Patricia Shields, ed., Jane Addams: Progressive Pioneer of Peace, Philosophy, Sociology, Social Work and Public Administration (Switzerland: Springer, 2017). 200 pp. $76.99 (hardcover), ISBN: 9783319506449

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12945
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Mary E. Guy

Book Reviews 491

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 491–492. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12945.

Mary E. Guy is professor in the School

of Public Affairs at the University of

Colorado Denver. Her research focuses

on public administration in general, and

more specifically, on the human processes

involved in public service delivery. She is

past president of the American Society for

Public Administration and fellow of the

National Academy of Public Administration.

E-mail: mary.guy@ucdenver.edu

W hat if? The question remains, years after I

read The Red Tent (Diamant 1997). It is a

compelling novel that integrates women

into biblical history in a meaningful and realistic way.

The contrast between women’s voices in The Red Tent

and how women’s voices are portrayed through the

male-centric lens of scripture is great. So great, in

fact, that in the former, women are important. In the

latter, women are reduced to sidelights. Now comes

an excellent tome heralding Jane Addams’s work. And,

once again: What if? What if Jane Addams’s voice had

been heard above the din of proverbs, principles, and

misguided economic theory?

Here is a woman who came of age in the late

nineteenth century, at a time when American women

celebrated their advancements and were pushing for

suffrage. In a 1913 essay that Shields reprints in this

book, Addams speculates on how the argument would

play if the tables were turned—if it were men seeking

the vote rather than women. Assuming women held

the vote, Addams conjectures that the argument

against allowing suffrage for men would be that they

are too eager to fight. She surmises that the argument

would go something like this: “You’d very likely forget

that the real object of the State is to nurture and

protect life, and out of sheer vain glory you would

be voting away huge sums of money for battleships,

not one of which could last more than a few years …

Every time a gun is fired in a battleship it expends, or

rather explodes, seventeen hundred dollars, as much

as a college education costs … and yet you would be

firing off these guns as mere salutes, with no enemy

within three thousand miles, simply because you so

enjoy the sound of shooting” (143). Hmmm. Sounds

like now. Just imagine the shape of political debates

today if Addams’s point of view had become the

prevailing one.

What if women’s voices had been heard as public

administration donned its disciplinary garb? What

if an embrace of theory and praxis, informed by

a comprehension of the breadth and meaning of

life, had predominated, instead of a focus informed

by industrial standards of efficiency? If Addams’s

work had set the stage for scholarship in public

administration, followed rapidly by Mary Parker

Follett’s (1918/1998, 1940) ideas, the pages of public

administration journals would be filled with more

about how to advance humanity and well-being and

less about how to enumerate quantitative indicators of

inconsequential questions. It took Amos Tversky and

Daniel Kahneman’s work to convince us that people

make decisions based on stories and how questions are

phrased, rather than on numbers (see Lewis 2016).

It took Herbert Simon’s (1947) work to convince us

that people make the best decision they can given

the circumstances. Addams and Follett had written

about the reality of human choices decades prior, but

they spoke in a woman’s voice, in a room not thought

“scholarly.”

The capacity not to see the obvious afflicts public

administration scholarship in our never-ending sprint

to be a “science.” Reading Addams’s work today offers

an opportunity to see the obvious and reflect upon it.

It is one hundred years since she wrote, but her words

are as prescient now as they were then. She strove to

extend democracy beyond its political expression to its

lived expression. Citizen engagement, a topic of much

interest today, is the embodiment of Addams’s goal.

And to Addams, the test of theory is in its application

as an effective tool in practice, not as an elegant,

succinct statement of something that is intuitively

satisfying regardless of its relationship to behavior.

This book does four things superbly well: it expands

what we know about Addams’s thought, situates her

within pragmatism as a philosophy, demonstrates her

role as a pioneer in sociology, social work, and public

administration, and provides the reader with little-

seen essays and speeches that she wrote.

Shields opens the book with an explanation of

pragmatism as a philosophical approach that stresses

the relation of theory to praxis. She situates Addams’s

Patricia Shields, ed., Jane Addams: Progressive Pioneer of Peace,

Philosophy, Sociology, Social Work and Public Administration

(Switzerland: Springer, 2017). 200 pp. $76.99 (hardcover),

ISBN: 9783319506449

Reviewed by: Mary E. Guy

University of Colorado Denver