Jane Addams: “Why Women Should Vote”

Context

“Why Women Should Vote” was written during the Progressive Era in the second half of Jane Addams's life. As such, the document both influenced the debate on women's suffrage, one of the main concerns of Progressive reformers, and mirrored the social and political ideas of the Progressive Era about the role of women in society and the domestic sphere. Addams advocated the possibility of women's voting and having professional independence, yet she did not conceive these as individual rights but firmly established them within the idea of common good. She grounded these arguments starting from the Victorian assumption that a woman's role was primarily within the domestic sphere. This allowed Addams to campaign for women's rights without showing a radical subversion of the gender roles of the time. Even so, it is evident that Addams was moving women beyond the sphere of motherhood and successfully gave newer relevance to child-rearing and housekeeping as community duties rather than mere family chores.

Although historians have not yet agreed on a single meaning for the term Progressivism or clearly identified a unified social bloc for the movement, they have found its roots in the fragmentation of American society resulting from the massive industrialization and urbanization of the second half of the nineteenth century and the economic depression of the 1890s. Progressive thinkers, at least the majority of them, did not have a revolutionary agenda: they sought to reform American society still from within a capitalist perspective, although they tried to establish a firmer control of the state in economic and social matters that were of public interest. They addressed the social inequalities and problems of American society at the turn of the century, in an extreme effort to reconcile capitalism with democracy. Their fields of action encompassed labor rights and education reforms, including outlawing child labor, trust-busting, electoral reform, the protection of consumers' rights, and prohibition of alcoholic beverages. By 1912, Progressives had formed their own political party, and presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified with the reformist spirit.

While they did not go as far as challenging the free market, they acknowledged that the extreme form of laissez-faire capitalism that had taken hold of the American economy had created unfair privileges, monopolies, and abuses of power. Thus, they argued for the obligation of the government to regulate social and economic matters in favor of the common good. Progressives also believed that scientific principles and competent supervision should govern political and economic institutions. Their goal was to create task forces of experts who would restore fairness and order in their own fields of expertise.

Addams's argument in favor of women's suffrage inscribed itself within this goal of creating pools of experts to manage and resolve the various social problems of the urban environment. Twenty years before she wrote “Why Women Should Vote,” Addams founded, together with her companion, Ellen Gates Starr, the Hull House settlement in a Chicago neighborhood strongly characterized by the presence of first- and second-generation immigrants. Hull House answered a twofold necessity: providing social and health services and educational opportunities for the largely immigrant and socially deprived population and, at the same time, offering young, college-educated women the chance to work. Addams believed that women could be more efficient than men in taking care of youths and juveniles because of their traditional roles in the domestic sphere. Because of their competences, they should be allowed to vote so that their opinions could contribute to improve city policies.

When she wrote the article, Addams was a middle-class, college-educated woman who had found a professional outlet for her talents and was already a well-known figure on the American political and social scene, on her way to becoming a “mother” figure for the nation but with no biological children of her own. The first decade of the twentieth century marked the zenith of Addams's reputation: she was described as “the only saint that America has produced,” and, in a survey on “the most useful Americans,” she was second only to Thomas Edison.

The article shows that Addams used her own professional experience both as settlement worker and as the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago's 19th Ward to redefine motherhood and housekeeping beyond the traditional sphere of the family. To Addams, the context in which women could apply their civic competences enlarged from the nuclear family to society as a whole.