 Hi and welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown and today we're talking about Jane Adams and Emma Goldman. Two key progressive era thinkers, both feminist philosophers. One, Jane Adams, a pragmatist, the other a radical, but both important figures for progressive era political thought, especially related to feminism and women's issues. Jane Adams, born 1860, just on the eve of the outbreak of the Civil War. Emma Goldman, born a little bit later, 1869. Adams died in 1935, Goldman died in 1940, so their timelines are pretty close together. And today I want to talk about each of these figures in turn, but also talk a little bit about a little bit about the overlaps and similarities, dissimilarities as well, between their ideas. First, let's talk about Jane Adams. Now, Jane Adams was the daughter of a fairly wealthy Midwestern family. She was, as many women at that time were, college educated. She received a college education at one of the new women's colleges, but she fell in that sort of area where, although women could get educated, there were not many career options open to them. Adams described this as the snare of preparation, right? On the one hand, they were sort of prepared by their education for careers that then didn't exist, right? So Adams did what many women of her generation did after college. She took a kind of grand tour of Europe, but rather than hitting kind of the sightseeing sort of things, she spent a lot of time in the poorest sectors of the city she traveled in, including a memorable trip to London to an institution known as Toin B. Hall, or sometimes just called the Settlement, where mainly college students from Oxford and Cambridge lived and did service work in the in the neighborhood of London, in this poor neighborhood of London. Jane Adams saw this as a potential model for herself. So when she went home, instead of going home to courtship and marriage, as she was expected, Adams along with her friend, Ellen Gates-Star, formed Hall House in one of the poor, largely immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago. Now, Hall House was an institution set up from the beginning to do social work in the neighborhood. Again, it was called a social settlement. Social settlements were popping up in major cities in the U.S. as a mode of providing services, social services. Many of the types of social service organizations that existed at that time were driven by charitable organizations, theories of social science or religious ideas that would sort of impose moral conditions and impose ideas of what the right thing for these people were. And at first, Hall House was no different, but very quickly, Adams adopted an approach that was less driven by her own ideas and more driven by the needs of the people in the neighborhood. So what Adams ended up doing was changing her plans and really listening to and involving cooperatively people in the neighborhood in order to determine what Hall House's plans would be. Adams is an important figure in the lineage of pragmatist philosophy of the School of Pragmatism. She's an important sort of member of the second generation of thinkers and her connection with pragmatism comes primarily through her close working relationship with another second generation figure, John Dewey, who she both worked with and also she inspired a lot of his developments. In her work, I mean, you can kind of see the pragmatism already in the flexible sort of problem-driven approach of Hall House. You see it also in an approach that she that's sometimes called the sympathetic knowledge or sympathetic interpretation method, where she addresses sort of human and social problems through the sort of attempt to craft narratives that help us understand the experiences of people on the ground, give us a sympathetic point of view on their lives, and use that to drive social change rather than having social change being driven kind of top down. In democracy and social ethics, she emphasizes this kind of method. This sort of she uses the word perplexities in a number of places to refer to the kind of the kind of sort of felt or experienced problems that drive social inquiry. She also rests a lot of the argument on this important distinction between individual ethics and social ethics. So individual ethics sort of emphasizes personal morality, moral codes or rules, sort of liberal rights, whereas social ethics emphasizes interdependence, the way in which we depend on each other as well as cooperation. And as you can probably tell from the thesis of the book, democracy and social ethics are closely connected if not the same sort of thing. So she doesn't think about democracy as just a kind of convenient form of government, a way of connecting the people to their government. She actually thinks of democracy as primarily an ethical thing, primarily about people cooperating with one another. So that's Adams. Now let's talk a little bit about Emma Goldman. Goldman was born in Russia, as I said in 1869, to a Jewish family. They immigrated to the United States when she was still a teenager. And she spent much of her life living and working in the United States. She was an activist, a writer, also a lecturer. She gave many lectures and speeches, sometimes to large crowds. Goldman was an anarchist thinker. She was a proponent of women's rights. And as many anarchists were at the time, she was in and out of jail on many occasions, prison on many occasions. Sometimes because she was involved in planning violent acts, other times because the American government of this time period was repressive against ideas that were considered treasonous or seditious. So anarchists, socialists, communists were often jailed just because their ideas were considered as being against the government. Something that today would be a little bit harder to get away with, perhaps, but was common, especially during World War I. Goldman, although she defended women's rights, you'll notice she's not in favor of women's suffrage, of the main sort of feminist project of the time period of trying to secure the right to vote for women. Not because she thought men should vote and women shouldn't, but because she was a true anarchist. She was so against the state that opening up voting to other people just seems irrelevant to her. So she has a concept of anarchism that, on the one hand, is driven by a kind of unrestricted notion of liberty, of individual liberty, and the sort of equation of any form of government with violence. So we shouldn't have the state because the state is violence. Its actions are necessarily violently coercive. Not that Goldman necessarily disagrees with Adams about the interdependence of people. She's the type of anarchist who's totally comfortable with the notion that people are independent and collective action is the way we're going to solve social problems. It's just that she has this notion of the state as sort of separate from and coercive of the people. Adams has a somewhat more, you could call it, pragmatic attitude about the state, but also she has this deep commitment to democracy, which, again, sees democracy more as a way of life than a form of government. An idea she shares with, possibly co-developed with John Dewey, who had a lifelong commitment to democracy as well. It's an interesting, I think, to look at these two perspectives in contrast on democratic institutions, the nature of democracy. So that's Adams and Goldman, a little bit of an introduction. I look forward to hearing further thoughts as we discuss the selections from Adams' Democracy and Social Ethics, the introduction and the discussion of household life, as well as the selections from Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays, where we get her theory of anarchism as well as her account of marriage and love in an anarchist context. So please let me know what you think on Discord or in class today, or here on the comments of this video, and otherwise, I'll see you next time. I'm thinking about inviting a colleague of mine, Dr. Starneman, who studies progressive era women activists and writers, sort of radical thinkers, and is particularly interested in both Adams and Goldman. So I'm thinking about inviting her to do a little interview here. Let me know if you think that would be interesting. Okay, see you next week.