A woman of her time: Addams and eugenics

To celebrate Jane Addams without complication would be to do history (and the woman herself) a disservice. Like many progressive reformers of her era, Addams held some views that overlapped with the eugenics movement – a set of ideas, widely accepted at the time, about improving public health and society through better understanding of heredity.

Context matters enormously here. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenic thinking was not a fringe belief; it was mainstream. It was taught in universities, endorsed by scientists, and embraced by reformers across the political spectrum, from Theodore Roosevelt to Alexander Graham Bell.

Progressive Era thinkers genuinely believed they were applying modern science to age-old social problems like poverty, disease, and inequality. The line between public health advocacy and eugenic reasoning was often blurry, and many well-intentioned people crossed it without fully grasping the implications.

Addams was no exception. While she never championed the movement’s most extreme positions, some of her language and assumptions about “fitness” and social improvement reflected the eugenic thinking that permeated her intellectual world (to be clear this belief was mostly linked to the “fitness” of sex workers to be mothers).

Her work at Hull House, though rooted in genuine compassion, occasionally carried paternalistic undertones about which communities needed guidance and what form that guidance should take.

It’s worth noting, however, that Addams was also a woman who consistently defied the conventions of her age. She fought for immigrant rights during waves of nativism, opposed World War I when pacifism was deeply unpopular (this is what earned her the nickname of the Most Dangerous Woman in America), and championed the poor when much of society insisted their suffering was their own fault.

That she did not fully interrogate eugenic assumptions reminds us that even the most courageous thinkers can have blind spots shaped by the intellectual currents around them. It’s not a reason to dismiss her, but it is a reason to engage with her legacy thoughtfully, recognising that progress is always a work in motion.