twenty years at hull house

that one accepts the prevailing ideology, which, because it prevails,

seems "natural" rather than ideological. As Allen Davis points out regarding Addamss view of industrial labor: "She supported a revolt

against shoddy, poorly designed products, and against dehumanizing

working conditions. But never did she carry her arguments to their

logical conclusion and suggest that there is something fundamentally

wrong with the industrial system. In the end, although she carefully

documented the destruction being wrought by the factory, the best

she could offer was to help adjust the young people to the system and

make them a little happier in the process" (155). To point out that

Addams adopted a mildly meliorative position toward social change

rather than a radical one is not, of course, to criticize her, only to correct the impression sometimes conveyed that HulbHouse was somehow "revolutionary."

Addamss tendency to work within the prevailing ideology is also apparent in her statements about gender. HulbHouse was very much a

womans project, and its activities were largely directed toward women's

needs, both the "subjective necessity" of providing an outlet for the

energies and benevolent impulses of wealthy, educated women and the

"objective necessity" of relieving the sufferings of the urban poor. But

Addamss view of womens "basic nature" remained very much within

the nineteenth-century frameworks of "separate spheres" and sexual

stereotypes. She directs some genial irony in Twenty Years at Hull- House toward the idealizations of her class motto at Rockford Semi' nary—"the early Saxon word for lady, translated into bread-giver"

and her class color—"the poppy, because poppies grew among the

wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was hunger that needed

food there would he pain that needed relief." And yet the notion of

woman as bread-giver and reliever of pain maintained a powerful hold

on her imagination, and as late as 1922, she was still arguing, in Peace

and Bread in Time of War, on rather dubious anthropological grounds,

that women's "natural" role was as bread-giver. Addamss essentialist

beliefs in women's natural intuitive powers and instincts toward benevolence and nurturance underlay not only her work at Hull-House

hut also her later antiwar efforts in the Women's International League

for Peace and Freedom. She was a late and rather unenthusiastic suffragist and boasted as late as 1910, in Twenty Years at HulPHouse, that

in the Hull-House women's clubs, "there was a complete absence