With One Bold ACT: The Story of Jane Addams

For 25 years, Jane Addams, social reformer, pacifist, Nobel Prize winner and founder of Chicago's Hull House settlement for inner-city immigrants, has not been accorded a full-length biography. Now there are two: Gioia Diliberto's A Useful Woman (Forecasts, May 17) and the present volume. The former is a feminist examination of Addams's earlier life; Polikoff, who has a personal connection to Hull House through her aunt, a long-term resident, provides a broader narrative account of Addams's life and works. She treads lightly over the more controversial areas of this life story, briskly dismissing as the product of modern Freudianism suggestions that Addams and her longtime companion, Mary Smith, were lovers. While she presents a richly detailed account of the remarkable reach of Hull House's social and cultural programs, she offers little in the way of a critical discussion of the liberal philosophy on which these programs were based. Polikoff describes Addams's association with Theodore Roosevelt's insurgent, unsuccessful Bull Moose campaign for the presidency in 1912, but misses the opportunity to explore the conflicts between Addams's social idealism and the constraints of practical politics that Addams's experience furnishes. Although Polikoff's family connection to Hull House supplied her with a fund of anecdotes, which she uses to good effect, in the end, Addams remains an elusive figure here, one hard to disentangle from her public persona. Still, this illustrated account is a useful introduction to Addams's life and works, especially for younger readers. 54 b&w photos. (Sept.)