Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams
page 63 of 162 (38%)
page 63 of 162 (38%)
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constraint we experience when two standards of conventions and manners
clash but feebly prefigure this deeper difference. CHAPTER IV HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT If we could only be judged or judge other people by purity of motive, life would be much simplified, but that would be to abandon the contention made in the first chapter, that the processes of life are as important as its aims. We can all recall acquaintances of whose integrity of purpose we can have no doubt, but who cause much confusion as they proceed to the accomplishment of that purpose, who indeed are often insensible to their own mistakes and harsh in their judgments of other people because they are so confident of their own inner integrity. This tendency to be so sure of integrity of purpose as to be unsympathetic and hardened to the means by which it is accomplished, is perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the household itself. It nowhere operates as so constant a force as in the minds of the women who in all the perplexity of industrial transition are striving to administer domestic affairs. The ethics held by them are for the most part the individual and family codes, untouched by the larger social conceptions. These women, rightly confident of their household and family integrity and holding to their own code of morals, fail to see the household in |
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