Abstract

The doctrine of Democracy, like any other of the living faiths of men, is so essentially mystical that it continually demands new formulation. In a 1914 report to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Jane Addams remembered how Chicago’s clubs came together two decades earlier around social issues that had been in the air for some time but which took on sudden immediacy amidst the women’s new collective “feeling and thought” and, with that key happening, called the groups to deliberate action. “The newly moralized issue, almost as if by accident,” as Addams described the phenomenon, “suddenly takes fire and sets whole communities in a blaze, lighting up human relationships and public duty with new ..