1Since the early 1990s, the rediscovery of “feminist pragmatism” – or “pragmatist feminism” – by authors such as Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, Ella Lyman Cabot, Mary Whiton Calkins, Elsie Ripley Clapp, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Chipman Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Jessie Taft, and Ella Flagg Young, spawned a network of U.S. researchers. This included Mary Jo Deegan (1988, 2002), Marilyn Fischer (2019a, 2019b, 2009 with Nackenoff and Chmielewski), Louise Knight (2005, 2022), Maurice Hamington (2009, 2010) and Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996, 2024), who have explored the relationship between feminism and pragmatism from philosophical, pedagogical and socio-political perspectives. In recent years, the debate has expanded internationally: in 2020, the Women in Pragmatism conference took place for the first time in Europe, in Barcelona (Miras Boronat & Bella 2022; Castelli 2024).
2With his last book, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois et le vote des femmes. Élection de 1912, organisations civiques et Parti progressiste (2023), Daniel Cefaï enriches the debate on women, pragmatism and democracy, and does so in a novel way. Through a meticulous historical reconstruction, in the form of a narrative that retains all the rigor of scholarly analysis, he shows how women, especially those living in social settlements, transformed the role of the state in the United States of the early 20th century. Social settlements were communities of people from the upper classes (many of them women who, despite their studies, were not allowed to pursue careers as academics, lawyers, or doctors), who decided to settle in disadvantaged neighborhoods to carry out social surveys and social work, as well as what we would now call cultural animation.
3The book is based on a rigorous archival survey, conducted by the author during three study visits from 2016 to 2018 in the United States, in New York, Harvard and Chicago, and completed during the 2020-2021 Covid pandemic. Cefaï published two long texts, “La naissance de l’expérimentation démocratique” (2020) and “Politique pragmatiste et social settlements. De nouveaux publics aux États-Unis à l’ère progressiste” (2021). They are in-depth studies on what he calls the “pragmatist matrix” of these “civic initiatives.” Alongside this investigation of social settlements, he has published an in-depth reading of the work of Jane Addams, focusing, in the manner of a micro-historian, on the 1912 presidential election. He read dozens of the circumstantial texts Addams published at that time, which Cefaï sees as the apex of the Progressive era, in order to understand how and why Addams campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, at a time when a collective dynamic of mobilizing associations and reform movements was also moving in the same direction.
4An attentive interpreter of the thought of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, whose dissemination he has promoted in the French-speaking world (in particular through the journal Pragmata, which he edited from 2018 to 2022), Cefaï has recently taken an interest in pragmatism “outside the philosophical canon” that had framed it (Cefaï 2023: 9). Since then, he has produced new studies on lesser-known authors such as Randolph Bourne, or those often overlooked in the “pragmatist galaxy,” such as the sociologists William I. Thomas and Robert E. Park. Along these lines, he also studied the experiences of women in social settlements as a case of “pragmatism in action” (Cefaï 2021: 370). In many respects, the Chicago school of philosophy’s assumptions about ethics, education, inquiry, and experimentation appear as a rationalization of social settlement action, particularly in New York and Chicago. Over the years, philosophers, such as Charlene Haddock Seigfried, originator of the pragmatist feminism project (Seigfried 1996), have become convinced of Dewey’s political apprenticeship with Addams and the women of Hull House (Seigfried 2024: 145-7; Knight 2005: 258). This is also Cefaï’s thesis, for whom an understanding of the ethics and politics of Dewey, Mead and Tufts is only possible if we take into account their numerous civic commitments and the exchanges between philosophers and activists of the period.
5In this book, Cefaï focuses on the mobilization by women for suffrage and the advocacy of women’s issues and racial emancipation by two pragmatist outsiders, Jane Addams and W.E.B. Du Bois.
6Women’s suffrage marked what is known as the “first wave” of the international feminist movement. Although this history was conditioned by the different modes of partial suffrage granted to women and by social, institutional and political events specific to each nation-state, we can see that women achieved the right to vote in Germany in 1918, in the USA in 1920, in England in 1928, in Spain in 1931, in France in 1944, and in Italy in 1946, to name but a few countries.
