Long Road of Woman's Memory, The.
Addams, Jane. The Long Road of Woman’s Memory. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916.
8vo.; blue cloth, stamped in gilt; few light abrasions to spine; dust-jacket; lightly browned, few chips to extremities removing a few letters from spine.
First edition of Addams’ examination of the workings of memory in the old and young alike, derived from experiences and conversations with women at Hull House and on travels abroad on her own. Chapters include “Transmuting the Past, as illustrated by the story of the devil baby”; “Reacting on Life, as illustrated by the story of the devil baby”; “Disturbing Conventions”; “Integrating Industry”; “Challenging War”; and “A Personal Experience in Interpretative Memory.” With advertisements in the rear for six additional Addams titles, along with two by Ida M. Tarbell: The Business of Being a Woman and The Ways of Women.
The Long Road of Woman’s Memory takes up an issue that began to interest Addams after years at Hull House: the idealization of the past by elderly people. Addams began to wonder about the effect that memory has both on an individual’s evaluation of the past and on institutions. She spent 1915 in Europe, continuing her inquiry, interviewing women of war-torn families. Her philosophical discoveries on this trip constitute the brunt of this work, which begins quite eloquently: “Quite as it would be hard for any one of us to select the summer in which he ceased to live that life, so ardent in childhood and early youth, when all the real happenings are in the future, so it must be difficult for old people to tell at what period they began to regard the present chiefly as a prolongation of the past…”
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