SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT

SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT. Between the late 1880s and the end of World War I, the settlement house movement was an influential Progressive-era response to the massive urban social problems of the day, The United States was in a period of rapid growth, economic distress, labor unrest, unemployment, low wages, unfair labor practices, and squalid living conditions. Large numbers of immigrants arrived daily to work in this newly established industrialized society. Ethnic enclaves sheltered immigrants who were experiencing isolation, new customs, and a strange language.

Established in large cities, settlement houses were privately supported institutions that focused on helping the poor and disadvantaged by addressing the environ-mental factors involved in poverty. The basic settlement-house ideal was to have wealthy people move into poor neighborhoods so that both groups could learn from one another. Canon Samuel Barnett, pastor of the poorest parish in London's notorious East End, established the first settlement house in 1884. In the midst of this neighborhood (settlement), Toynbee Hall housed educated and wealthy people who served as examples, teachers, and providers of basic human services to the poor residents of the settlement. Toynbee Hall was based on the social gospel movement and attracted young theologians and other middle-class people to emulate Jesus in living among the poor.

Inspired by Barnett's efforts, Dr. Stanton Coit and Charles B. Stover founded the first American settlement house, the Neighborhood Guild of New York City (1886). Other settlements quickly followed: Hull-House, Chicago, 1889 (Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr); College Settlement, a clubfor girls in New York City, 1889 (Vida Dutton Scudder and Jean G. Fine); East Side House, New York, 1891; Northwestern University Settlement, 1891 (Harriet Vittum); South End House, Boston, 1892 (Robert Archey Woods); and Henry Street Settlement, New York, 1893 (Lillian D. Wald). New settlements were established almost every year: University of Chicago Settlement, 1894 (Mary McDowell); Chicago Commons, 1894 (Graham Taylor); Hudson Guild, New York, 1897 (John Lovejoy Elliot); Hiram House, Cleveland, 1896 (George A. Bellamy); and Greenwich House, New York, 1902 (Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch).

Although settlement houses have often been characterized as largely secular in nature, many of them grew from religious roots. Some settlement house workers who came from a faith perspective included moral teachings, at a minimum, in their work with community residents. Probably the best-known example is Chicago Commons, founded in 1894 by the Reverend Graham Taylor, who was the first professor of Christian sociology at the Chicago Theological Seminary. He founded Chicago Commons partially as a social laboratory for his students. As Allen F. Davis has pointed out, of the more than 400 settlements established by 1910, 167 (more than 40 percent) were identified as religious, 31 Methodist, 29 Episcopal, 24 Jewish, 22 Roman Catholic, 20 Presbyterian, 10 Congregational, and 31 unspecified. In 1930, there were approximately 460 settlement houses, and most of these were church supported.

Settlement houses were run in part by client groups. They emphasized social reform rather than relief or assistance. (Residence, research, and reform were the three Rs of the movement.) Early sources of funding were wealthy individuals or clubs such as the Junior League. Settlement house workers were educated poor persons, both children and adults, who often engaged in social action on behalf of the community. In attaining their goals, the settlement house reformers had an enviable record. They had a realistic understanding of the social forces and the political structures of the city and nation. They battled in legislative halls as well as in urban slums, and they became successful initiators and organizers of reform.

Settlement workers tried to improve housing conditions, organized protests, offered job-training and labor searches, supported organized labor, worked against child labor, and fought against corrupt politicians. They provided classes in art and music and offered lectures on topics of interest. They established playgrounds, day care, kindergartens, and classes in English literacy. Settlement workers were also heavily involved in research to identify the factors causing need and in activities intended to eliminate the factors that caused the need.

Settlement houses assumed as their operational base the adequate functioning of the families they served, many of whom were migrants and immigrants whose problems were associated with making the transition from rural to urban living and from a known to an unknown culture. Whatever their problems, clients of settlement houses were viewed as able, normal, working-class families with whom the wealthier classes were joined in mutual dependence. When such families could not cope, settlement leaders assumed that society itself was at fault, and this assumption led quite naturally to a drive for societal reform.