7The book highlights the exceptional case of the United States, a land of immigration and coexistence of a multitude of social worlds – mirroring multiple criteria of nationality, ethnicity, language, religion... – where women’s mobilization for the right to vote inevitably had to face the challenges raised by its dialogue with the question of racial emancipation.
8Three requirements, set out by Cefaï in the introduction, motivate the preparation of this book. Firstly, he needed to contextualize the public experiences of women, which nourished the progressive movement and to which Jane Addams refers in her idea of the “socialization of democracy” (Cefaï 2023: chap. 1). Secondly, the author set out to show how pragmatists, both men and women, supported both the movement for women’s suffrage and that of racial emancipation through a kind of participation that was problem-focused, rather than linked to political affiliations (ibid.: chap. 4). Thirdly, by examining the frictions that the difficult dialogue between gender and race provoked in the social movement and political debate of the time, Cefaï highlights the relevance of a pragmatist perspective. He uses a pragmatist sociology of publics, collective mobilizations and public problems to account for the events that marked this period. And he helps us understand the background of civic struggles against which a book like John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927) was conceived. The public, public engagement, public problems, public policy: this is the crux of the matter.
9The book consists of thirteen chapters, along with an appendix containing eight writings by Jane Addams, translated into French, on women’s suffrage and the Progressive Party. The chapters interweave several lines of contextualization – individual personalities, biographical paths, associative worlds, social movements, political parties. They show the reader how women’s mobilization for suffrage contributed to the civic and political effervescence of a reformist movement. We discover that suffragists were indeed multi-taskers. They were engaged in the invention of social work while being at the forefront in the creation of women’s unions and in the fight against child labor and for compulsory schooling. They were also at the heart of campaigns for urban cleanliness (Knight 2022) and healthy consumption, and so on. In 1912, a wave of hope arose for the construction of a new republic capable of combining the pluralistic demands of an increasingly multicultural society, resolving injustices and inequalities based on race and gender, and strengthening a democracy centered on the development of each individual’s social, economic and political capacities. It was in this context that the two forms of civic engagement of Jane Addams and W.E.B. Du Bois developed. In Chicago, this white woman, a friend of Dewey, Mead, and Tufts, became involved in the national social settlements movement – Hull House became a national reference point – which gave rise to her idea of the “socialization of democracy” (Addams 1902, 1910): a radical conception of democracy, sensitive to the situations experienced by the most vulnerable populations, attempting to diagnose with them the nature of their needs and oriented towards solving their problems through self-government methods. This is what has since been called issue-centered democracy. In New York, W.E.B. Du Bois, a Harvard-educated African American intellectual steeped in Jamesian pragmatism, author of the books The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) and The Soul of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), established The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP – Du Bois, Addams and Dewey were among its founders in 1910). The publication became the instrument for the defense of Black civil rights and strategically worked towards the convergence of the two movements: women’s suffrage and racial emancipation.
10Although this is not the author’s stated intention, the book problematizes and enriches our understanding of an idea as elusive and controversial as that of intersectionality, which has fallen back on the perspective of “identity politics” in the study of the combinations of oppression, discrimination and privilege that are deemed to characterize social and political identities. Patricia Hill Collins (2011) sees intersectionality and pragmatism as two distinct “knowledge projects” that must enter into a dialogue in order to address three fundamental questions of feminism: the concept of experience, complex social inequalities, and social action. Cefaï’s investigation, using historical reconstruction and empirical material to focus on how women transformed the role of the state in the early 20th century, suggests three horizons of reflection (which may be as relevant for intersectional thinking as well), to enrich understanding of the experiences of democracy lived by the most marginalized populations.
