The Settlement House Movement

THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT

Origins and Aims

In order to address the problems faced by the urban poor, many of whom were new Americans, progressive reformers organized schools and settlement houses. The idea behind settlement houses was that social reform had to begin with individuals, who needed help to overcome conditions created by circumstances that were beyond their control. To that end, reformers had to live in the neighborhoods of their clients so that they could truly understand their needs. Stanton Coit brought the settlement house idea to New York City in 1886, when he opened the Neighborhood Guild. Although the guild failed soon afterward, it inspired the College Settlement (1889), founded by graduates of the "Seven Sisters" women's colleges. Among the best known of the dozens of settlement houses founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the Hull House in Chicago, the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, and James Reynolds's New York University Settlement. collegeeducated middle-class people, especially women, were attracted to settlements because they offered a way to be useful in a time when opportunities for educated women were constricted. Workers tended to be in their twenties or thirties, and were often inspired by the message of the Social Gospel to carry Christian principles of equality and mutual responsibility into poor neighborhoods. Some did not stay long, but there was a constant stream of eager recruits. Settlement houses spread widely in the 1900s, and most large cities in the United States had more than one by the end of the decade.

Settlement Activities

Settlement houses provided a variety of educational activities for poor tenement dwellers, and also Americanized them. There were sewing classes, cooking classes, housekeeping classes, English classes, kindergarten classes—all geared either to help women gain job skills or to educate their children. Settlement workers also helped to disperse middle-class standards of cleanliness and behavior to new arrivals. They provided recreational and cultural activities as an alternative to the local saloon. Hull House in Chicago staged drama productions, and Henry Street Settlement in New York had plays and playgrounds. Since the middle-class reformers went to their clients and lived among them, they were better able to understand their needs.

Henry Street

One of the best examples of the role that settlement houses played in the broader progressive reform movement, and of the aims of those who staffed them, is the Henry Street Settlement and its founder, Lillian Wald. Wald grew up in Rochester, New York, in a comfortable middle-class home and trained as a nurse at New York Hospital. After attending New York City's Woman's Medical College, Wald found her life's calling in 1893 when she attended a sick woman in a tenement. Appalled at the bad conditions in the slums, she decided to pursue public-health nursing. In 1893 she established the Nurses' Settlement on Henry Street on New York City's Lower East Side. Before Wald established Henry Street she, like many of the other middle-class women drawn to settlement work, was astonishingly naive about the living and working conditions of the working class. She recalled in her memoirs a visit from a downstairs neighbor during her days as a visiting nurse. The neighbor, a young immigrant woman, wanted help in organizing a trade union, and Wald admitted that "even the term was unknown to me.… The next day I managed to find time to visit the library for academic information on the subject of trades unions." But what Wald lacked in worldliness she quickly made up through sympathy and intelligence. By the 1900s the Henry Street Settlement featured a visiting-nurse service and full settlement facilities. Inspired by Wald's example, people in other cities established visiting-nurse systems as well.

Activism

For Wald and those she influenced, the goal was not simply to cure the sick but to attack the conditions and habits that spread disease and poor health, and the settlement houses became a base for broader activities on the state and national level. Through her exposure to poor families Wald became committed to child welfare. With Florence Kelley she founded the National Child Labor Committee in 1904 and lobbied for legislation regulating children's work. The federal Children's Bureau was established in 1912 at their suggestion. Many settlement-house workers became strong advocates of municipal reform, after witnessing firsthand the problems of corruption, graft, and inefficiency that plagued city governments. In a time when the cities were overflowing with needy dwellers, settlement houses provided a useful way to expose rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, to each other, and settlement house workers functioned as effective advocates for necessary social legislation.

Sources:

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910);

Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

R. L. Duffus, Lillian Wald, Neighbor and Crusader (New York: Macmillan, 1938);

Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York: Holt, 1915).