SOURCE: "Reforming: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams," in States of Perfect Freedom, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, pp. 157-81.

In the following excerpt, Abbott compares and contrasts Addams's autobiography with that of a feminist writer and contemporary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

The autobiography would seem to be the ideal structure for feminist political theory. The historical subjection of women has taken the form of what John Stuart Mill called "bonds of affection." When a woman looks to identify the sources of her oppression she looks not only at the factory and its boss but also at the family and its bosses, the father and husband. For the feminist, the personal is political in a way that is fundamentally different from the experience of other writers.

This perspective can permit an understanding of the origin of politics and liberal society that the male writer can never appreciate in an...