Essay about Jane Addams

Addams, Jane. The modern city and the municipal franchise for women. Baltimore, Maryland: National American Women Suffrage Association, 1906. (Jane Addams Article from Moodle Site)

     Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a coming-of-age story about an unconventional woman's development within a society of strict rules and expectations. At pivotal moments in Jane's life, she makes choices which are influenced by her emotions and/or her reason. Through the results of those choices, Jane learns to balance passion and practicality to achieve true happiness.

Jane Addams, a pioneering social worker, helped bring attention to the possibility of revolutionizing America’s attitude toward the poor. Not only does she remain a rich source of provocative social theory to this day, her accomplishments affected the philosophical, sociological, and political thought. Addams was an activist of courage and a thinker of originality. Jane Addams embodied the purest moral standards of society which were best demonstrated by her founding of the Hull-House and her societal contributions, culminating with the winning of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.

Labors did not have very good wages and it was problem during the Gilded Age. Labors’ had to live by paternalism, meaning that George Pullman owned them. It seems as if labors never got a profit for the long hours that they worked in the sweatshops. All the money goes straight back to Pullman, because they had to pay for rent and their goods and groceries provided by him. So basically, Pullman didn’t consider them valuable because there was always someone looking for a job. These reasons led to several unionizations like the Knights of Labor where they had to pay their dues to go on strike and fight for them. Anyone from radical to bosses could join this union except bankers and lawyers, which made no sense. They fought for workplace rights but where they did wrong is when they demanded outside workplace rights such as free public schools for their children. This union caused deaths

Jane (Laura) Addams was born to Sarah (Weber) Addams and John Huy Addams on September 16, 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois near Rockford and Wisconsin border. She was the eighth of nine children. From this union out of the nine children only three of the daughters and one son survived to see adulthood.

In the past women's right was nonexistent, and they did not have any educational or voting rights. Most of their education was toward music, dance, embroidery, and how to be a good wife. Woman did not have a voice in society, and their ideas was disregard and not valued. During the year 1700-1900, some feminist movement for women's rights arouse. In Europe, Mary Wollstonecraft advocated for women's right and education. As a liberal thinker, Wollstonecraft desired a society with equal rights for men and women. In the U.S., Jane Addams developed the philosophy of socialized education, and was the pioneer is social work and women's right.

See, e.g., Marion Crain & Ken Matheny, Beyond Unions, Notwithstanding Labor Law, 4 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 561, 562–53 (2014). “Unions served as a vehicle for worker voice and political influence . . . .”

Who is Annie Easley? Maybe she was one of the four African Americans to work for NASA out of 2,500 employees. Or maybe she was a human computer, a mathematician, or a math technician? Who was Annie Easley?

“Why did they have to mix their women into everything? Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically. Why goddamnit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them-all human motives?” (Ellison 418).

An American pragmatist and feminist, Hull-House founder Jane Addams (1860-1935) came of age in time of increasing tensions and division between segments of the American society, a division that was reflected in debates about educational reform. In the midst of this diversity, Addams saw the profoundly interdependent nature of all social and political interaction, and she aligned her efforts to support, emphasize and increase this interdependence. Education was one of the ways she relied on to overcome class disparity, as well as to increase interaction between classes. Her theories about the interdependent nature of living in a democracy provided a backdrop for her educational theory. Education, she thought, needed to produce people who

“The subject of the Education of Women of the higher classes is one which has undergone singular fluctuations in public opinions” (Cobbe 79). Women have overcome tremendous obstacles throughout their lifetime, why should higher education stand in their way? In Frances Power Cobbe’s essay “The Education of Women,” she describes how poor women, single women, and childless wives, deserve to share a part of the human happiness. Women are in grave need of further improvements in their given condition. Cobbe suggests that a way to progress these improvements manifests in higher education, and that this will help further steps in advance. Cobbe goes on to say that the happiest home, most grateful husband, and the most devoted children came from a woman, Mary Sommerville, who surpassed men in science, and is still studying the wonders of God’s creations. Cobbe has many examples within her paper that shows the progression of women as a good thing, and how women still fulfill their duties despite the fact that they are educated. The acceptance of women will be allowed at the University of New England because women should be able to embrace their abilities and further their education for the benefit of their household, their lives, and their country.

At the turn of the 20th century, increasing vigilance of women led to the focus of placing responsibility on both men and women for the corruption of sex workers. Both genders had a responsibility for the prevalence of prostitution as well as to finding a solution to a prevalent problem in metropolitan areas such as Chicago. However, rather than providing financial or social resources to help victims of prostitution form relationships and earn a respectable place in society, many progressive and feminists reformers as part of the Feminist Movement argued for the creation of vice commissions in order to gather evidence and research on the connections between prostitution and structured crime. This led to the persecution of prostitutes and the long term establishment of the criminal industry due to the infrastructure and legal foundations for the processing and cracking down on the “Social Evil”. However, there were individuals such as Jane Addams who worked tirelessly to improve the conditions of sex workers and those who recently left the profession, but she knew that there was a great divide between the public and the women who had been abused and used for one of the worst sins society has prevalent within it. She accepted the task and took it in strides for she knew that it would take empathetic cooperation on the sides of those in political/legal positions in collaboration with citizens and those attempting to better their lives as well as the city of Chicago. She did

The foundation of colleges for women as well as events at women’s rights conventions intellectually challenged society’s views on women’s traditional roles. As education became more of a public governmental service, the educational

simply, it is the story of a woman who began her life with nothing but

Thackeray’s portrayal of Jane Osborne in Vanity Fair is very troubling to the reader of the twentieth century. Grown to be a woman who is stuck under her tyrannical father’s roof, her life appears to be very confining and menial. Her sister snubs her, her nephew mocks her behind her back, her father mocks her to her face, and her main role in life seems to be as her father’s housekeeper. However, Thackeray’s portrayal would have had a very different effect on the Victorian reader. While all of these things which affronted us would have been equally awful to them, Thackeray uses another key phrase which has lost its effect on our modern minds: "that unfortunate and now middle-aged young lady" (448). Jane Osborne’s