WHAT OTHERS THINK
Reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review (January 15, 2006), the New York Review of Books (May 11th, 2006) and the New Republic (May 15, 2006).
"For anyone feeling confused or despairing about the world's dangers and divisions, Louise Knight has arrived in the nick of time with a biography of Jane Addams. Whether the problem was hostility toward the female half of the world or sweat shops, class and race divisions or a love of war, Jane Addams took them all on—with enough success to become the first female American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. By focusing on the first half of her life, Citizen gives us just what we need to realize that our struggle for cooperative justice and democracy has both precedent and hope."
GLORIA STEINEM
"Jane Addams was the most prominent woman leader in America during the first third of the twentieth century. More than any other book to date, Citizen explains how she achieved that status and why her story continues to resonate for those women and men who still believe that
democracy is more than an illusion."
JOSEPH J. ELLIS
Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy
by Louise W. Knight
| Publication Date: 14 November 2005 | $35.00 · £22.50 |
| UK Publication Date: 13 December 2005 | 0-226-44699-9 |
Before there was Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, or Barbara Ehrenreich, there was Jane Addams. The first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and one of our greatest political activists and public intellectuals, Addams keenly understood that critical engagement with one's country was the essence of patriotism. In Citizen, Louise Knight recounts in vivid detail Addams's fascinating life and the evolution of her political thought.
This masterful biography explores how Addams was born to one life and chose another. Though raised in a small town, Addams was driven to become a pioneer in urban reform, working through the Hull House—which she co-founded—in Chicago and beyond as a leader in labor relations and an advocate for children, immigrants, and the poor. And though she was the product of a highly class-conscious and morally absolutist family and culture, she developed into one of our nation's foremost pragmatic ethicists, on a par with Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and her good friend John Dewey.
Set against the backdrop of the Progressive era, Citizen ultimately follows Addams's development as a thinker and activist in the turbulent world of Chicago during the 1890s—a decade that included both the World's Fair and the Pullman Strike. Knight shows how Addams absorbed and responded to the unjust working conditions in American factories, the unchecked power wielded by employers, the impact of corrupt politics on city services, and the intolerable limits placed on women by their lack of voting rights Citizen is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily powerful mind encountering and shaping the radical ideas and political challenges of her age.
Louise W. Knight is a Chicago area native and independent scholar who has taught rhetoric at Northwestern University.
Louise W. Knight is available for interviews. For more information please contact Mark Heineke at (773) 702-7897 or mah@press.uchicago.edu
