2.4: 1889-1929--The Settlement House Movement and Revolutionary Women

The Settlement House Movement (1889-1929)

The Settlement House Movement

To many historians of social work, the true beginnings of social work in America go back to the settlement house movement. The approach embodied by the movement was rather progressive: educated, sometimes wealthy people would buy property in the midst of a poor neighborhood of a city in order to establish a settlement house; they would live there so as to better understand the actual day-to-day living circumstances of the poor; and they would endeavor to help those in poverty to have better lives, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger ones. Instead of occasionally visiting the poor and giving them advice, or forcibly relocating the poor to almshouses or workhouses in order to receive outdoor relief, settlement house workers were better able to earn the trust and respect of those whom they were helping, because they lived among their clientele. To them, the living conditions of their clients were not abstract or distant. Settlement house workers saw those realities daily with their own eyes, woke up in the midst of them, and dealt with the consequences of those conditions (Crocker, 1992).

The settlement house movement, while still endeavoring to teach the poor new behaviors that could potentially help them experience upward social mobility, embodied principles that came to be known as hallmarks of social work—ideas like environmental reform. Unlike previous efforts to eradicate or reduce poverty by essentially diagnosing what was wrong with the poor and telling them how to change—thereby defining poverty as a problem of the individual—the leaders of the settlement house movement recognized that the system was set up to produce inequality; people in power manipulated rules, procedures, and laws to their own benefit while the often voiceless, nearly politically invisible poor became more and more disenfranchised in the process.

This shift in philosophy brought with it an increased sense of duty and commitment to reform on a broader level. Helping people with their individual problems was important, but not sufficient to counteract the very powerful forces that were causing the problems in the first place—it was analogous to giving a competitive athlete with knee pain a prescription for a painkiller. While the drug alleviated the discomfort and made it easier to function on a day-to-day basis, it didn’t help to heal the knee or cure whatever the underlying problem might be.

Settlement house workers could (and did) teach English classes, provided medical treatment at little to no cost, made strides on issues of public health, assisted job seekers, and provided counseling and myriad other services to clients who were in great need of those services, benefits, and skills. However, the never-ending stream of people who truly needed these kinds of assistance showed that the services provided were the equivalent of treading water—clients may not have been drowning, but they weren’t necessarily progressing either. More to the point, even if people did rise out of poverty and no longer required the services of settlement house professionals, there was always someone else who did.

Hull House Museum, on the campus of University of Illinois at Chicago.
"Jane Addams Hull House Museum - Exterior 1" by Chicago Architecture Today is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Settlement house workers’ political activism led to a myriad of reforms in the system. Among the changes they helped to instigate were:

• Child labor laws
• Improved conditions for women in the workplace
• Improved public health and safety in cities like Chicago
• The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
• The founding of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
• Protecting domestic workers (often single mothers of minority races) from unfair working conditions and treatment
• Desegregation of urban hospitals (Crocker, 1992)

 

Revolutionary Women

Jane Addams: Hull House

Our knowledge of the settlement house movement is tied to one American more than any other: Jane Addams, the founder of Chicago’s Hull House, still the most recognizable name among the many settlement houses that operated in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois and attended Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in her home state. She went on to study medicine but did not complete her studies for her own health reasons; still, her desire to help others continued to drive her. She spent considerable time traveling, reading, and writing in order to determine how she might fulfill her drive to serve the needy (Haberman, 1972).

While traveling with her companion Ellen Gates Starr, Addams had the experience of visiting Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. This helped her to put her drive into a specific direction, as she’d been considering establishing some sort of social service center in a poor Chicago neighborhood. Addams and Starr purchased a home in Chicago in order to establish Hull House, which would go on to became the most well-known settlement house in the country, particularly making an impact on the lives of Chicago’s immigrant residents. The famous settlement house provided early childhood education, after-school activities for kids whose parents were still at work, medical care, a kitchen for the hungry, and mental health counseling services. The evening hours were just as busy as the day, as Hull House provided a range of classes to adults, both professionally and personally oriented. Fine arts opportunities also abounded; the agency had an art gallery, art and music classes, and a theatre troupe (Haberman, 1972).

