1. The Pragmatistic Feminism of Jane Addams’ embodied care
Paniel Reyes-Cardenas
The University of Nottingham

2. Overview Who was Jane Addams? Addams’ Feminism What is Pragmatism?
Epistemology and Ethics
Embodied care
Democracy and Social ethics

3. Jane Addams
Born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860, and graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, Jane Addams founded, with Ellen Gates Starr, the world famous social settlement Hull-House on Chicago.
From Hull-House, where she lived and worked until her death in 1935, Jane Addams built her reputation as the country's most prominent woman through her writing, settlement work, and international efforts for peace.

4. Addams’ feminism
Pragmatism in the work of Jane Addams can infuse into care ethics a means for confronting social and political issues while maintaining the emotive and relational dimensions that make care ethics such an important contribution to moral philosophy.
The term "embodied care" is an acknowledgment of the central role played by the body in the process of caring. (Hamington, 2001: 105)

5. Addams’ feminism
Addams stressed relationships and communication. As a woman denied the vote, she and the women of Hull-House had little power or influence in Chicago's political democracy.
They were inspired and motivated by Addams' vision of a social democracy. Using hard work and this vision, they helped propel significant social change.

6. Addams’ feminism
According to Addams, women (and especially, marginalised women), have positive experiences that constitute a perspective to be discovered by sympathetic knowledge.
According to Jean Elshtain (2002, p. 237), Addams feminine model of reform brought "a healing domesticity in which the strong maternal image sustains and enables instead of smothering or constraining. . .” The maternal model thrust women into a world of care, responsibility and obligation.
Addams feminine model gives women power and authority in a cooperative way.

7. Characteristics of Pragmatism
1. Anti-foundationalism
2. On-going fallibilism
3. Emphasis in the social character of the Self and the need to foster a community of inquirers
4. The acknowledgment of the ubiquity of contingency and chance and therefore the acknowledgment of the precariousness of experience (vs. the spectator theory of knowledge), knowing is a form of doing.
5. A pluralism with respect to traditions, perspectives and orientations in philosophy, science and culture broadly conceived.

8. Jane Addams’ pragmatism
Addams was a disciple of John Dewey, but had very close and continued contact with William James and George Herbert Mead.
James to Addams: “You are not like the rest of us, who see the truth and try to express it. You inhabit reality.”
Indeed, Addams showed a robust interplay between theory and practice between the pragmatic tradition.
She carried pragmatism to its logical conclusion: social activism

9. Addam’s epistemology
Addams’ approach to epistemology is a combination of Epistemology and Ethics.
Addam’s believed that the potential for collective progress in knowledge requires a conception of “sympathetic knowledge”, or a process of radical contextualisation.
She understood “sympathetic knowledge” as: “The only way to approach to any human knowledge” (NCA, 7)

10. Addam’s Radical Meliorism
Addam’s epistemology, as mentioned above, it is mingled with ethics: knowledge is a contribution to meliorism, i.e., a contribution to a society that progresses as a whole in a democratic manner: “the final test is the good of the community as a whole”

11. Care ethics
The moral theory known as “ the ethics of care” implies that there is moral significance in the fundamental elements of relationships and dependencies in human life. Normatively, care ethics seeks to maintain relationships by contextualizing and promoting the well-being of care-givers and care-receivers in a network of social relations (Sander-Staudt 2014, 1)

12. Embodied care Active Listening Participation in the democratic spirit
Connected leadership
Activism

13. Embodied Care: Active listening
Through friendly relations with individuals, which is perhaps the surest method of approach, they [people from all over the city] are thus brought into contact, many of them for the first time, with the industrial and social problems challenging the moral resources of our contemporary life. (Addams 1910, 366)

14. Embodied care: participation
To follow the path of social morality results perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy, which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy. (Addams 1907, 7)

15. Embodied care: connected leadership
Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminated among the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the common people they can only come through example, through a personality which seizes the popular imagination. (1907, 228)

16. Embodied care: Activism
We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory. (1907, )

17. Addam’s Democratic ideal
We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith. (1907, 6)

18. Addam’s pragmatic feministic ideal: lateral progress
Whoever practices embodied care:
“…has to discover what people really want, and then "provide the channels in which the growing moral force of their lives shall flow." What he does attain, however, is not the result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain climber beyond the sight of the valley multitude, but it is underpinned and upheld by the sentiments and aspirations of many others. Progress has been slower perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral.” (1912, 10)