Jane Addams, “The Modern City and the Municipal Franchise for Women” (speech at the National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention, Feb 1906).
Addams, one of the most famous women in America during
her lifetime, was a Progressive reform leader and founder of the settlement
house Hull House in Chicago.
Note: what did she mean by “civic housekeeping” and how does she use this concept to argue for women’s public rights (i.e. suffrage)? Was she challenging traditional notions of “womanhood”?
It has been well said that
the modern city is a stronghold of industrialism quite as the feudal city was a
stronghold of militarism, but the modern cities fear no enemies and rivals from
without and their problems of government are solely internal. Affairs for the
most part are going badly in these great new centers, in which the
quickly-congregated population has not yet learned to arrange its affairs
satisfactorily. Unsanitary housing,
poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of
contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated
factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding,
prostitution, and drunkenness are the enemies which the modern cities must face
and overcome, would they survive.
Logically their electorate should be made up of those who can bear a
valiant part in this arduous contest, those who in the past have at least
attempted to care for children, to clean houses, to prepare foods, to isolate
the family from moral dangers; those who have traditionally taken care of that
side of life which inevitably becomes the subject of municipal consideration
and control as soon as the population is congested. To test the elector’s fitness to deal with this situation by his
ability to bear arms is absurd. These problems must be solved, if they are
solved at all, not from the military point of view, not even from the
industrial point of view, but from a third, which is rapidly developing in all
the great cities of the world – the human-welfare point of view . . . .
City housekeeping has failed partly
because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its
multiform activities. The men have been
carelessly indifferent to much of this civic housekeeping, as they have always
been indifferent to the details of the household . . . . The very
multifariousness and complexity of a city government demand the help of minds
accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the
health and welfare of young children and to a responsibility for the
cleanliness and comfort of other people. Because all these things have
traditionally been in the hands of women, if they take no part in them now they
are not only missing the education which the natural participation in civic
life would bring to them but they are losing what they have always had.