11First horizon of reflection: contextualizing the public experience of women requires being attentive to the “collective dynamics of transactions between civil society, political parties and public authorities” (Cefaï 2023: 18). Angela Davis (1981) argued not only that the dialogue between the women’s suffrage movement and the movement for racial emancipation had failed but, in particular, that research had not paid attention to the role of women in a political context characterized by opposition between Union Republicans in the South, interested in securing the Black vote, and Democrats committed to defending women’s demands at the expense of racial emancipation. Cefaï takes care to reconstruct how the mobilization of women did, indeed, not get mired in the opposition between Democrats and Republicans but contributed to the exceptional emergence of the Progressive Party as the third party in the United States. The author does not settle for a static portrayal of the different publics of reformism but searches for the moments and incidents that transformed the relationship between the issues of women’s suffrage and racial emancipation – the “turning points” in the development of these “social processes,” as one would have said in Chicago (Cefaï 2023: chap. 2). The “1912 moment” constitutes a key turning point in re-organizing the web of civil society: a series of hitherto separate issues began to resonate with each other, entering into a process of “publicizing and politicizing the issues” (ibid.: 16), moving beyond local civic action and gaining new national representation through their inclusion in the political arena. While the Abolitionist cause had been accepted since the Civil War, and Prohibition had been championed since 1869 by the Prohibition Party and since 1893 by the Anti-Saloon League, the major parties had not yet taken the issue of women’s voting rights seriously. The year 1912 was the key moment: the Bull Moose Party was created and gave more political visibility to women while, in that same year, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Jane Addams, leader of the social settlement movement and vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), was the first woman to speak at a U.S. national party convention, taking the podium in support of Roosevelt at the Chicago Coliseum on August 7, 1912 (her speech is translated, ibid.: 311-4). The social settlements movement saw the official entry of the social question into the political arena with the birth of the Progressive Party, following Theodore Roosevelt’s secession from the Republican Party (ibid.: chapt. 3 and 10). Roosevelt’s hastily drafted program was almost word for word that of the National Conference of Social Work – a reservoir of reformers at the time.
12But while the presidential election year was an accelerating and radicalizing factor for voting rights, labor rights, and social rights, the same could not be said for “the Black issue.” Du Bois, editor-in-chief of The Crisis magazine, was establishing himself as a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Full of hope, he picked up his pen and wrote to Roosevelt (ibid.: 262). It was a failure. “There is no place for ‘New Blacks’ in the “New Nationalism’,” summarizes Cefaï (ibid.: 263). Much to Du Bois’s dismay, the electoral agreement ended up excluding Black demands for racial emancipation, under pressure from Progressive and Democratic leaders in the South (ibid.: chap. 11). Here Cefaï proposes a series of categories that amplify his notion of the public arena (Cefaï 2022). Seen from a pragmatist perspective, the 1912 election constitutes “a moment of encounter, confrontation, and communication between different ecologies of public experience” (Cefaï 2023: 67). Women’s right to vote becomes a “general cause” that accelerates the dynamics of transformation of publics, the emergence of “a new architecture of civil society and its relations with public powers,” as well as a new “civic and political rhetoric” (Cefaï 2020: 353, 343) and the constitution of three different types of public arenas. These are, (a) “arènes en miroir,” mirroring each other: the electoral arena that addresses a constellation of new problems is joined by other arenas that are working on these same problems; (b) “arènes gigognes,” nested in each other: problems formulated at the national level are reproduced at different scales – for example, cities and states; (c) “arènes ségréguées et sécessionnistes,” segregated and secessionist: those excluded from political citizenship develop their own counter-publics outside the electoral arena, as in the case of the Black public sphere (Cefaï 2023: 62-4).
13Second horizon of reflection: the right to vote is an empowering factor that reconfigured the ecology of women’s capabilities (ibid.: chap. 5). Women who participated in the clubs experienced a moral awakening that prompted them to distance themselves from charitable and religious associations. Study groups and discussion salons were formed. Some women learned new management and fundraising practices typical of business as they made their way into places of executive and legislative power to promote laws and operational programs in defense of the most fragile populations. The women who became publicly engaged put to use a whole “repertory of actions already well-honed” (ibid.: 58) by the abolitionist, pacifist and prohibitionist movements, moving from one front of conflict to another. This leads Cefaï to call them intermittentes d’une cause (activists for this or that cause, on and off) (ibid.). Even though women did not yet have the right to vote, they were already extremely involved in institutional politics:
[…] public outreach in the press or on lecture circuits; circulation of petitions, leaflets and pamphlets; harassment of representatives in Boston, Chicago or Springfield, New York or Albany, Philadelphia or Harrisburg, with letter campaigns; meetings, marches and demonstrations; behind-the-scenes lobbying work with political machines, at City Hall, in “state legislatures” and in the federal Congress; participation as witnesses or experts in hearings of state legislatures; drafting bills; conducting public inquiries; information, education, coordination and mobilization activities in civic networks; efforts to streamline the organization and budget of administrative agencies; creation and development of alternative services and living places; development of legal, health or educational schemes intended to become institutionalized within the state. (Ibid.)
