Knight, Louise W.

Louise W. Knight chronicles the friendship between Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt which reached its apex during the 1912 Progressive Party convention in Chicago and which was broken by the outbreak of World War I and Addams’s adoption of a pacifist stance. Knight focuses on Addams’s drive to achieve women’s suffrage across the United States, and not just in selected states, and she examines Addams’s embrace of the Progressive Party as the best vehicle to promote women’s suffrage. Knight highlights Addams’s prominent role at the Progressive Party convention of 1912 and her extensive campaigning for both Roosevelt and votes for women. Knight reveals that Roosevelt never fully embraced Addams’s view of women’s suffrage and that he tried unsuccessfully to gain her endorsement for the Republican presidential nominee in 1916.

A photograph of Knight, two of Addams, and one of Roosevelt on the campaign trail supplement the text along with a political cartoon and two handbills from the 1912 campaign.