I have long been a puzzled admirer of Jean Elshtain's work, going back to graduate school when Public Man, Private Woman (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1981) first came out, and I read it for a class in feminist theory taught by Nancy Hartsock.Footnote ¹ I remember another student, a Marxist, wrinkling her nose and saying about the author, “she's really pretty conservative, don't you think?” I had a hard time understanding this question. As a newcomer to feminism in the early 1980s, I perhaps naively thought that anyone who recognized that gender was an important category for political analysis, that it was a realm of inequality, and that canonical political theory actually had a lot to say about it despite the fact that most of our professors always blithely ignored it, was, by definition, pretty radical.

But over the years my view of Elshtain's relationship to feminism has been somewhat confused. She obviously was one of the trailblazers, along with Carol Gilligan, of care feminism and feminist attention to the family. Her promotion of the family as a site of significance for politics in the early 1980s was in many ways foundational for contemporary feminism in political science, which has always been behind other fields in the area of gender. Among political theorists, Elshtain stood alongside other early figures such as Susan Moller Okin, Zillah Eisenstein, and Molly Shanley. Yet she often took some rather unfair swipes at what appears to be an imagined feminism, or at least a combined caricature of different feminisms that require all women to march in step to the liberal ideals of profession on the one hand and, simultaneously on the other, the radical hatred of men.

Moreover, this treatment of feminism sits in stark contrast to her view of democracy, perhaps ironically summed up best by something she actually says not about democracy per se, but about civil society: “Civil society is a realm that is neither individual in a narrowly relentless individualist sense nor communitarian in a strong collectivist sense” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain and Calvert1991, 67). I think this sentence describes her view of democracy, too, and says a lot about Elshtain's view of feminism as well. For Elshtain, democracy is a realm where we talk, listen, respect differences, hammer them out, work them through, and come up with solutions, rules, and policies that serve the common good more than the selfish good of particular individuals. As someone who cut her teeth on Rousseau (despite the fact that Elshtain herself does not express admiration for one of my favorite theorists),Footnote ² and was influenced by Carole Pateman's (Reference Pateman1979) reading of him, among others, I am deeply attracted to this image of democracy, but the question that I wrestled with is whether it carried into her views of feminism.

I believe it did, but in a roundabout way, because the texts in which such democratic vision is to be found are not the ones in which she overtly took up questions of gender and family. Of particular importance in defending this claim is Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy, which I maintain is Elshtain's most feminist work. In this work, her true views of feminism can be found, views that are not compromised by the polemicist tendency with which she often approached contemporary feminist politics. The first time I read Jane Addams, when the book came out in 2002, I was impressed and inspired by Elshtain's sympathetic portrayal of Addams's dream of “break[ing] down artificial barriers between people and mak[ing] it possible for human beings to realize their full sociality” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 95), a dream that had long influenced my own reading of canonical figures and my feminist reconstructions of theoretical concepts like obligation and freedom. Addams's “compassion without condescension” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 95) invoked my own fascination with the problem of recognition in political theory and the contributions that a feminist ethic of care could make to it. It struck me particularly how this view resonated with my own first book in feminist theory, published ten years prior (Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann1992). There, I drew on Carol Gilligan's (Reference Gilligan1982) work on moral psychology which seemed to me (in 2002) to echo Addams's view “that women's lives revolved around responsibility, care, and obligation” while simultaneously noting that “[t]hese emphases were, in a sense, thrust upon them” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 157). Thus rather than evidence of “moral superiority,” as some early and inattentive critics accused Gilligan of offering, Addams, like Gilligan, saw care and responsibility as “a moral necessity that can and often has served as a source of female power and authority” (157)—that is, as simply part of the human condition and the moral landscape that dominant discourses in political theory have ignored or even denigrated. But Addams holds, as I believe Gilligan was suggesting, that “the imperatives of this realm must be extended more generally” with Elshtain calling such a view “the rock bottom ground of her [Addams's] civic philosophy and social feminism” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 157). I was sorry that I myself had not known to turn to Addams in constructing my argument; and I could not help thinking that if history could be reversed, with Gilligan writing her book after Elshtain's rather than twenty years before, she might have spent more time talking about Jane Addams and less about George Elliot and Anton Chekhov.

