The settlement house movement flourished in the United States from the late 1880s through the Great Depression. Middle-class women and men volunteers lived and worked in settlement houses, which were often converted residential buildings in poor urban neighborhoods. The volunteers hoped to improve the lives of poor families by providing amenities and services not then extended by government agencies, beginning with clubs, classes, and social gatherings, and extending to playgrounds, arts programs, sports and summer camps, clean-milk stations, well-baby clinics, and other innovative programs. Early settlement leaders saw their mission as social reform, and the settlements became "laboratories" for developing new techniques and offering training in the rapidly professionalizing field of social work. By World War I the settlements had become the most important setting for the honing of a U.S. philosophy of social work and social services, with ties to universities, city governments, and other agencies.
The settlement house movement originated in England in the early 1880s as a quasi-religious middle-class response to industrial poverty. London-based reformers collaborated with university dons and students to substitute "personal service" to the poor for the alms so distasteful to bourgeois sensibilities on both the Left and the Right. Several years after the founding of the first English settlement in 1884, the idea reached the United States and appeared almost simultaneously in New York (the Neighborhood Guild and the College Settlement on Rivington Street), Boston (Andover House), and Chicago (Hull House). Dozens of settlements would be founded over the next three decades by middle-class activists with different religious and institutional affiliations. Shortly after 1910 the new National Federation of Settlements listed over four hundred settlement houses concentrated in the urban East and Midwest.
The U.S. settlement movement took on its own priorities and rhetoric, centered on the cultural issues arising from the concentration of European immigrants and their children in U.S. cities by 1900. While they prided themselves on the "democratic" flavor of their work, the mostly Protestant settlement workers often showed insensitivity toward Catholic and Jewish immigrants, which stemmed from the chauvinism of their own cultural, racial, and class backgrounds. Jane Addams, of Hull House, typifies the most liberal of the settlement philosophers, as she called on native-born Americans to appreciate "immigrant gifts" in the form of ethnic arts and artisans' skills. Yet she may be seen as more of an assimilationist than a pluralist because she believed the future would reveal the essential commonality of all peoples. Many settlements based their programs on rapid "Americanization" of immigrants' language, work habits, family life, and ideals. The simplest form of immigrant resistance to settlement programs was failure to attend them. Jane Addams admitted ruefully that her experiment with a public kitchen (modeled on Ellen Richards's New England Kitchen), which sold nutritious prepared foods to overworked laboring families, flopped because immigrants preferred their own food choices.
With few exceptions, the white settlements and settlement workers replicated the racism of the Progressive Era by distinguishing between native-born Blacks and immigrant whites. European Americans were deemed good candidates for acculturation, while African Americans were seen as a degraded group with special rehabilitative needs. Settlements for Blacks were segregated from those for whites; moreover, most settlement-like experiments in Black communities, such as rural, school-based settlements and YWCA-affiliated houses, have been overlooked by historians because they appeared different from the "mainstream" settlements. Although whites often were involved in staffing these settlements, Blacks, particularly women, were central in launching and maintaining Black settlement work.
The U.S. settlement movement's virtual gender parity was unique among U.S. institutions during the Progressive Era. At least half of the prominent U.S. settlement houses were headed and staffed largely by women. The roster of influential women settlement leaders includes Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Mary K. Simkhovitch, Mary McDowell, and Helena Dudley. Further, the settlements offered an urban immersion to thousands more middle-class women, including Hull House's Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, and Grace and Edith Abbott, who moved rapidly into government service and advocacy for children, workers, and immigrants.
Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
Mina Carson
See also
Progressive Era;
Social Work.
