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Response To Comments On 'Addams On Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, And African Americans', Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The author thanks Denise James and Charlene Haddock Seigfried for their thoughtful comments on her paper. Although they respond in different ways, they both picked up on questions and uncertainties that arose as she wrote the paper.

For some years, she has been trying to write about essays Addams addressed to African American audiences. For this paper, she decided to deal only with Addams’s writings between 1900 and 1910 in order to compare her essays for African American audiences with what she wrote at the same time for wider audiences. This approach enabled her to sort out when Addams’s writing …

Addams On Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, And African Americans, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this paper, I will restrict the discussion to Addams’s writings during the twentieth century’s first decade, when she developed most of her thinking on cultural pluralism. By 1910, Dewey had not yet moved to cultural pluralism, Boas’s cultural relativism had not yet penetrated the intellectual world, and Mendelian genetics had not yet replaced Lamarckian assumptions regarding heredity.The Great War was yet to shatter illusions about Western civilization’s strength and rightness.