Jane Addams revised.

Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Basic Books, $28, 328 pp.

She wore a full-length black dress almost every day of her adult life, with puffy sleeves extending to her wrists. A bored, wealthy young woman, she had a nervous breakdown in 1882. After founding the social settlement, Hull House, in 1889, she never invited a neighborhood resident to live with her (a privilege reserved for like-minded volunteers). She did, however, solemnly encourage her Sicilian neighbors to substitute the thoroughly cooked vegetables of the "New England kitchen" for their native cuisine.

Sketched from this angle, Jane Addams seems a caricature of the intrusive social worker. Her latest biographer, University of Chicago Divinity School ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, knows better. Elshtain recognizes that skepticism about the ability of affluent white volunteers to "help" the poor can disguise a corrosive cynicism, and that Addams's occasional displays of cultural insensitivity should not be given undue weight. Elshtain's Addams, as displayed in Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy, is more Vaclav Havel than Lady Bountiful, more daring philosopher of democracy than charitable grandee.

The story is remarkable. Born in 1860 in the small town of Cedarville, Illinois, Addams grew up as a beloved daughter of the town's leading citizen, John Addams. For four years beginning in 1877, she attended Rockford Female Seminary in Rockford, Illinois, a sort of prairie Mount Holyoke, although she recoiled from the faculty presumption that students should have a "conversion experience" and consider careers as missionaries. (Later, she would join a Presbyterian church, but only because she identified Jesus as standing with "the many" as opposed to the "privileged few.") Instead, Addams immersed herself in the school's apparently rigorous academic life--during one summer vacation she prepared for the fall term by plowing through Plutarch, John Ruskin, Washington Irving, and Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She confided to a classmate her enthusiasm about the "splendid" prospect of throwing "ourselves into the tide of affairs, feeling ourselves swamped by the great flood of human action."

But how? What Addams called the "snare of preparation" soon enveloped her. Intrigued by the problem of urban poverty, keenly interested in politics (her father had befriended a young Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s), Addams struggled to find something more challenging for a well-educated young woman than a ceaseless round of music lessons and social calls. Her most important anchor, her father, died six weeks after her graduation. She made a halfhearted stab at medical school, and quickly withdrew. She deflected several suitors, preferring the companionship of female friends. (This has led, inevitably, to speculation about Addams's sexual orientation, which Elshtain brushes aside as more revealing about our own time than Addams's.)

Her lack of direction explains her bouts of nervous exhaustion in the 1880s. What remains surprising is the persistence of her curiosity about the wider world. Her first trip to Europe was grim. Enduring the complaints of a hypochondriac stepmother who doubled as chaperone, she jotted in her notebook a fragment from Victorian sage Matthew Arnold, "Weary of myself and sick of asking / What I am and what I ought to be."

But she went back. And on her second European trip she visited the first British settlement house, Toynbee Hall. Here were Oxford and Cambridge graduates living in London's East End and assisting their working-class neighbors. Here was a Christian spirit, with no denominational proselytizing.

Addams immediately persuaded friends and, eventually, wealthy Chicago benefactors, to start a similar enterprise in Chicago. And soon Hull House opened its doors, in an immigrant neighborhood on the city's near West Side that contained seventy thousand residents within a six-block radius. (In a given week, remarkably, nine thousand of those residents would pass through the settlement's doors.) She and her colleagues began with a library, a modest art gallery, and courses in the great books. (Elshtain is rightly dismissive of later commentators who see in such programs only cultural imperialism.) The popularity of these initial efforts induced Addams to develop classes in American government, cooking, and sewing. Eventually, the women of Hull House ran a daycare center, built the city's first playground, sponsored sport teams, gave music lessons, and operated a theater where neighborhood children and adults took the leading roles. Evening lecturers, including John Dewey and W.E.B. DuBois, gave the center an unusual intellectual cachet.

Addams, herself, although she lived at Hull House until her death in 1935, spent most of each day at her writing desk. A signal virtue of Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy is Elshtain's perception that Addams deserves recognition as one of America's most important public philosophers, a figure as important, in her way, to the early twentieth century as Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. That Addams wrote in parables drawn from her experience in her Chicago neighborhood, that she wrote so well, has lulled readers into pigeonholing her as a warm-hearted raconteur.

