SOURCE: "A Return to Hull House: Reflections on Jane Addams," in Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, pp. 3-12.

In the following excerpt, Elshtain offers a critique of Addams's career from a feminist standpoint outside the traditional left-wing framework.

From a standpoint of jaded modern sophistication, the story of Jane Addams at first seems a tale of old-fashioned do-goodism fired by the charitable impulses of a "lady" who wound up fashioning an overpersonalized approach to social problems. Such naive forms of social intervention, the sophisticate might continue, inevitably gave way to professionalism, social workers who neither require nor need even be aware of the complex inner wellsprings of their own motivation but who act, instead, from the realization that there is a job to be done. The primary question is how most efficiently to do it—to "manage...