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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Looking for Feminist Pragmatist Roots of Degrowth Ideas: Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Caroline Bartlett Crane

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The aim of the paper is a search of feminist pragmatist roots of degrowth ideas. The starting point is the question of whether in views of the members of the Progressive Movement the idea of progress has always implied the economic (and industrial) growth. Searching for counter-examples leads me to ideas of ecofeminism and feminist critics of capitalism in the previous turn of the centuries. The ideas of ecofeminism were developed by women associated with the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the social settlement Hull House. They observed a link between the exploitation of subordinate members of a society and the degradation of nature in Western cultural values. The paper is devoted to three women: Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Caroline Bartlett Crane. I shortly discuss Addams's critique of capitalism as patriarchal. Then I analyze more deeply ecofeminist ideas present in writings of Perkins Gilman and of Bartlett Crane. This study provides me with conclusion that they had been forerunners of ideas that later became crucial for the degrowth movement: anti-consumerism, broadly conceived social justice, peaceful and harmonious co-existence of human and non-human animals, necessity for changes in our social values, new perspective on the human nature. All of them postulated transformation of social and political order into more just and democratic communities.