Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having led women’s movements, heirs of the Trojan women, who courageously defended peace in a context where the belligerence of one side fuelled that of the other. However, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber disregarded everything they had published on the subject to go with the violent flow, one becoming a French patriot writing and acting against the German enemy and the other a German patriot writing and acting against the French enemy. Jane Addams was not only brave in practice, but she was also a most excellent intellectual.
The invisibilisation of women’s works in the history of the social sciences has done great harm to this field of knowledge and also to society as a whole. For example, making women authors such as Addams invisible has served to impoverish and deform the social sciences by leaving them in the hands of the patriotic or ideological belligerence of one or the other. It has even been argued that to be a good sociologist you have to ‘take a stand’ for one side or the other instead of taking a stand for peace, for the defence of the lives of all people, whatever their gender, their country, their culture or their way of thinking. Fortunately, the works of these authors, who are of a much higher intellectual and human level than those unjustly considered the fathers of the social sciences, are now becoming visible. For example, at the Congress of European Sociology in 2024, women authors with much more excellent works than those of these ‘fathers’ according to the current criteria of science at a global level have been made visible. Jane Addams not only had much more social impact, she improved society more, but she did it in co-creation with other women and men, she was a sociologist before Durkheim and Weber, and she had a higher intellectual and human level. Her example is very current for all women who will not submit to any belligerence, and who will continue doing quality social science that improves society.
Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the Universidad de Barcelona
Clarinetist graduated from the Conservatory of Music of Aragón.