Rhetorically Speaking

It’s always amazing to me how words on a page change their meaning depending on the mindset at the time the pages are read. For example, four years ago my daughter and two other girls wrote a short enactment depicting the life of Jane Addams. As I listened to her memorize her lines and watched the group practice in our living room, I decided to read a little about Jane Addams and about Hull House in Chicago, Illinois.  Her bravery, heroism, and desperate search to make the lives of those much less fortunate than herself resonated through everything I read. Their work was rewarded as they advanced to state competition that year. Jane’s work was rewarded as she witnessed lives being touched through the Hull House. She also became the first women to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (1931) .

Two significant changes have occurred in my life as I revisit Jane Addams: I’m now a doctoral student (yes, at 50+) and my daughter is now a senior. So, in rereading Jane Addams I have moments of nostalgia thinking of the history project and of visual memories of my senior daughter once in middle school. For some reason I’m also noticing that Jane Addams died when my mother was three and my father was nine. Historically, in looking at a timeline, their lives overlapped. I’m possibly getting a little soupy here but every stage of progress overlaps other stages.  This is good; this is important.

I’ve also plunged into the world of rhetoric, technology, and the ethic of care. While these may seem to be random and disconnected, in my world they seem very connected. And so, as I read about Jane I saw that her ethic of care permeated everything she changed, every individual she met, and everyone who saw her vision and worked alongside her.  She states, “I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habit as a whole…” (Fifty Major Thinkers on Education, 183).