ABSTRACT
In Peace and Bread in Time of War (Addams 1922/1960) and other writings and speeches produced during and after World War I, Addams extends her argument about the hierarchy of militarism over industrialism into the international arena. She argues that the path to peace requires transnational collaborations that incorporate as partners and friends those groups that, out of necessity, have been most directly concerned with “bread labor” to sustain life—the working class, the poor and oppressed more generally, and women.
This chapter addresses the most obvious challenge facing those who would take up Addams’s suggestion that political friendships at Hull House can serve as a model in the international arena: how to develop cross-class political friendships when the parties on opposite ends of systemic economic hierarchies are separated by great distance and lack the propinquity of classes that was crucial at Hull House (Addams 1895, 184).
My analysis centers on Addams’s activities in the women’s peace movement and her insistence that organization should be de facto; that is, based on the contours of existing economic relations rather than the boundaries of formal political organization. From Addams’s accounts, I extract eight lessons about how de facto organizational processes can mimic propinquity of classes when it is not physically available.
