Women in Pragmatism: Past, Present and Future

In the tradition of pragmatist studies, the scholarship of Jane Addams is usually associated with that of John Dewey, given their friendship and shared interests. However, the relationship between the two is often portrayed in terms of a narrative embodying classic archetypes of gender, “the male as mind generating theory and the woman as body experiencing and caring” (Hamington in The Stan- ford Encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University, 2018). Dewey himself explic- itly acknowledged his debt to Addams’s ideas and insights (Dewey in Response, Vol. 5: The later works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. Southern Illinois University Press, 1930). Several studies have investigated the relationship between the two from various perspectives (Schilpp in The philosophy of John Dewey. Tudor, 1951; Davis in American heroine: the life and legend of Jane Addams. Oxford University Press, 1973; Deegan in Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago School, 1892– 1918. Transaction Books, 1988; Farrell in Beloved lady: history of Jane Addams’ ideas on reform and peace. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967; Lasch in The social thought of Jane Addams. Bobbs-Merril, 1965; Leffers in Pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey inform the ethics of care. Hypatia 8(2):64–77, 1993; Linn in Jane Addams: a biography. Grenwood Press, 1935; Seigfried in Pragmatism and feminism: Reweaving the social fabric. University of Chicago Press, 1996). However, a further exploration is required in order to highlight the epistemic and theoretical dimensions of Addams’s speculation. From this standpoint, it would be possible to have a clearer picture of the strong intersection of the epistemic and practical dimen- sions in Addams’s thought. This intersection is due to its “evolutionary” nature (Fischer in Jane Addams’s evolutionary theorizing. Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics”. University of Chicago Press, 2019), which allowed her to merge multiple different cultural and empirical suggestions into an inspiring vision of the world and of human destiny.