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Fannie Barrier Williams brilliantly analyzed and participated in the tumultuous changes in black Chicago from 1887-1926. She specialized in essays and political advocacy for African American women. She compared them to “the new woman” and “the New Negro,” and by 1895, she had defined African American women as uniquely combining the characteristics of both groups. She also employed the concepts and ideas of pragmatists and feminist pragmatists and brought black women’s ideas and experiences to this social theory.

Symbolic interactionists assume the self and the other create social meaning and society through lifelong conversations of gestures. This process is cooperative and intersubjective between individuals and objective through institutions, community patterns, and symbols. Pacifism emerges from these cooperative goals and various behaviours and strategies such as non-resistance, nonviolence as a spiritual force, and collective actions. As this chapter shows, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Jane Addams first developed their perspective in Chicago between 1889 and 1914. Dewey and Mead changed their epistemology during World War I from pacifism to an advocacy of war and unquestioning obedience to the demands of the nation and its military force. These changed ideas had dramatic consequences for the development of large-scale, societal explanations of social interaction for subsequent scholars. This articulated a male definition of pacifism as unpatriotic and criminal. During the war, Mead stayed closer to Addams than Dewey did. Dewey, for example, declared Addams a traitor, but Mead did not. Mead did not define pacifists as a criminals if they based their position on religious (or collective) training. Since Addams was raised as a Quaker, she was following her social group’s values and was not a traitor. Addams, did not follow the men’s support of war and violence by the nation-state. Thus she continued the trio’s earlier connection between pacifism and symbolic interactionism. As she wrote extensively on peace and its generation between the self, the other, world consciousness, newer ideals of peace, bread labour, non-violence, continuous mediation, and the ability to take the role of the other, she developed a feminist symbolic interactionism. Woman’s culture, she argued, generated an ideal peacemaker. Addams’s experiences as a ‘pacifist in wartime’, including government harassment and surveillance, informed her new ideas and practices. After the war’s end, Dewey returned to his original ideas and practices on pacifism and human behaviour, especially as they applied to democracy and education. He and Addams restored their friendship and close alliance. Mead resumed his early work at a slower pace, and he became less political and more abstract in his approach. As Dewey and Mead developed their earlier epistemology, Dewey’s former student Robert E. Park built his theoretical stance on a male perspective that was similar to Dewey and Mead’s war-time perspective. When Herbert Blumer defined ‘symbolic interaction’ after 1937, he strengthened the male tradition in Chicago sociology. An apolitical, ‘scientific’, micro-level examination of the self and the other increasingly dominated the field. Addams’s foundational role in the perspective was forgotten or suppressed. Meanwhile feminist symbolic interaction, including pacifism, also matured and became a worldwide social movement, largely outside of the male tradition which was rooted in the academy. Addams’s pacifist writings, speeches and leadership, especially of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, led to her receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. This has resulted in a female peace tradition that is echoed in the work of other Peace Nobelists especially Emily Greene Balch (Nobelist 1946), Alva Myrdal (Nobelist 1982) and Lemayah Gbowee (Nobelist 2011). This approach is also associated with male pacifists, exemplified in the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., another Peace Nobelist (1964). Reconnecting feminist symbolic interactionism with academic, male traditions is of increasing interest to contemporary scholars.

The special needs of women with disabilities have been disregarded in a wide variety of vital areas. Issues pertain to women as wives and mothers. Studies of the effects on female sexuality of such conditions as renal disease and diabetes are lacking, though the sexual functioning of men with these diseases has been researched. On the economic front, the Federal-State Vocational Rehabilitation system and the regulations concerning disability benefits under Social Security provide less adequately for women than for men. Hopefully, this volume will raise the consciousness of its readers to the special status of women with disabilities as a minority group experiences multiple sources of discriminations.

In general, disfranchised Americans are becoming increasingly aware of their social restrictions and limitations on opportunities. As a result there are now minority groups who have identified their shared problems only within the last twenty years,and these groups are rapidly changing the nature of minority relations. In particular, people with newly defined multiple minority statuses are beginning to articulate their specialized interests and establish new relations with both the dominant majority and the minority groups to which they belong. Physically disabled women are one such group. As women and as disabled people, they are members of two separate minority groups. Their relations to disabled males and able-bodied females shed light on the theoretical complexities of this recent social phenomenon. They also reveal how understanding their specific problems can lead to a redefinition of how to generate a more liberated and liberating society.

Often known as cynical, contentious, and exhibiting a complicated approach to objectivity, Erving Goffman could also be generous, civil, insightful, open to feminist ideas, and surprisingly political. A 1977 collective feminist writing project led to my conversation with Goffman in 1980 about his ideas on gender, sexism, and feminism. A summary of that conversation is presented, together with my formal reflections then (1980) and now (2013). While documenting the sociological practice of an earlier era, this paper concludes that feminist sociological theory must move beyond its locations in the past and the present into the liberating knowledge of the future.

Jane Addams is one of the greatest sociologists who has ever lived; yet, her ideas and practices remain a puzzle to many contemporary sociologists. There are many reasons for this confusion, but they are less important than learning what she accomplished and why it is vital to understand her life within the context of a global society. I will outline these major points here.

This chapter challenges and augments the received view of the history of symbolic interaction at the University of Chicago. The history of the discipline’s development at the University of Chicago between 1889 and 1935 is well-known, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, sometimes called “the Chicago school of sociology” or symbolic interaction. But the Hull-House school of sociology, led by Jane Addams, is largely unknown. In this chapter I explore her founding role in feminist symbolic interaction. Her perspective analyzes micro, meso, and macro levels of theory and practice. Feminist symbolic interaction is structural, political, rational, and emotional, and employs abstract and specific models for action. Addams led a wide network of people, including sociologists, her neighbors, and other citizens, who implemented and institutionalized their shared visions. Addams led many controversial social movements, including the international peace movement, recognized in 1931 by the Nobel Peace Prize. “Feminist symbolic interaction” expands the scope of symbolic interaction by being more action-oriented, more political, and more focused on a successful social change model than the traditional approach to this theory. In addition, many new sociologists are added to the lists of important historical figures.