Democracy and Social Ethics

What entitles a comfortable young woman to preach thrift to a family poorer than she has ever been? Addams sets the visitor's rules beside the neighbours' own way of helping, and the rules look small.

In the tenement an Irish family whose own breadwinner is out of work takes in an evicted widow and her five children, and a woman lends her shoes. Giving there goes as far as the need does. The visitor from the charity office investigates first, praises saving and temperance, and is surprised when her safest sayings are challenged: in the saloon she calls a horror, a man out of work got a free lunch and a loan of five dollars. Addams does not send her away. She shows that the visitor judges by the habits of her own class, and that her families learn to praise thrift to her face.

• charity
• poverty
• philanthropy
• mutual aid
• social class
• moral judgment
• compassion

Can a grown daughter owe something to people outside her family? Addams names that debt the social claim and argues that a household which sees only itself wrongs its daughter and its cook alike.

College spends four years teaching a daughter to care about the world, and her parents then expect her home as if nothing had changed. She gives way, because the family's demand is definite and the other is vague, and the years that follow are restless and unhappy. Addams reads King Lear as the father who cannot accept that his child has become an adult, and she does not spare Cordelia either. The kitchen shows the same narrowness. A mistress wants her cook to serve this one family, cut off from her own people, and wonders why girls prefer the factory, where twenty others work beside them.

• family
• family ethics
• women's roles
• gender
• domestic labor
• social isolation
• social obligation

Why did a model employer end with a strike while a corrupt alderman kept his voters' affection? Addams gives one answer to both: goodness decided over people's heads fails, and whoever shares their life wins them, even a dishonest man.

The president of a great company built his workmen a model town with parks and clean houses, reduced their wages in a depression and refused to arbitrate. Goodness for them meant, to him, thrift and temperance, and he never learned what the men themselves were reaching for. Beside him Addams sets the alderman of her own ward, who pays for funerals, finds jobs and gives away Christmas turkeys with money made from the city's franchises. His voters know it and keep him. From both she draws a rule for reformers: progress made with people climbs more slowly, and it is the kind that holds.

• paternalism
• labor relations
• labor
• collective action
• political corruption
• political patronage
• democracy
• social ethics
• community

How much does a school owe the child who will spend a lifetime in a factory? Addams charges that it teaches him to get away into an office and tells those who stay nothing about the work they do.

An Italian peasant's son has spent his days outdoors among people working with their hands, and the first thing school asks is that he sit still and listen. The street teaches him more naturally. What school does teach, down to its commercial arithmetic, assumes that a boy rises by getting away from manual labour. The labourer who stays finds nothing in his work to feed his mind and meets a kind of contempt as well. Of the educator Addams asks something else: that the workingman be a conscious member of society, with some notion of what his part is worth to it.

• education
• meaningful work
• childhood
• moral development