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Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884by Sylvia D. Hoffert;Jane Addams: A Writer's Lifeby Katherine Joslin

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Page 1: Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884by Sylvia D. Hoffert;Jane Addams: A Writer's Lifeby Katherine Joslin

Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884 by Sylvia D. Hoffert; Jane Addams:A Writer's Life by Katherine JoslinReview by: Grace FarrellLegacy, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2005), pp. 205-206Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679559 .

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Page 2: Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884by Sylvia D. Hoffert;Jane Addams: A Writer's Lifeby Katherine Joslin

Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884. By Sylvia D. Hoffert. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.272 pp. $39.95.

Jane Addams: A Writer's Life. By Katherine Joslin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

2004.328 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Grace Farrell, Butler University

Two new biographies of social revolutionaries? one written by an historian and one by a literary critic?continue the feminist project of inter

preting and recontextualizing an expanded nine

teenth- and early twentieth-century American canon. Although hitherto neglected by history, Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815-1884) followed a line

of important nineteenth-century American women into the newspaper business, publishing and editing four newspapers between 1847 and

1866, in which she supported abolition, temper ance, and women's rights. Margaret Fuller, per

haps the most distinguished of women journal ists, was hired in 1844 by Horace Greeley for the

New York Tribune. In 1850 Greeley also hired

Swisshelm, who became the first woman to serve

as a Washington, D. C., correspondent. She re

turned to Washington in 1863 as a clerk and nurse

and, in 1865, began the short-lived Reconstruc

tionist, which was put out of business by an

arsonist. Jane Addams (1860-1935), born into

privilege almost two generations after Swis

shelm, began the settlement house movement

with her creation of Hull-House in the slums of

Chicago. She worked tirelessly for social reform, woman's rights, and peace, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

The strength of historian Sylvia D. Hoffert's

Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life lies in its innovative organization. She twists her

story "like a braid" with each strand offering a

different context for Swisshelm: religion, mar

riage, property, work, abolition, and woman's

rights. The organization works well; as Hoffert

proceeds chronologically through each topic,

"parts of the story... appear, disappear, and then

reappear" (8). Without being repetitious, she is

skillful in building her readers' knowledge base,

preparing us for the richly contextualized topical movement of her text. Each topic sheds light not

just on Swisshelm but on the social mores within

and against which women of the time built their

lives. Hoffert lets her topics build upon and

intersect one another, emphasizing the complex

ity of any discussion of a woman's cultural and

historical position. For example, Swisshelm's

long and unhappy marriage, filled with rancor

and court battles over money, provides an axis of

analysis of the economic condition of married women. Similarly, Swisshelm's move into the

workforce ruptures both marriage and work

place as sites of male hegemony. Hoffert makes clear that Swisshelm "is not

entirely appealing to write about" (195). She was

outspoken but could deliver sarcastic personal barbs. She supported abolition and rights for

freedmen, but advocated displacement and even extermination of Dakota Indians. Perhaps most surprising, she advanced the rights of

women, but held conventional ideas about their

domestic nature. Her eccentric and abrasive

personality, combined with a certain rigidity, kept her from forming alliances with other women in the suffrage movement and often alienated her from her only child, the more

conventional Zo Swisshelm Allen. Where Swisshelm seemed to fight lonely bat

tles every step of her life, the private Jane Addams could easily be obscured by the net

work of organizations and movements within

which she labored. The task of Katherine

Joslin's Jane Addams: A Writer's Life is to reclaim the private woman long neglected by biogra phies that extol the public icon and to reposi tion Addams as a writer among literary figures. She does both admirably.

Book Reviews 205

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Page 3: Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884by Sylvia D. Hoffert;Jane Addams: A Writer's Lifeby Katherine Joslin

Although she begins her book with an exam

ple of "biography by omission," recounting how

Addams did not meet Henry James when they both sailed for Europe on the 5.5. Servia, Joslin

proceeds to give us, in rich detail, the crucial

meetings that did take place during the course of

Addams's life: with Tolstoy, with William James, and with the writings of Virginia Woolf. More

over, Joslin s excellent discussion of the literary

artistry of Addams's writing is what makes her case for Addams as a literary figure; she does not

need near misses with Henry James. Joslin makes

the case that Addams, "along with Zola, Sinclair,

Norris, Dreiser ... was an experimental moral

ist" (103), and that, like Whitman, she "situates

the moral imagination in the modern American

city" (85). Joslin beautifully describes the fluidity and polyphony of Addams's writing voice in

Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) as it crosses

class and gender lines, splitting off from the

autobiographical Jane to move from one to

another of the neighbors on Halsted Street in

Chicago. The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), with its experiments in stream of con

sciousness, shows the influence of William

James, but is never derivative. Addams's style was

always one that played with voices and moved by association of images, geographies, and thought

colliding with thought. The Second Twenty Years

at Hull-House (1930) continues in this stylistic direction, presenting social history as what

Addams termed "'honest reminiscence,'" the

recording of "seemingly disconnected impres sions, images, and narratives that flow through her mind, confident that what emerges will be an

accurate accounting of experience" (208-09).

Throughout her life-long writing career, which

produced ten books and numerous essays, Addams cultivated fictional techniques for con

veying lived experience and always sought to give authentic voice to the silenced.

Although vilified throughout the 1920s for

her pacifism during World War I, when, in 1931, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Addams

regained some of what had seemed to be

national sainthood. Katherine Joslin has

regained for her a well-deserved reputation as

an important literary figure; we must now

reread her. And Sylvia Hoffert has vividly reminded us of the struggles of public women

of a half-century before Addams, when there were even fewer opportunities to live an inde

pendent life and when, despite angels in the

house, sainthood was rarely conferred upon women who stepped outside the confines of the

home to lead unconventional lives.

Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography. By Heike

Schaefer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004.288 pp. $39.50. Reviewed by Betsy Klimasmith, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Mary Austin, whose fiction, poetry, journalism, and drama drew largely on her experiences in

the developing American West of the late nine

teenth and early twentieth centuries, left read ers with a vast body of work rife with ecologi cal insight, irony, artistry, pedanticism, and

paradox. Austin was a western writer who spent

significant periods of her literary career in New

York, as well as a supporter of Native American

rights and artistic production who appropri ated Native American tales and songs into her

own material. She was also a politically active

environmentalist and feminist whose best

known passage essentializes both gender and

the landscape:

If the desert were a woman, I know well what

like she would be: deep-breasted, broad in the

hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great masses of it

lying smooth along her perfect curves, full

lipped like a sphinx, but not heavy-lidded like

one, eyes sane and steady as the polished jewel

206 legacy: volume 22 no. 2, 2005

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