Title: Freedom through Fostering Democratic Social Relations: Jane Addams’s Faithful Feminist Pragmatist Pedagogy

Jane Addams’s (1860-1935) feminist pragmatism provides a framework for today’s religious scholars to think about the role of religious education in fostering ethical freedom in democracy. Critical of the risk of the conceptualization of freedom as individual liberty in populist politics, Addams believed in the power of education for humanizing social relations and the moral agency of the people for “greater freedom” (Addams 1902). By drawing from her work, I propose ethical freedom as the type of freedom by which people can use their personal and collective agency to care for ethics, morality, peace, and justice in the social organism and the world. 

Jane Addams is one of the most influential feminist pragmatists in the United States. She incorporated Christian faith and pragmatism into her activism at Hull House for democratic social reform. Her contribution to democracy as a public intellectual, activist, and researcher has been widely recognized by the global public, as shown by her Nobel Prize award in 1931. However, she has not received due scholarly attention in religious studies because of intellectual sexism and methodological secularism, both of which have led to the neglect of her faith and religiosity (Dorrien, 2009). Additionally, the binary opposition between activism and scholarship has led people to reductively categorize her as an activist only. As a result, Jane Addams has not been given the same attention as the canonical fathers of American pragmatism, such as William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty (Atkin 2010; Legg and Hookway 2021). Because her emphasis on embodied knowledge, use of stories, and emotion as a tool for understanding predates contemporary feminist methodology, feminist scholarship has recovered the theory and practices of Jane Addams since the mid-twentieth century (Hamington 2010, Hamington 2022, Shields, Hamington, and Soeters 2023). This recovery process has also evolved around contestations over her faith, her racial and colonial biases, and her relationship with the popular cult of “true womanhood” of the nineteenth century—the term historians use to refer to the notion of women’s virtue as sexual purity, docility, and domesticity.  Although she warns against American supremacy that justifies war by projecting itself as a savior for world democracy (Addams 1933), her publications still reflect colonial ideologies (Jackson 2001; Sullivan 2006; Fischer 2010). Her desire to find commonality among all women led her to disregard the power differential between Native American and European women while simultaneously perpetuating Orientalism in her discourse about Asian women. Attending to these scholarly contestations, I interpret the implications of Jane Addams’s faith, philosophy, and ideologies in the American pragmatist tradition to draw critical insights for religious educators about how to cultivate democracy. 

Understanding society as a social organism, Addams argued that democracy should be a way of life and education ought to help people humanize their social relationships. Serving as a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 1905, she, with other residents at Hull House, protested against child labor, the lack of educational resources, and the over-commercialization of education (Addams 1911). Through her conviction that education should facilitate associations with people beyond their interest groups, Addams challenged the industrial model of education and esoteric scholarship and argued that education must be imagined as a work of art and ethics rather than rigid doctrinarism. 

The types of educational crises in Addams’s time echo the challenges we currently face in the U.S.—commercialism, racialized economic disparities, and the battle over American history—all of which have converged to form the current attack on the Department of Education by the populist right-wing presidential administration.  The primary purpose of education for Addams was to humanize social relations and society by cultivating ethical imagination and compassion and a spirit of creativity. Religion has provided rich traditions and resources by which to facilitate moral imaginations and worldviews that can counter the doctrine of neoliberal capitalism that privatizes social goods and minimizes their social values.

For democracy to flourish, people should be able to stretch their sympathy towards others to create an environment and a social process that are hospitable to those who are marginalized –politically, economically, and spiritually. Education, for Addams, should be more than a mechanical tool to transmit knowledge; it should be a way of contributing to the moral formation of members of society. Thus, Addams argues that Hull House symbolizes a “protest” against the reductionist view of education as a mere means of training people for commerce and esoteric “academic scholarship” detached from real-life experiences. She rejects these approaches to education in that they both fail to facilitate democratic social relations among and across various groups (Addams 1893). 

In this paper, I interpret the implications of Jane Addams’s pedagogical philosophy in the American pragmatist tradition to draw insights into how religious education can cultivate democratic social relations both in the classroom and the broader society for ethical freedom. Methodologically, I conduct a philosophical and historical analysis of Jane Addams’s feminist theoretical approach to education for democracy. After discussing the development of her pragmatist philosophy within the context of her activism, my presentation delves into her philosophy of education and unpacks her racial and colonial ideologies to derive pedagogical insights for contemporary religious scholars. Ultimately, I argue that religious education can foster ethical freedom for democratic social relations by cultivating democratic virtues. By reinterpreting the concept of freedom in light of Addams’s feminist pragmatist pedagogy, my presentation invites the audience to think together about how we, as religious educators, can contribute to the cultivation of ethical freedom and democratic virtues in light of the current challenges to education and democracy.