The most famous settlement house in America was Hull-House of Chicago. Although it was not the first American settlement, Hull-House came to exemplify the particular brand of research, service, and reform that was to characterize much of the American settlement house movement. Jane Addams and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr, moved into a poor immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. They had vague notions of being "good neighbors" to the poor around them and studying the conditions in which they lived. As they observed the structural elements of poverty, however, the two began to create a specific agenda of services and reform. Exploitation of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, poor employment conditions and inadequate wages, lack of educational opportunities, substandard housing, and inefficient city government were the factors that contributed greatly to the poverty of the area and called for specific responses. Hull-House soon offered a day nursery for children, a clubfor working girls, lectures and cultural programs, and meeting space for neighborhood political groups.

Along with a remarkable group of reformers who came to live at the settlement, Addams supported labor union activity, lobbied city officials for sanitary and housing reforms, and established the Immigrants' Protective League to fight discrimination in employment and other exploitation of newcomers. In addition, Hull-House members carried on an active program of research. Residents surveyed conditions in tenements and workplaces. They publicized their results widely, attempting to create an atmosphere conducive to governmental and legislative reform.

Under Addams's leadership a powerful network of women social reformers emerged from the Hull-House setting that was influential throughout the United States. Three-fourths of settlement workers in America were women; most were well educated and dedicated to working on problems of urban poverty. These included Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott, prominent figures in the U.S. Children's Bureau; Florence Kelley, labor and consumer advocate; Alice Hamilton, physician and social activist; and Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, social researchers and key leaders in the development of social work education. In addition to these women, Mary O'Sullivan, a labor leader and reformer, organized the Chicago Women's Bindery Workers' Union in 1889. In 1892, she became the American Federation of Labor's first woman organizer. Additionally, Lucy Flower helped found the Illinois Training School for Nurses, the Chicago Bureau of Charities, the Cook County Juvenile Court, the Protective Agency for Women and Children, and the Lake Geneva Fresh Air Association for poor urban children.

World War I had an adverse effect on the settlement house movement. The settlement houses declined in importance and there seemed to be less need of them. Gradually organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association, summer camps, neighborhood youth centers, and other local and national agencies were established to carry on similar work. The settlement house movement gradually broadened into a national federation of neighborhood centers. By the early twentieth century, settlement houses were beginning to cooperate with, and merge into, "social work." The settlement house movement led the way to community organization and group work practice within the newly proclaimed profession of social work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Axinn, June, and Herman Levin. Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need. 4th ed. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1997.

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

Day, Phyllis J. A New History of Social Welfare. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002.

Handel, Gerald. Social Welfare in Western Society. New York: Random House, 1982.

Popple, Philip R., and Leslie Leighninger. Social Work, Social Welfare, and American Society. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.

Trattner, Walter I. From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. 6th ed. New York: The Free Press, 1999.

GaynorYancey

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

Act of Settlement 1701, passed by the English Parliament, to provide that if William III and Princess Anne (later Queen Anne ) should die without heirs, the succession to the throne should pass to Sophia , electress of Hanover, granddaughter of James I , and to her heirs, if they were Protestants. The house of Hanover , which ruled Great Britain from 1714, owed its claim to this act. Among additional provisions, similar to those in the Bill of Rights , were requirements that the king must join in communion with the Church of England (see England, Church of ), that he might not leave England without parliamentary consent, and that English armies might not be used in defense of foreign territory without parliamentary consent. The act also prohibited royal pardons for officials impeached by Parliament. A clause providing that no appointee or pensioner of the king should sit in the House of Commons was repealed (1705) before the act became effective. The unpopularity of William's pro-Dutch policy, the lack of an heir to William or Anne, and fear of the Jacobites prompted the act.