sang in the choir, and I did the same in college. So I've studied Christianity a lot, and that was helpful to me in studying Adams, I think. But I also like Adams in that I found it difficult to arrive at the conclusion that Jesus was actually God. That was hard for me. It was hard for her. She found him to be a hero and the most admirable man, and she modeled herself after him in certain ways, I believe. And to Christian audiences, she makes that clear. She doesn't emphasize that to non-Christian audiences. I mean explicit Christian audiences like in churches or women's colleges where they were all very actively Christian in her years. And so I'm sort of like that. That's my view of the whole Trinity issue. I don't think Adams was particularly spiritually devout. She didn't really pray a lot, I don't believe. I'm not very much good at praying. But I do feel, in the same way she did, that there's some large spiritual force that work in the world that's very mysterious. And it's important to become aware of that and listen to it and be open to it and not think you know very much about it. I guess that's about as far as I can go on that. As far as Hallhouse goes, of course it is very, very moving to arrive at a place where she lived. My favorite thing was to walk up the stairs in Hallhouse because they creak and they're just splendid, long, dramatic stairs. And that's when I have my most spiritual moment 'cause she walked up and down those stairs so many times. So it is a special place to me. - Well you've given us a wonderful glimpse into the life of Jane Adams. And I hope that some people are transformed by reading about her story and your enthusiasm for it. We've been speaking today with Louise W. Knight, author of Book Jane Adams, Spirit and Action. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your insights into the life of Jane Adams with us Louise. - Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit and Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]