Addams herself became openly active politically, fighting for the rights of the poor, immigrants, children, and women at every turn, despite the fact that women still did not have the right to vote in America. She was an outspoken feminist and pacifist, qualities which earned her fans and enemies alike, and became well known internationally through her work with organizations like the Women’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Efforts like these led to Addams becoming only the second woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (Haberman, 1972).

Hull House continued to operate for many decades after Addams’ 1935 passing, closing in 2012 after falling several million dollars into debt. In its final years, Hull House served more than 60,000 clients yearly with services ranging from foster care and domestic violence counseling to vocational programs and family assistance services (Thayer, 2012).

Attribution: Social Work & Social Welfare: Modern Practice in a Diverse World. (opens in new window) Mick Cullen & Matthew Cullen.

 

Ida B. Wells: Journalist and Advocate (1862-1931)

Pioneering Contributions

Ida B. Wells was an integral part of the progressive movement, using her passion about social justice and her skills as a journalist to fight for racial and gender equality. She was the first person to document the lynching of African Americans, and lead many anti-lynching campaigns. Wells worked with other organizers of her time to create the foundation for modern social work. She used writing to fight the injustices of her time. She helped found the Alpha Suffrage League, a group for African-American women who supported suffrage, and challenged the National American Woman Suffrage Association because of their exclusion of African American women in their movement. Wells was involved in the founding of the NAACP, and The Negro Fellowship League, as well as many other organizations that fought for equality for all Americans.

Career Highlights

Wells’s pamphlets “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” and “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States” were the first to present the fact that the lynching of African Americans in the U.S. were not happening as a result of fair trials or as a punishment for a crimes committed, but were a retaliation for blacks trying to gain economic, social, or political empowerment.

Wells was the frequent target of threats or violence from whites trying to maintain the status quo. She wrote for the Negro Press and had articles on racism and activism that were printed in black newspapers across the country. In addition to founding the Negro Fellowship League, Wells served as its President and helped to open settlement houses that helped African Americans who were migrating to the North from the South. In 1909, she attended a conference for an organization that would later become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Though she is considered a founder of the NAACP, Wells cut ties with the organization because she felt it that in its infancy it lacked action-based initiatives. She was involved in expanding school access for black children, and worked with Jane Addams to oppose the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago. Her work on suffrage and women’s rights led to the establishment of the Alpha Suffrage League. Towards the end of her life, Wells’s activism focused on urban reform in Chicago.

Biographic Data

Wells was born into slavery on July 16th, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi to political activist parents. She attended college but never graduated after being expelled for disagreeing with, and confronting, the college’s president. The oldest of five kids, Wells became a teacher to support her siblings after her parents passed away from yellow fever in the 1878 epidemic. She moved with three of her younger siblings to Memphis, Tennessee to attend Fisk University. She worked with reformers and activists such as W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and Mary Church Terrell. She married attorney and newspaper editor, Ferdinand Barnett, in 1895, and had four children. She passed away from kidney disease in 1931.

 

Attribution: NASW Pioneers

 

Modjeska Monteith Simkins: Health, Education, and Civil Rights Trailblazer (1899-1992)

Modjeska Monteith Simkins, born in 1899, was one of the key figures of the civil rights and social reform movement in South Carolina. In her early years she worked in the field of public health, which led her to passionately fight to improve the overall health of African Americans in South Carolina. As a founding member of the state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was elected in 1941 to serve as Secretary, the only woman to serve as an officer at the time. Simkins also played a leading role in the Briggs v. Elliot case, which demanded equality among black and white schools in Clarendon County and became one of several cases to challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1990, Simkins was awarded South Carolina’s highest honor, the Order of the Palmetto, in recognition of her devotion to social justice and racial equality.

Attribution: Modjeska Simkins Social Justice