Settlement Houses. By the 1880s, rapid
urbanization,
immigration, and unregulated industrial
capitalism had produced deplorable living and working conditions in America's cities, but pro‐business legislatures and a tradition of limited government retarded the regulation of conditions affecting workers’ health and safety. Impelled partly by Christian
socialism's vision of class harmony and partly by a search for more authentic experience (which they romantically ascribed to the poor), a generation of young activists moved into the
slums to take reform into their own hands. Building on English precedents, they formed small colonies or “settlements” amid the people they sought to help. The best known of the settlement houses, which by 1900 numbered in the hundreds, were Hull House in
Chicago, founded by Jane
Addams in 1889; Henry Street in
New York City ( Lillian Wald, 1893); and university settlements such as College Settlement in
Philadelphia (1893). The settlement movement remained loosely organized even after the National Federation of Settlements, headed by Jane Addams, was founded in 1911. Settlement‐type institutions proliferated in all regions, some resembling religious missions (both Catholic and Protestant), others community centers.
African Americans, often excluded from white‐dominated settlement houses, sometimes established separate houses.
Exemplifying the contradictions of early twentieth‐century reform, the settlements combined empirical social‐scientific research and moral uplift. Residents conducted research, producing social surveys such as
Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) that formed the basis for campaigns against
prostitution, sweatshops, environmental hazards, and
child labor. Settlements were also social‐service agencies whose residents ran well‐baby clinics, day nurseries, pure milk stations, and playgrounds. They offered immigrants classes in English and citizenship as well as vocational subjects. The settlement served as a common ground for immigrants, and settlement workers lauded immigrants’ contributions to American culture and defended them against nativist attacks. At the same time, they encouraged immigrants to adapt to American society and tended to regard ethnic and cultural differences as picturesque but archaic.
The settlement houses attracted middle‐class female college graduates who preferred a period of useful volunteer work in the slums to the customary return to the parental household to await marriage. Intellectuals like Addams or Florence
Kelley who became long‐term residents created what scholars see as a new kind of social space that connected the public associational life of policy‐making with the private realms of love and family.
The settlements have fascinated historians for a variety of reasons. For some, the settlements facilitated the fashioning of modern selves by a new intellectual elite who believed that authentic experience could be found among the poor. Others have depicted settlements as “spearheads for reform” that initiated a range of Progressive legislation as settlement residents lobbied legislatures and drew on their close personal observation to publicize conditions in urban immigrant wards. As neighborhood associations, settlements may have been less important overall than community‐based ethnic organizations, but as conduits to government and the media they helped shape American perceptions of the urban‐immigrant poor for a generation. The
Progressive Era's enactment of mothers’ pensions, protective labor legislation, and municipal reform was largely owing to their effort.
Feminist historians have recognized in the settlements the institutional basis for a distinctive women's culture. Residents explored new possibilities of working and living collectively as professionals and friends, demonstrated new roles for female social experts, and brought the influence of organized women into national politics as “social housekeepers.” However, the feminist lives of settlement pioneers like Addams contradicted the settlement houses’ teaching of “maternalist” family values and male breadwinner ideology. Viewed in a context of modernization broadly defined, settlements were the cutting edge of a Progressivism whose pursuit of efficiency and uplift could have unexpected consequences, including new uses of expertise.
Settlements lost their distinctiveness after
World War I, becoming part of a broader network of community agencies and social‐work federations, and joining business Progressives in campaigns for
public health and the
Americanization of immigrants. Residency by a community of volunteers, the settlements’ hallmark, gradually faded. By 1945, facing pressure to become more representative of their neighborhoods, settlements added community residents to their boards. Racially segregated settlements, created in the North at the time of heavy black migration to northern cities, were reintegrated. The National Federation of Settlements became the United Neighborhood Centers of America in 1979.
As the twentieth century ended, settlement houses continued to serve poor neighborhoods in America's major cities; in 1996, thirty‐eight existed in New York City alone. Meanwhile, knowledge of the early settlements continued to grow as their papers became available to scholars.
See also
Cultural Pluralism;
Feminism;
Gilded Age;
Nativist Movement;
Poverty;
Race and Ethnicity;
Segregation, Racial;
Social Class;
Social Science;
Social Work;
Volunteerism.
Bibliography
Allen F. Davis , Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 2d ed., 1984.
John P. Rousmaniere , Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: The College Woman and the Settlement House, 1889–1894, American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 45–66.
Judith Ann Trolander , Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement Movement to Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to the Present, 1987.
Mina Carson , Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930, 1990.
Ruth Crocker , Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930, 1992.
Elisabeth Lasch‐Quinn , Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945, 1993.
Ruth Crocker
