 The scholarship of philosopher Marilyn Fischer has revealed how significant social evolutionary thinking was for Addams. The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, a year prior to Addams’ birth. By the time Addams became a public intellectual, evolutionary thinking had not only become influential but was being applied to social phenomena as an explanatory narrative. Fischer describes, “Recognizing Addams’s use of social evolutionary discourse, set within imaginative forms, reveals the logic and sensibility of her layered ethical analysis” (Fischer 2019, 13).