Click here to load reader
Upload
review-by-grace-farrell
View
216
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
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 .
Accessed: 18/06/2014 08:40
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Legacy.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 08:40:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 08:40:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 08:40:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions