Settlement Houses

1. Settlement Houses How did the role of settlement houses develop and impact the early 20th century?

2. 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 • converted residential buildings in poor urban neighborhoods • The volunteers hoped to improve the lives of poor families • providing amenities and services not then extended by government agencies • 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

3. II. Origins of the Settlement House Movement • Originated in England in the early 1880s • Quasi-religious middle-class response to industrial poverty • London-based reformers collaborated to substitute "personal service" to the poor • Several years after the founding of the first English settlement in 1884, the idea reached the United States • 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.

4. III. U.S. Settlement Movement Priorities • Centered on the cultural issues arising from the concentration of European immigrants and their children in U.S. cities by 1900 • 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. • 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

5. 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.

6. Review • Who worked at settlement houses? • Why did people volunteer at settlement houses? • What were the goals of settlement houses? • How did settlement houses first develop? • How did they develop in the U.S.? • Describe the priority of settlement houses in the U.S. • Who developed Hull House? Why? • Why would immigrants chose to go to a settlement house? • Why would immigrants not chose the help that settlement houses offered?