Similarly, Elshtain's interpretation of Addams's contextualization of people's actions in the face of extreme circumstances presaged the view of freedom that I tried to develop in my work on freedom (Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann2003). For instance, when Elshtain quotes Addams saying that parents who appear to be neglectful by middle-class standards may be trapped by circumstance because “the world has closed in on them … [and] they must give succor short shrift … in order to put food on the table” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 128), she echoes feminist arguments over domestic violence and U.S. welfare “reform” of the 1990s, which showed how we must complicate our understanding of choice and action within constrained parameters. Women and, particularly, poor mothers are often forced to make “choices” that do not appear, from a middle-class perspective, to be very rational, much less liberating (Mink Reference Mink2002). The challenge Elshtain hears in Addams's work—“Who is this ‘other’ after all? Not an abstract artifact of discourse, but rather, one's neighbor” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 128)—surely echoes contemporary feminism's rejection of the dichotomy of self and other, its argument for seeing the other and self in a mutually constituting relationship. Her emphasis on “autonomy within relationships” foreshadows contemporary feminist “relational autonomy” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 174; Mackenzie and Stoljar Reference Mackenzie and Stoljar2000). And surely her advocacy for poor mothers to be able to care for their children instead of working in sweatshops anticipates contemporary feminist arguments against workfare and other welfare reforms of the 1990s (Hirschmann and Liebert Reference Hirschmann and Liebert2001). The Jane Addams I encountered in Elshtain's writings in 2002 dreamed a recognizable dream of democracy that I shared, and I appreciated her dedication, strength, leadership, compassion, and commitment to democratic equality portrayed so eloquently and effectively. In case it is not clear, I love this book, which came out at the same time as The Subject of Liberty (Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann2003). Once again I wished for time travel to allow me to go back and rewrite my own book with Elshtain's book in view. Although I was previously familiar with Addams, Elshtain's reading of her was inspiring, prescient, and smart.

In light of the Jane Addams book, I think it fair to say that though Elshtain's feminism was contentious, it misreads her when feminists reject her as “one of us.” In my view—though it might be an odd thing to say about someone who wrote one of the very first books in second-wave feminist theory—Elshtain's feminism was not a theoretical one. Rather, it was grounded in the question, what can we accomplish to make life better for everyone? She was a pragmatic feminist. She rejected a feminism that advanced the cause of one group at the expense of others, including women at the expense of men or children, employment opportunities and equity at the cost of resources for caregivers. (Admittedly, this is precisely what makes her position on gay marriage so profoundly puzzling and disappointing.) That, I think, may cause many in our field to have been irritated by her at times harsh and unfair judgments; but for me, the Jane Addams book affirms the exciting part of Public Man/Private Woman and its vision of a world where women counted, where women were actors on the stage of history, and its assertion that the world couldn't survive without that action. That is the vision that she has left me with, and I hope my own work honors it.

But context, as Elshtain notes, is oh, so important. On rereading Jane Addams in 2011 for Elshtain's second Engaged Mind conference at The University of Chicago, I was drawn to Addams's vilification by those on the Right, particularly regarding pacifism (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 226–35). It reminded me so much of our own Gulf Wars and the War on Terror, where “support our troops” became synonymous with “let the president do what he wants, shut up, and get out of the way.” Anyone who raised an objection was seen as a left-wing hater of America, even a hater of freedom (to adopt some of the former president's “Bushisms”), unpatriotic, disloyal, a traitor. Such attitudes displayed not an exceptionalism bred by war, but the solidification of a trend of hyperbole and incivility that had emerged in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, as “yes, we can” turns into “oh no, you won't,” a politics of hope turns into a politics of cynicism, lies, and manipulation, and democracy seems more a dream than ever.

But Jane Addams reminds us that our twenty-first-century vitriol is nothing new. Addams's fight against Chicago alderman John Powers, who smeared her in retaliation, her being labeled as an anarchist, the extreme uncompromising positions of those on the Left regarding her support of Theodore Roosevelt, and her lack of “purity” on socialism all seem just too depressingly familiar to feminists today (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 199).Footnote ³ The losses feminists have sustained in the past twenty years in abortion rights may at times be overshadowed by the wonderful gains we have made regarding marriage equality, but they are still very serious and frightening. The losses are a direct result of the kind of dirty politics that Elshtain observes in Jane Addams, as politicians seek to restrict women's equality, civil rights, and freedom from an ideological perspective that can only be explained by a fundamental misogyny. That the spokespersons for this misogyny often wear dresses does not make it any less serious, only more bizarre. Both Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman have been outraged at their discriminatory and sexist treatment by voters, the media, and fellow (male) politicians while at the same time advocating legislative and public policy measures that encourage this very sort of discriminatory treatment.

