Jane Addams: “Why Women Should Vote”

Audience

The essay has diverse addressees. Because Addams originally published the essay in the magazine Ladies' Home Journal, it is evident that the author aimed to win over other women, primarily from an urban context, to the cause of female suffrage. Ladies' Home Journal was a leading women's magazine of the twentieth century and is still read today. By the time Addams published her article, the magazine had reached a vast audience of subscribers, exceeding one million readers. Addams's article is a clear call to her fellow middle-class, educated women to become a leading force in the movement for reform. The author is encouraging them to be aware of their new social roles and professional opportunities and thus to campaign for their rights to vote. Addams's starting point is that women's “conscience is slow to recognize any obligation outside of [their] own family circle,” and this has kept them from exerting that prominent role in the improvement of urban society that they deserve because of their competences in dealing with youths and human welfare. At the same time, Addams devotes a certain degree of attention to working-class women too, taking examples from the lives of women in tenement houses to support her argument.

In addition to middle-class women interested in finding a professional outlet for their college qualifications, the larger audience of “Why Women Should Vote” is represented by the more Progressive sectors of American society. Addams's essay is a plea to accept middle-class women within this Progressive coalition and also a demonstration of the expertise that women could bring to the movement. The cause for women's suffrage is closely tied, then, to the argument for Progressive reform of American society. According to Addams's thought, women's suffrage is a crucial instrument to realize those reforms that the Progressives had in mind: sanitation of living and working conditions, improvement of slum and immigrant urban areas, Americanization of immigrants and their children, and efficiency of bureaucracy and the administrative machine.

The goal of the essay is thus twofold. First, Addams is addressing women to raise their awareness that they should see their role in American society at large rather than simply confined to and restricted within domestic walls. What they have learned as mothers and as caregivers within their own families, they should be allowed to bring out into the wider American society. Women should be confident of their abilities and demand the vote to implement the legislative changes that they consider necessary to improve modern life. This idea appeals, she believes, to the wider Progressive coalition too: Addams is asking them to support women's demands for the vote as a way of supporting their own reformist agenda and forwarding their causes. Women's suffrage, Addams argues, should be seen as an instrument to foster social change and as a benefit to American society as a whole, not simply to a defined social group.