Introduction by Louise W. Knight, author
“Jane Addams: Spirit in Action”
By now it should come as no surprise that our foremothers did know a thing or two, but it is always stunning to come upon words of wisdom that are totally relevant today.
My friend Louise Knight, who has written the definitive biography of the reformer Jane Addams recently passed along the essay below. What is stunning here is how these words written almost a century ago speak to the current conversation about Second Adulthood or the Encore stage of life (just check out www.encore.com) in which we have an opportunity turn the wisdom, expertise, and confidence of our pre-fifty years – what Addams calls “moral energy”- to making our world a better place.
— Suzanne Braun Levine
“Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?”
An editorial by Jane Addams
Ladies’ Home Journal
Jane Addams (1860-1935) was 54 years old when she wrote this essay at the invitation of the editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which in 1914 was the nation’s most widely read women’s magazine. At the time, Addams was the most famous and admired, as well as the most politically accomplished, woman in the country.
Two years before, she had seconded the nomination of former president Theodore Roosevelt as the presidential candidate for the Progressive Party, and she regularly testified before and lobbied state legislatures and Congress on behalf of such progressive legislation as banning child labor, providing women with the vote and the eight-hour work day, and, in the case of Congress, defeating proposed immigration restrictions.
In 1914 she was serving on the board of the NAACP and the Women’s Trade Union League, was as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Progressive Party, had just stepped down as a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and within a few months would be elected president of the Woman’s Peace Party and the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. The readers of the Journal knew that Addams was herself an example of a woman over fifty who, to say the least, did not feel old.
— Louise W. Knight, author, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago, 2005), website: www.louisewknight.com
“One of the most remarkable changes in the lives of women in this country has been the postponement of old age. Chiefly because they had nothing else to do, our grandmothers, after their children had been reared and safely launched into homes of their own, expected to give their remaining years to a general oversight of the households of their sons and daughters and to the upbringing of their grandchildren, confirming both as nearly as possible to their own excellent although somewhat inflexible standards.
It is useless to deny that this admirable and highly domestic occupation occasionally led to difficulties. A vigorous woman, accustomed to the cares of a large household in which her word was law, when deprived of an absorbing occupation could not all at once reduce herself to a negligible quantity, and the traditional “mother-in-law” was quite as much of the victim of circumstances as was the cherished family upon whom her unused energies were expended.
The easy assumption of old age under the circumstances is readily understood, for when the individual valued herself largely as a repository of wisdom and tradition it was quite in character to don a cap, and to sit, knitting innumerable pairs of stockings, where she might easily be consulted. Almost any family album will reveal these sweet-faced women, a fold of linen over their placid breasts, a cap upon their smooth hair, whom we are happy to claim as our grandmothers, and yet if we knew their exact ages, in almost every instance we would be surprised to discover how young they were, many of them scarcely fifty years old. They assumed that life was over for them at the very time their husbands were still in the midst of business and professional activities, often receiving their highest honors and rendering their most distinguished public services after they were fifty years old.
We regret the passing of these charming women and we certainly deplore those women of seventy years occasionally seen rushing from one social function to another, attired in modish gowns, with picture hats surmounting their elaborately coifed heads. Although so dissimilar it is nevertheless true that both types of women are without adequate activity. The former dissembled a placidity which certainly they could not have felt in every instance; the latter continue a round of vapid occupations which they fear to drop lest they be faced by insupportable leisure. Both are obviously without absorbing interests.
Happily there is another type of woman between the ages of fifty and seventy years of whom every section of America has its shining examples; first discovered perhaps through church sewing circles and missionary societies, although the widely spread Woman’s’ Christian Temperance Union organizations had much to do with enabling her to find herself. The Woman’s Club movement has also been a great factor in developing the powers of women who are over fifty years old. Many of them learned to write papers, to address audiences, to preside over meetings, to organize committees for the first time after they had passed that age. The women’s clubs also gave to thousands of women their first sense of responsibility in regard to public education and civic reform. It was largely through the efforts of these older club women that kindergartens, manual training and domestic science were introduced into the public-school system of America. In many cities these women were also the pioneers in agitating for public playgrounds and vacation schools.
These same elderly women who, in their youth, had been sheltered from any knowledge of crime and the ways of criminals, and who would have considered it most unladylike even to refer to a “disreputable woman” [a prostitute], were often responsible for securing matrons in the police stations, teachers in the jails, the establishment of juvenile courts and the abolition of vice [saloon, gambling, drug-dealing and brothel] districts. These women are now in no small measure responsible for municipal concerts, for crafts and trades schools and for exhibitions for the encouragement of local artists. In their girlhood they knew no exercise more violent than playing croquet, no dietary more rigid than preserves and sponge cake for supper, no notion but that all diseases were Heaven-sent, and that a certain number of children must inevitably die in infancy, but they are now agitating for public gymnasiums and municipal baths, for pure-food laws and a clean milk supply; they are quite tigerlike in insisting that all children shall be protected from contagious diseases through school nursing and medical inspection, and they have come to consider a high death rate among infants a disgrace and a reproach to the community. . .
One woman of sixty whom I know is most widely useful in many church activities, not only in the local circles of her denomination but also as president of a State organization. Her husband died several years ago, her children are both married and living in two distant cities. It would be hard to imagine a more desolate life than hers might be did she not have an outlet, not only for her splendid energy, but also for her social gifts and her affection. Her small but charming house does not give an impression of emptiness, but it is as if it were the center of beneficent activity, a place where a woman dwelt not alone but surrounded by the affection of countless friends. It would be absurd to say that if she had remained “quietly at home,” exchanging social amenities with her neighbors, her life would have been so filled with satisfactory interests..
Another woman over fifty years old [Florence Kelley] is the executive head of a National organization [the National Consumers League] which has for years urged and secured better conditions for working women and children, both through legislation and voluntary effort. She has moved from one difficult piece of social organization to another until probably no one else in the United States is more conversant with the conditions surrounding working women and children in every part of the country, and with the laws which have been enacted on their behalf and with the efficiency of their enforcement. . . .
That weariness and dullness which inhere in both domestic and social affairs when they are carried on by men alone will no longer be a necessary attribute of public life when such gracious and gray-haired women become a part of it, and when new social movements, in which men as well as women are concerned, naturally utilize woman’s experience and ability.
Ever-widening channels are gradually being provided through which woman’s increasing moral energy may flow, and it is not too much to predict that in the end public affairs will be amazingly revivified from those new fountainheads fed in the upper reaches of woman’s matured capacity.”
— Jane Addams
Ladies Home Journal
October 1914, Vol. 31 page 7.