文摘
The Name of Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize Winner of 1931, is primarily known in relation to her social work with immigrants in the ghettoes and slums of Chicago. Almost unknown are her books about Democracy and Social Ethics, Education, Prostitution as organised white-slave-traffic, Peace-Building etc., which all influenced her social practice together with other residents of the settlement of Hull House. The article refers to two of these books. In both she analyses the relationship between social structures as power-relations and hegemonial cultural patterns, the one the bourgeois double-moral about sexuality, the other about war as a necessary, natural educational process for humanity, sustaiend especially by German idealistic philosophers. The critique of this idea is empirically founded in her observations about the possibility of combining particularistic and universalistic patterns of “living together” in the community of immigrants from different ethnic, religious, national and political backgrounds. Together with the international organisation of the Women for Permanent Peace (WPP) she organized a congress in The Hague where her idea of ending wars by negotiations instead according to the “winner-versus-looser”-logic was put into practice in presenting it to the war-ministers of the European countries. Coming home from her European tour and giving a speech at Carnegie Hall, New York, about the results of the discussions with the ministers and soldiers she became over night the “most dangerous women of the USA” and the “red scare” was banned for about 10 years from any public discourse and activity.
