ABSTRACT
Jane Addams was an articulate cultural feminist who embodied her beliefs. She wrote extensively on the superiority of women’s values, world-view, and behavior. She lived her life surrounded by women, and she trusted them more than she did men. Her cultural feminism was actualized in her lifestyle, self-presentation, and epistemology. That is, she was employing this perspective whenever she focused a very gentle and compassionate eye on the harsh world of the poor and the disenfranchised. She did not, however, sentimentalize their pain nor gently chide those who caused these conditions. Addams was a staunch fighter and persistent advocate. Her development of cultural feminism occurred throughout her lifetime, but it became increasingly apparent that this was her major intellectual stance and theoretical position. 1 For many years, she believed that the advantages of cultural feminism would become so evident that patriarchal society would give way in a rational recognition of its inferior power to order the world. She was grossly inaccurate in this judgment, and it was patriarchy and not cultural feminism that organized everyday life in the future.
