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Vol. 30:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 2002
Jane Addams and the Jane Addams Papers Project
by Mary Lynn Bryan
Jane Addams, powerful advocate for reform, social justice, and peace, is one of the pivotal figures of American history. From northwestern Illinois, where she was born Laura Jane Addams on September 6, 1860, in the village of Cedarville and educated at Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College), she rose to national and international fame. Before she died on May 21, 1935, Jane Addams had become an articulate and able organizer, leader, and popularizer of many of the key reform movements that swept the United States during her lifetime.
Jane Addams seated in a rocking chair at Hull House during its first winter, 1889-90. From the author's collection.
Co-founder with Ellen Gates Starr of the world-famous Chicago social settlement Hull-House during the 1890s and the first decades of the 20th century, she guided it, as well as the American settlement movement, when both were at the forefront of national reform efforts. Addams was a voice for reform in child labor, infant welfare, education, labor, housing, health care, immigrant education and protection, urban environment, and women's rights and suffrage. A superb communicator, she was the author of 11 books, including her noted autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull-House and Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, plus hundreds of articles and speeches.
Addams also became the leader of the first modern woman's peace movement. She was the primary organizer of the Woman's Peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, serving as an active president through World War I and until 1929. She was often identified as one of the 10 most important living women of her day, and her name became almost a household word during her lifetime. She received numerous honors, capped in 1931 when she became America's first female recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
As Illinois' most famous heroine, Jane Addams is memorialized throughout the state. A mural in the State Capitol Building at Springfield depicts her contributions to humanity; her name is chiseled in the stone frieze of noted Illinois writers that circles the Illinois State Library Building; and a bronze bust of her graces the reading room of the Illinois State Historical Society.
In Chicago, two of the original Hull-House buildings, from which she led a network of like-minded reformers during America's Progressive Era, have been preserved and restored by the University of Illinois at Chicago. With national landmark status, the structures serve as a museum composed of collections, research projects, and exhibits to reveal her life and work. The Jane Addams Memorial Park near Navy Pier hosts a sculpture created in her memory. Today, the Hull-House Association carries on social work in her name throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.
Everything from schools to canned goods has been named for her, and poems, plays, and books are dedicated in her honor. And yet, with the exception of scholars, one hundred of whom recently named Jane Addams second only to Eleanor Roosevelt as the most significant woman of the 20th century, few outside of Illinois seem to know her name or life story.
But that is changing. Over the past 3 years, three new book-length treatments of Jane Addams have been published, and there are at least three other writers in the midst of producing new Addams biographies. There is a growing children's literature on the life of Addams. This year, there are to be four conferences devoted to some aspect of Addams' work and thought. She is also the focal point of numerous speeches and articles. During the 2002-03 academic year, at least three scholars plan full-length academic courses on the life, times, and philosophy of Addams. Two of the most widely read older biographical studies of Addams have been re-issued, some of Addams' writings are available in their entirety on the Internet, and the University of Illinois Press is bringing out new editions of all of her books.
In part, this renaissance of Jane Addams studies may be traced to a commitment, made more than 25 years ago by the National Historical Publications Commission (NHPC), to support the preservation and publication of the papers of significant American women and their organizations. The Jane Addams Papers Project is part of that effort. It was begun in the mid-1970s, with the support of the NHPC's successor, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC); the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); and private foundations. Headquartered initially in the restored Jane Addams Hull-House, located on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, the editors agreed to identify, gather, organize, annotate, and make the Addams papers available to the widest possible audience.
Portrait of Jane Addams by Helen Balfour Morrison, ca. 1931. From the author's collection.
The task would have been relatively easy if all of the Jane Addams papers (defined as documents that were sent to, produced by, or held by Jane Addams) had been carefully saved in one place. They were not. After conducting an especially designed and exhaustive national search of public and private archives, historical societies, and libraries; digging through the attics, trunks, boxes, and file drawers of Addams' friends and family; and conducting an international search of appropriate collections, the editor-detectives gathered photocopies of more than 150,000 documents that fit their definition. By the mid-1980s, these documents became the 82-reel microfilm edition of The Jane Addams Papers issued by University Microfilms International.
Recognizing that this mass of information might be overwhelming to many, the editors planned their next publication as a guide to the microfilm edition. Issued by Indiana University Press, The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (1996) provides finding aids and reference tools to help readers gain access to the microfilm. At its core is a subject-correspondent index to the correspondence of Jane Addams. It also contains an outline of the organization of the microfilm edition, a bibliography of and index to the writings and speeches of Jane Addams, information on the provenance of the Addams papers, a listing of the more than 1,000 collections from which the body of papers was reconstructed, a genealogy of Addams family members, a list by date of Addams correspondence, and assorted lists of organizations and individuals significant in Addams' life and work.
Associated with the Department of History at Duke University since 1983, the Jane Addams Papers Project is now engaged in work on the third of its planned three publications: the letterpress edition of selected Addams papers. The editors expect to develop an edition of at least six volumes. Following a chronological arrangement, the volumes will be composed of the most significant documents from the life and work of Addams. These will be accompanied by appropriate editorial commentary and annotation, and each volume will include a description of the editorial principles employed by the editors, appropriate illustrations, a bibliography, and an index.
Jane Addams talking with children on the steps of the Hull House residents' dining hall, ca. 1930. From the collection of Mary Lynn Bryan, editor of The Papers of Jane Addams.
The first volume, The Selected Papers of Jane Addams: Preparing to Lead, 1860-1881, will be issued this year by the University of Illinois Press. It is composed of documents that shed light on the first 21 years of Jane Addams' life, and also reveals the experiences and forces that shaped the young Addams and prepared her for a life of leadership and commitment to the democratic ideal.
Selections from correspondence, diaries, clippings, and Addams' essays offer readers the opportunity to consider the activities and influences of Jane Addams' childhood and youth and to investigate the environment in which she grew to maturity, including the community of Cedarville, its institutions and people, and the Addams and Haldeman family dynamic that swirled around the young Addams. At Rockford Female Seminary, Jane Addams formed female friendships among classmates and teachers that would last her entire lifetime. Here she progressed through a challenging curriculum and took an active role in the development of higher education for women in the United States as she helped Rockford Female Seminary Principal Anna P. Sill move the seminary to college status. Addams was aware that she was part of a new wave of women steeped in an education that fitted them for roles outside of a traditional family structure. Her challenge was identifying the part she would play.
In the volumes to come, the editors will reveal how Addams met that challenge. They will follow Addams' relationships among her siblings, their progeny, and her stepfamily, as well as among her personal friends. The editors plan to treat the development of Hull-House and Addams' rise to prominence as a reformer, first in Chicago, then in Illinois and on the national level. They will examine her contributions as a writer, speaker, and eloquent champion for her reform agenda; her role in the Progressive Party; and her activities in other reform organizations.
Subsequent volumes will cover Addams' response to World War I and explore her treatment as a leader in the American peace movement during the war, her leadership of the Woman's Peace Party and the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom, and her dedication to the international woman's peace movement and world peace. In the three publications-- the microfilm edition, the comprehensive guide for scholars, and the selected print edition for both scholars and the general reading public-- the editors expect to bring the words, contributions, and life of one of American's extraordinary women to a much wider world.
Mary Lynn Bryan is the editor of The Jane Addams Papers.
