Jane Addams' Book "Subjective Necessity of The Social Sentiments": Summary

Authorship

Jane Addams was born in 186o and lived until 1935. She lived longer than Booker T. Washington but shorter than Andrew Carnegie. She was one of the most prominent and tireless social reformers. She graduated Rockford College which is in Illinois in 1881. After she graduated, she decided to study medicine in Philadelphia. She wanted to examine Europe and England’s efforts to deal with urban poverty, so she went there for a tour. When she returned, she decided to team up with Ellen Gates Starr and formed Hull House in Chicago’s West Side in 1889. This was inspired by the Toynbee hall which Jane saw in London. The Hull house was a settlement house and a social center for immigrants.

Addams opens up about how the Hull house will help benefit society. She attempts to treat “of the subjective necessity for social settlements, to analyze the motives which underlie a movement based not only upon conviction, but genuine emotion”. She explains three motives that affect “pressure toward social settlements”.

Summary and Analysis: The three motives that she describes really help sharp her argument because it allows the reader to see what she thinks. The first motive she talks about “contains the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to extend democracy beyond its political expression”. She explains this by saying “we have refused to move beyond the position of its eighteenth-century leaders, who believed that political equality alone would secure all good to all men”. She believes that society is stuck in one place and is moving stagnant. She elaborates that people only pick and choose in what rules they want to follow. She is obviously against this and thinks this is happening because society believed that everyone had the same rights as everyone. This was untrue. This is what she was arguing, “we hasten to give the franchise to the immigrant from a sense of justice”. She is also clarifying that just because you do believe in equal rights, that still wouldn’t make men good people, but to really understand this, one had to remember, Addams was a feminist. Her views were slightly skewed.

The next motive she talks about is “the impulse to share the race life, and to bring as much as possible of social energy and the accumulation of civilization to those portions of the race which have little”. This kind of goes off the first point but at the same time, it doesn’t. She is talking about equality for immigrants here but the way she distinguishes this from the first point is by showing the readers what will happen if they do believe in equality. Not only believe but if they practice. She want’s people to share culture, talk to each other about different ideas. It was hard in that time since people looked as immigrants as workers but Addams is standing up for them and wants the chance for their voice to be heard.

The last motive she states “springs from a certain renaissance of Christianity, a movement toward its early humanitarian aspects”. While she sticks up for the immigrants and she fights to help make America a better place for immigrants with the Hull House, she askes only one thing from them in return. She wants them to accept Christianity and it has a subtle way of showing it. Even if that wasn’t her intention, the reader sort of feel that notion of where she was trying to go with religion.

Conclusion

She gives her opinion on which motive is the best but she is certain that “it is that spiritual force is found in the settlement movement, and it is also true that this force must be evoked and must be called into play before the success of any Settlement is assured”. The reason she thinks this is because the three motives have three different guidelines. If one follows two of the three, they are lacking on whichever one they did not follow. If the follower follows all three of the motives, Addams is claiming that they will have a spiritual force with them. The only way to get this force though, is by assuring the settlement. It makes the reader kind of see what kind of person Addams was. She believed in following these three motives to help achieve her to a higher standard of herself. Also, she was a very helpful person which comes to light in this essay. She wanted to help immigrants and wanted to bridge that gap between the American’s and the immigrants.