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“Christmas Settlement-Workers...”
No caption.
In
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, groups of
socially-conscious women (primarily) and men, usually from religious,
educated, and middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds, established
“settlement” houses in the impoverished inner-cities of England and
the United States. The
settlement workers sought to improve the lives of the urban poor, many
of whom in the United States were immigrants, by offering education, job
training, and other services, as well as by pressing for government
legislation to improve urban conditions.
Some critics, like cartoonist
Mark Henderson, considered the settlement workers to be hypocritical
do-gooders. Here, he contrasts a frontier settler of the early-nineteenth
century with a settlement worker 100 years later. The humble and brave settler, in the midst of clearing the
land, must defend his family and home from an Indian attack.
Conversely, it is the modern settlement worker—in her affluent
attire, attended by a waiting coachman—who “attacks” the startled
inner-city family (whose pose mimics that of the frontier family) by
serving them tea. The
artist’s message is that the settlement workers do not meet the needs
of those they feign to help, and, perhaps, that the urban poor (like the
frontier settlers) are best left to fend for themselves.
The first settlement house was
Toynbee Hall, established in 1884 by Samuel Augustus Barnett, an
Anglican cleric, his wife, and university students in a poor section of
London. The British
settlement house inspired Charles Stover and Stanton Coit to open a
similar establishment two years later in the Lower East Side of New York
City. In 1889, Vida Scudder
started the College Settlement in New York City, while a week later,
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded what would become the most
famous settlement house, Hull House in Chicago.
During the period from 1891 though 1897, many of which were years
of economic depression, the number of settlement houses in American
cities expanded from six to 74. The
movement also spread to cities to Western Europe, Japan, and Southeast
Asia.
The settlement house staffs
consisted of women and men (many of whom were Protestant ministers) who
were part of a larger movement called the “Social Gospel.”
They endeavored to apply the Christian doctrines of neighborly
assistance and charity to the poor to those people who were struggling
to cope with the problems and challenges of the emerging industrial and
urban society: the poor,
working-class, and immigrant populations of inner-cities.
The settlement houses followed no set plan, but were, in the
words of Jane Addams, “an experimental effort to aid in the solution
of social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern
condition of life in a great city.”
Most of the settlement house
workers were college-educated, which was a privileged status obtained by
few at the time, and was especially unusual for women.
With the establishment of settlement houses, college-educated
women created careers in social work during an era when employment
opportunities for women were very limited.
Women ran some settlement houses, such as Addams’s Hull House
in Chicago and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York
City, and participated equally with men in other settlements.
By 1910, women constituted about half of all social workers, and
made up 62 percent of that relatively new profession by 1920.
The settlement houses became
neighborhood centers, which provided various types of educational
courses for adults and children, instruction in English and citizenship
for the many immigrant residents, day care for the children of working
parents, libraries, health care, recreational programs, summer camps,
community theaters, meeting rooms for unions and political groups, and
other services. Some of the
settlement houses also collected data about social and economic
conditions in their neighborhoods and cities, which they used to agitate
for legislation aimed at improving the lives of the urban poor and
working class.
A
leading example was Chicago’s Hull House, where settlement house
worker Florence Kelley, the daughter of Congressman William “Pig
Iron” Kelley (Republican of Pennsylvania), headed the Labor Bureau.
She used statistics and other information collected from her work
to lobby the state legislature to prohibit clothing manufacture in
tenement houses, regulate child labor, and establish a factory
inspector’s office in the state government.
In 1893, the Illinois State Legislature passed a bill crafted
from her suggestions for labor reform, and Kelley served as the
state’s first factory inspector (1893-1897).
Jane Addams and other Hull House staff also successfully lobbied
for the creation of the nation’s first juvenile court system, which
treated juvenile’s separately from adults, and a juvenile detention
center for the Chicago metropolitan area.
Robert C. Kennedy
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