Jane Addams, pragmatism and cultural policy

Abstract

This article examines the American social reformer Jane Addams (1860–1935), not so much as an intellectual in her own right, but rather as somebody who embodied certain contradictions regarding the cultural idealism of the intellectual class in the late nineteenth century. Addams’ principal achievement was to co‐found a “settlement house” in Chicago in 1889. Settlement houses were residential communities established by universities among the urban poor, where idealistic young graduates would engage their neighbours in improving cultural and educational activities. Like other nineteenth‐century institutions such as museums and libraries, settlement houses represented a middle‐class attempt at cultural outreach and democratization. Addams analyzed the motives for establishing such an institution and the cultural contradictions it embodied. Her habitual self‐doubt steered her towards a pragmatic multiculturalism at odds with her contemporaries, and eventually towards an emphasis on art and education as catalysts for cultural diversity. Addams was responsible for transforming the settlement house from an instrument of cultural reform into a prototype community offering a public sphere based on tolerance and diversity. Her autobiography reveals the guilt, self‐disgust and doubt which lie behind nineteenth‐century cultural idealism and twentieth‐century cultural democratization.