SOURCE: '"Excellent Not a Hull House': Gertrude Stein, Jane Addams, and Feminist-Modernist Political Culture," in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited with an introduction by Lisa Rado, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994, pp. 321-50.

In the following excerpt, DeKoven draws parallels between the lives and of Addams and Gertrude Stein.

An enormous gulf would seem to divide Jane Addams's immigrant Chicago from Gertrude Stein's expatriate Paris; Jane Addams's social work and politics from Gertrude Stein's writing and art. But the terms of the first opposition, immigration and expatriation, suggest at least a symbolic mutuality, and it will be my purpose here to investigate, within a particular historical context, the parallel mutuality of progressive politics and avant-garde art.¹ Gertrude Stein and Jane Addams opened remarkably similar spaces: borderlands that served as powerful mediations, if not resolutions, of the contradictions of gender, politics and culture in the early twentieth...