Peering beneath the surface of the anecdotes that structure her many books and articles--the woman clutching at her chest of drawers as she is evicted from her apartment, the boys of the neighborhood, seeking some outlet for their energies, playing on the railroad tracks--reveals something more profound. What concerned Addams was the fate of mass democracy in industrial society. "The very existence of the state depends upon the character of its citizens," she proclaimed, and a genuinely democratic society would work to nurture and educate its citizens so that they could participate in public affairs. And such education would work both ways. A wry, self-deprecatory tone, as when she describes how she and her colleagues, unlike the neighborhood ward boss, failed to realize the importance of a proper funeral for a dead infant, points to her conviction that affluent, educated Americans like herself had much to learn from new compatriots.

Like most reformers of the period, Addams quickly came to believe that "private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited." Eventually, Addams and like-minded reformers in Chicago and elsewhere could claim credit for a dizzying array of successes, ranging from sanitation regulations to minimum-wage and child-labor laws.

When Elshtain the ethicist and moral philosopher sticks to analysis of Addams the (elusive) ethicist and moral philosopher, the results are consistently illuminating. She is especially good at conveying Addams's powerful, even moving, conviction that women concerned about clean streets and desiring playgrounds for their children must extend their vision to local politics. The family claim blends into the social claim.

When Elshtain moves further afield the results are muddled. Elshtain's self-identification with Addams, most notably, is distracting. Much of the opening chapter is an artillery barrage against (often obscure) commentators on Addams who take a more critical view of their subject. The afterword (the book's second account of an Elshtain visit to the Addams's family home) has Elshtain depositing three roses at the Addams gravesite.

Alternatively, Addams becomes a stalking horse for Elshtain's collected op-ed pieces. Thinking about Addams becomes a respite from "the din of our noisy, technology-invaded lives"; we can be grateful that Addams did not succumb to the "cult of the victim" that has "overtaken" contemporary culture; Addams never intended Hull House ("a complex intercultural space") to become a "Great Society-era program" (apparently an unforgivable slur).

Much of this is harmless, and it is only fair to add that Elshtain does distance herself from Addams's determined pacifism, which Elshtain thinks Addams would have maintained had she lived through Pearl Harbor. Elshtain's defensiveness, however, obscures some of what makes Addams and her circle interesting. Elshtain may be right, for example, to insist that Addams saw her neighbors as "citizens, or citizens in the making, not as clients or receivers of service." And perhaps we should regret the "bureaucratic cast the welfare state took in the post-New Deal era." But how do we explain the fact that Hull House alumni were so influential in the creation of early social welfare programs? Or that the same women played crucial roles in the first professional schools of social work?

More intriguing: Elshtain extols Addams as a "social" feminist in contrast to today's "individual" feminists. Addams and her friends at Hull House, Elshtain assures us, were "women with a vocation" living out "a version of strength through solidarity in community." They were not "career women."

Well, yes, but Addams had no children. Elshtain mocks, as did Addams, the modern propensity to predicate happiness on an active sex life. But she is silent on Addams's inability to think through the push and pull of motherhood and career. Addams believed that poor mothers should not be forced into the workplace. But she devoted little attention to the more complicated problem of women (and men) desiring children and careers. Working-class women desperate to earn money for their families may have felt guilty reading Addams in her more prescriptive moments, but probably less guilty than professional women placing their children in daycare. One of her closest associates at Hull House, Julia Lathrop, insisted that Americans should aim for a society where men could find a "living wage and a wholesome working life" and "good and skilled mothers" could "keep the house."

Such statements remind us that Addams and her colleagues were of their time, not ours. But what might Addams say about paid women's work and healthy child development now? The welfare reforms of the past decade require poor mothers to enter the workforce soon after the birth of a child, even as scientists become ever more convinced that infants need close attention in the first months of life. Women generally, on the other hand, now live longer, are better educated, face less discrimination in the professional world, and choose not to have as many children.

Even a casual familiarity with Elshtain's work reveals that she has interesting things to say on these complicated subjects. It's just that Elshtain's Addams, drawn so closely to Elshtain's own ideological profile, isn't sufficiently distant from contemporary polemics to inspire the rich conversation across social divides that Addams, ironically, considered essential "if we would have our democracy endure."

John T. McGreevy teaches history at the University of Notre Dame and is completing a study of Catholicism and American liberalism, from slavery to abortion, to be published by W. W. Norton.