What we see in American democratic politics today is the same kind of absolutist rhetoric, the misrepresentation and twisting of truth that Jane Addams experienced. As Elshtain rightly notes, it undermines and even destroys democracy. We have a speaker of the House who has said that he doesn't believe in the word “compromise,” and members of Congress on the radical Right who go even further in their absolutism. What hope does Jane Addams's “mitigation” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2002, 163) have today? When I first read Elshtain's observation that “you cannot build a democratic culture if everyone is on the take and cynicism about public life prevails” (184), I responded with an outraged sense of “damn right!” But I reread it ten years later with a sinking heart. Elshtain's account of Addams made clear upon my second reading just how much prejudice, hysteria, and hypocrisy are both the enemies of democracy and also its inevitable byproducts. Though Elshtain claims that the people so virulently opposed to the president and to the federal government wish for “an orderliness to the world that is unwarranted” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain2004, 551), such obstructiveness does not offer even the “legal moralism” of which Elshtain despairs. It might be considered a religious moralism, if one believes that the far Right really is hoping for the destruction of the world that will signal the rapture, but more likely it is just a desperate clinging to power in the face—in the case of President Obama, the literal face—of a social order that would have been unrecognizable two generations ago. It is a desperate clinging to the power of a past that no longer exists.

It is precisely this clinging to that past that has resulted in feminism being under siege for the past decade, and I confess that I was sometimes annoyed with Elshtain for her contributions to that siege. Consider, for instance, her concern about the collapse of public and private, personal and political as expressed in Democracy on Trial. Elshtain raises the specter of a world in which “conversation around the kitchen table or in the bedroom with one's spouse becomes the public property of the police or, worse, of the entire society” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1995, 45). Aside from the fact that in my view, the police often are worse than “the entire society”—the latter might yield humiliation if you are foolish enough to post your annoyance with your spouse on Facebook, but the former can yield the terror of the criminal justice system, not to mention uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence.

But the feminist point is that if that conversation holds, say, a serious threat of bodily harm and violence, why shouldn't it be of concern to the entire society? Isn't that what feminists have been fighting for? The issue, instead, is who controls the access to this information. As domestic violence scholarship suggests, the question is whether a woman has a right to bring that conversation to the police—bring it into the public—or whether the police will hide behind the rubric of family privacy to justify their inaction. Or if my husband's and my dispute over housework becomes so bad that we divorce, we may choose to bring it into the public realm via a court of law. But the question is the degree to which I, or we, can decide to make it public. Whether we do or not, however, the politics is always there; and it is the politics that makes the question of whether we want to make it public a relevant one.

Though I don't think Elshtain would endorse my view, I would suggest that Jane Addams shows us that everything personal is political. That is, despite what Elshtain wrote about feminism and democracy, I think she may have had greater hope for American democracy and for feminism because she sees in Jane Addams a model, a hero, for both. Indeed, one might say that Jane Addams shows that feminists were right all along, contra Public Man/Private Woman: everything in our lives is imbued with power, even when we seem to act completely alone. Surely Elshtain believes this in her work on Las Madres de la Plaza, for she shows us that their love and grief for their missing children is intensely political.

But responding to her (admittedly exaggerated) unease about feminists supposedly turning everything about the family on its head, we might recognize that not everything that is political must be public. When my husband and I dispute over household chores and the sexual division of labor, that is a political dispute because it is a dispute about power, no matter how amicable and cooperative we are. Even when he does 50%, that is a political action recognizing that I, as a female, should not have an automatic role determined by my gender. But just because it is political doesn't mean that it is public. I think Elshtain shows us, again perhaps in spite of herself, that this is a wisdom that sits at the heart of Addams's feminism. And it is the version of Elshtain that I like to think of, for it provides a ray of hope in a sea of despair about the place of feminism in today's democracy. If Jean had lived, she might have proved my hope to be misplaced, but I would prefer to think that is not the case. Jean Elshtain's feminism may have been contentious, and she may not have always seemed a consistent sister in the battle for gender equality, but I believe that her world view had a serious place for the kind of hope that feminism sorely needs today.