Reviews

The Long Road of Woman's Memory by Jane Addams

ibbys's review against another edition

3.0

Jane Addams was working in an ethnographic, interview-based style of social research during the early 1900s, when sociologists were still pretty positivist in their methods. Her observations are about how the memories shared with her by older working class immigrant women at the Hull House functioned in their recall to either resassert the status quo or move towards social change. She focuses on the transformation of memory through the act of speaking it, something that became important in later feminist consciousness raising. She also has a sort of puzzling final section about her memories of Egypt as a child that someone will have to explain to me. I admire Jane Addams for prioritizing social change praxis along with theory-building in her work. I can't believe she is so often excluded from the canon of social theory.