14Far from being naïve outsiders, these women were already involved, with their “networks of civic organizations” (Cefaï 2021: 442) on a national scale (although the center of gravity was in the Northeast and Midwest), in the development of legislation and public policy. This institutional politics was also “group politics” in social settlements and community centers (Follett 1918; Cefaï 2018). The coexistence, encounter, and cooperation between American women activists and foreign-born women generated a process of empowerment that enhanced their political capacity. Hull House and Henry Street Settlement activists took an interest in immigration and urban planning. They moved from the movement for civic care to that of public spaces (which they called municipal housekeeping) (Cefaï 2023: 10, 133, 277-83), from managing playgrounds and recreational parks (playground movement) to taking charge of all issues related to the management of organized pleasures. They established committees that acted locally and nationally to control food, drink and drugs, from over-the-counter cocaine (ibid.: 60) to the adulterated milk responsible for so many deaths (ibid.: 128-32). The Consumer League’s work turned shop customers into a concerned public in transaction with activists, parliamentarians, scientists, lawyers and industrialists. Cefaï points out that we can see in this process the emergence of a sort of “everyday politics” (Cefaï 2021: 469-70) in which “the personal is political” and “the domestic is political” (Cefaï 2023: 122-6). The ways in which Addams and those close to her acted and thought anticipate the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps they even went further on the issue of immigration. Jane Addams’s texts in the appendix show that, in Chicago, coinciding with the promotion of partial suffrage in Illinois, women of foreign origin who frequented Hull House consistently supported the municipal vote, gaining greater awareness of its value as a mechanism to help improve unfavorable living conditions in cities while proposing solutions to the problems they experienced at home and in public space. The work of the Immigrants’ Protection League, founded at Hull House in 1907, was bearing fruit.
15Third horizon of reflection: rather than a concept, paradigm, or “knowledge project” (Collins 2011), intersectionality becomes a process whereby frictions between different social worlds can translate into learning situations (Cefaï 2023: chap. 7). This is the case of the dialogue, on the subject of the lynching of Blacks, that played out in the press between Addams and Ida B. Wells, in conflict with the NAWSA and the White suffragist movement. Connections can sometimes be created between experiences distant in time and space. Sojourner Truth, a feminist and abolitionist militant, a slave from the age of 11, known for her 1851 speech “Ain’t I a woman,” became a source of inspiration in 1912 when the activist Martha Gruening, of Jewish origin, wrote an article published in The Crisis, in support of the two social movements, after she had left the NAWSA due to differences of opinion on the racial question. At the associative level, other examples testify to the desire of African Americans to meet Whites, exchange and cooperate with them. In 1904, Wells co-founded the Frederick Douglass Woman’s Club, an interracial club that fought for the right to vote in Southside Chicago. The Niagara movement, founded by Du Bois and other Black intellectuals in defense of racial emancipation in 1905, was replaced, in response to the Springfield riots in 1908, in New York by the NAACP with an inter-racial and inter-religious composition: John Dewey, Lillian Wald, Jane Addams were part of it. The encounter between different social worlds does not occur often. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a fundamental reference in gender studies for feminists of subsequent generations, remained an anti-Semite and an ardent supporter of White supremacy (Gilman Perkins 1908, 1923).
16From this perspective, researchers interested in intersectionality would do well to read the passages that discuss the impossibility of an alliance between the women’s suffrage movement and the African American civil rights movement (which went by a different name at the time). The Great March of March 3, 1913 in Washington, the Woman’s Suffrage Procession (with some 5,000-8,000 participants), organized by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns on the day of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, brought together all the feminist organizations of the time, proving the vitality of this mobilization of our great-grandmothers (American Woman Suffrage Association, Women’s Political Union, Equal Franchise League, Workers’ Suffrage League, College Equal Suffrage Party, Woman Suffrage Party, Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, etc.). Yet the delegations of women from the South denied Black women the right to mix with them (Cefaï 2023: 166)! This fact is disturbing in a demonstration that anticipated all the March 8 demonstrations we have known since the 1970s (for a description, ibid.: 166-75). Despite the patronage of Paul and Burns and their friend Mary R. Beard (companion and collaborator of the historian Charles Beard), nothing could be done.
