Was Jane Addams a promiscuous pragmatist?

Abstract

Contemporary pragmatist and feminist scholars have proposed the possibilities for “changing the theoretical analyses and concrete practices” of both feminism and classical American pragmatism offered by its recuperation through feminism. Particularly, scholarship on Jane Addams has reached back to retrieve her activism, ethics, and social theory as emblematic of what a feminist pragmatism can offer. Whereas most of this scholarship recuperates an almost seamless integration of these theoretical and philosophical orientations in Addams’ work, in this paper, I trouble those efforts by offering a promiscuous reading of Addams’ feminist pragmatism from two dimensions. First, I offer an analysis of Addams’ promiscuous appropriation of pragmatism and feminism that interrupts and perplexes both orientations. Second, I read Addams promiscuously through the ontoepistemological framework of material feminism, specifically Karen Barad’s “agential realism”, and prompt reconsiderations of how Addams performed how “matter matters” in knowing through being in twentieth-century Chicago.

Keywords:

• feminist pragmatism
• material feminism
• Jane Addams

Notes

1. Attributed to anonymous reviewer.

2. American philosophers associated with the pragmatist tradition include John Dewey, William James, Charles S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, W.E.B. DuBois, and George H. Mead (Seigfried, 1996). Jane Addams has more recently been included in this panoply of early pragmatist thinkers.