Addams and Gilman: The Foundations of Pragmatism, Feminism and Social Philosophy

Abstract

Classical women pragmatists have been absent in the mainstream accounts of both pragmatism and feminism. This mutual omission is striking since pragmatism and feminism share one very fundamental assumption: the recovery of experience. In this chapter, a proposal to overcome this situation is introduced by recovering the works of Addams and Gilman, which lend valuable elements for the creation of a robust theory of power, domination, and oppression that is attractive for feminist theory as well as for social philosophy. First, the validation of women’s experiences through Gilman’s literary work and Addams’s latest philosophical book on memory. Second, the questioning of the strong division of spaces and gender in Addams’s Hull House experiment and in Gilman’s utopian writings. The chapter emphasizes also their being part of a conversation of women of that time and therefore aims at contributing to the production of more inclusive models of the pragmatist conventional genealogy.