At the head of the march was the section of women who had the right to vote in their state and the long-time “pioneer” activists. Then came the professional women, in their work clothes; then the representatives of the states that had not yet granted women the right to vote; finally the men and, behind them, the section reserved for Black women, at the back of the march […]. The Black women marched, flanked by a security cordon of men, led by Mary R. Beard, dressed in a green cape, in her role as the parade marshal. (Ibid.: 175)
17Only a few women, such as Mary Church Terrell, Ida Wells, and Viola Belle Squire, defied the ban and joined the progressive delegations from New York, Michigan and Illinois. Yet Du Bois argued unhesitatingly in The Crisis on the need for mutual support between the two movements, in the name of the common goal of disfranchisement (ibid.: 186).
18Cefaï’s book conveys another message: Addams’s “socialization of democracy” anticipates and, in our opinion, surpasses today’s prevailing feminist thought. Women in the social settlements did not act within the horizon of the “identity politics” advocated by intersectional feminism. They spread an ethic and a politics of care (ibid.: 144) – long before the contemporary politics of care – that extended from human beings to the city and its environment. They did not deal solely with interpersonal, body-to-body relationships, but also took into account a dimension of “law in action, social solidarity and sharing of common goods, undoubtedly experienced in uses and customs, but also mediated and formalized in moral, legal and political rules” (ibid.: 214). Women moved from social work and philanthropy to a real politics of reform, from domestic care to public compassion and international antimilitarism (ibid.: chap. 6). The vote constitutes a horizon of action that provided an impetus to women’s civic and political imagination and, therefore, to their capacity to transform laws and institutions. Alice Hamilton invented industrial toxicology using the methods of field investigation learned during her residence of over twenty years at Hull House and working at the intersection of multiple social worlds – civil society, government, medicine, etc. (ibid.: 65-6). She became a pioneer of this professional and environmental medicine that has since become so important. In New York, Lillian Wald, a militant nurse, established home care services in 1893, which were installed in the Henry Street Settlement in 1895; she organized battalions of visiting nurses, inspired by the model of Florence Nightingale, to defend the most marginalized populations (immigrants, Blacks) from tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, and Spanish flu. She pioneered community nursing (ibid.: 78, 142-3), which would prove crucial to public health, reaching populations refractory to medicine and especially hospitals. Above all, Julia Lathrop, a resident of Hull House and one of the women reformers who supported the creation of the Cook County Juvenile Court in 1899, was appointed head of the new Federal Children’s Bureau in 1912 (ibid.: 273-4), initiating research into infant mortality and dramatically reducing it (ibid.: 142). She also launched nationwide campaigns for the care and education of children with a strong social impact.
19This volume inaugurates “La Bibliothèque de Pragmata [The Pragmata Library],”1 a series of open-access books on the web, created by Daniel Cefaï for the Pragmata association with the aim of disseminating a variety of works that refer to different traditions of pragmatism. Four other books have been published thus far: John Dewey et les questions raciales. À propos d’une controverse actuelle by Joan Stavo-Debauge (2023), Au commencement était l’Acte. Pragmatisme et sociologie by Louis Quéré (2024), La Démocratie comme milieu de vie. Lectures de John Dewey by Joëlle Zask (2025) and last, Street Corner Democracy. Ethnographie d’un processus de rénovation urbaine à Marseille by Jean-Stéphane Borja (2025). They bear witness to the strength of pragmatism in the French-speaking world. This first work on Addams, Du Bois, and the women’s vote, which is remarkably edited and includes several dozen period photographs, has in our eyes a very broad scope, one that goes beyond its simple historical framework. What distinguishes the experience of these women from that of other social movements today? How do gender and race issues come into play in the public experience of different social groups – a topic explored in the latest issue of Pragmata (7/8), Pragmatisme, pluralisme culturel et question raciale (Cefaï & Stavo-Debauge 2024)? To what extent do voting, or other mechanisms, act as factors of empowerment for excluded or marginalized populations? How does the existence of multiple milieus of civic action strengthen the civic, moral, and political imagination of these vulnerable populations and their capacity to transform laws and institutions? Reading this book will undoubtedly provide contemporary feminist research, and the literature on social movements, with new insights inherited from the pragmatist perspective of one century ago.