ABSTRACT
Symbolic interactionists assume the self and the other create social meaning and society through lifelong conversations of gestures. This process is cooperative and intersubjective between individuals and objective through institutions, community patterns, and symbols. Pacifism emerges from these cooperative goals and various behaviours and strategies such as non-resistance, nonviolence as a spiritual force, and collective actions. As this chapter shows, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Jane Addams first developed their perspective in Chicago between 1889 and 1914. Dewey and Mead changed their epistemology during World War I from pacifism to an advocacy of war and unquestioning obedience to the demands of the nation and its military force. These changed ideas had dramatic consequences for the development of large-scale, societal explanations of social interaction for subsequent scholars. This articulated a male definition of pacifism as unpatriotic and criminal. During the war, Mead stayed closer to Addams than Dewey did. Dewey, for example, declared Addams a traitor, but Mead did not. Mead did not define pacifists as a criminals if they based their position on religious (or collective) training. Since Addams was raised as a Quaker, she was following her social group’s values and was not a traitor. Addams, did not follow the men’s support of war and violence by the nation-state. Thus she continued the trio’s earlier connection between pacifism and symbolic interactionism. As she wrote extensively on peace and its generation between the self, the other, world consciousness, newer ideals of peace, bread labour, non-violence, continuous mediation, and the ability to take the role of the other, she developed a feminist symbolic interactionism. Woman’s culture, she argued, generated an ideal peacemaker. Addams’s experiences as a ‘pacifist in wartime’, including government harassment and surveillance, informed her new ideas and practices. After the war’s end, Dewey returned to his original ideas and practices on pacifism and human behaviour, especially as they applied to democracy and education. He and Addams restored their friendship and close alliance. Mead resumed his early work at a slower pace, and he became less political and more abstract in his approach. As Dewey and Mead developed their earlier epistemology, Dewey’s former student Robert E. Park built his theoretical stance on a male perspective that was similar to Dewey and Mead’s war-time perspective. When Herbert Blumer defined ‘symbolic interaction’ after 1937, he strengthened the male tradition in Chicago sociology. An apolitical, ‘scientific’, micro-level examination of the self and the other increasingly dominated the field. Addams’s foundational role in the perspective was forgotten or suppressed. Meanwhile feminist symbolic interaction, including pacifism, also matured and became a worldwide social movement, largely outside of the male tradition which was rooted in the academy. Addams’s pacifist writings, speeches and leadership, especially of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, led to her receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. This has resulted in a female peace tradition that is echoed in the work of other Peace Nobelists especially Emily Greene Balch (Nobelist 1946), Alva Myrdal (Nobelist 1982) and Lemayah Gbowee (Nobelist 2011). This approach is also associated with male pacifists, exemplified in the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., another Peace Nobelist (1964). Reconnecting feminist symbolic interactionism with academic, male traditions is of increasing interest to contemporary scholars.
