Hovde, Jane Addmas

Abstract

This slim volume is a reminder that in an era of inflated packaging good things can still come in small containers. Jane Hovde's task in preparing a biography of Jane Addams that would fulfill the objectives of the Makers of America series (the four other volumes published to date deal with John Brown, Amelia Earhart, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King) was daunting. She had to summarize the myriad events of a 75-year lifetime of leadership, incorporate the latest scholarship on the most important American woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, flavor her presentation with references to Addams's voluminous published and unpublished writings, and add an annotated bibliography.