Settlement houses
Settlement houses are community centers established in economically depressed urban areas, particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They primarily aimed to assist immigrants and the urban poor by providing essential services such as education, health care, and social support. Founded by middle-class, college-educated women, settlement houses emerged in response to the rampant poverty and challenging living conditions faced by city dwellers, especially due to rapid industrialization and factory employment.
The settlement movement, inspired by London's Toynbee Hall, sought to foster interdependence among neighbors and promote social reforms through education and charitable relief initiatives. Over time, these houses evolved into vital institutions that offered a wide range of programs, including cultural activities, language classes, and childcare services. While settlement houses were instrumental in advocating for social change and improving living conditions, their limitations became apparent as deeper systemic issues persisted, often leaving immigrant families reliant on local community networks rather than the settlements themselves.
Despite a decline in prominence post-World War I with the rise of government social programs, settlement houses continue to adapt and operate across the United States today, offering services like early childhood education, job training, and community advocacy. With over 900 settlement houses currently active, they remain a testament to the enduring legacy of community support and social responsibility.
Subject Terms
Settlement houses
DEFINITION: Neighborhood centers that provided community services to residents of economically depressed areas of cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
SIGNIFICANCE: Settlement houses assisted immigrants struggling to cope with meager incomes, new social customs, and unhealthy living conditions. Settlement house workers laid the foundation for government-sponsored social work by offering assistance to the poor and gathering data to prove the need for societal reform.
Settlement houses in slum neighborhoods were established and run by young, primarily female, college-educated members of the middle class who hoped to improve the lives of immigrants and other poor city dwellers. With the rapid expansion of factory-based employment, such city dwellers suffered from devastating poverty, a situation that settlement workers hoped to remedy through education and charitable relief.
The Settlement Movement
Two of the original leaders of the settlement house movement, Stanton Coit and Jane Addams, were inspired by a visit to the London settlement house of Toynbee Hall. Coit went on to open the first settlement house in the United States (US), the Neighborhood Guild of New York City in 1886, and Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Coit envisioned a settlement that would offer relief, education, and recreation. This combination that he hoped would stimulate the intellectual and moral life of slum residents and bring neighbors to recognize their interdependence. The founders of Hull House aimed to educate the public and strengthen the social functions of democracy. This quest soon led to a pattern of service, research, and reform that influenced the entire settlement movement. Settlements proceeded to grow rapidly in number, expanding from a total of six in 1891 to more than one hundred by 1900. More than four hundred centers were operating in over thirty states by 1913, with the largest and most influential located primarily in northern and midwestern cities.
The settlement house movement represented an adherence to a “social gospel” calling for a more Christian society that would minimize the increasing gap between the upper and lower classes. Concerned religious and civic leaders designated church and “Community Chest” funds to finance settlement houses staffed by trained workers to grant charitable relief to the poor, many of them immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe. Settlement workers agreed to reside in the neighborhoods they served to obtain the fullest possible exposure to the plight of the urban poor, who were forced to live in overcrowded tenement housing with inadequate sanitation.
Settlement workers offered immigrants opportunities in music, dance, and cultural productions, as well as classes in cooking, sewing, child care, and personal hygiene. Some settlements even established public bathing facilities. Many added daycare, kindergarten, and English-language classes to their services. In addition, settlements supported clubs, lending libraries, and lecture series, as well as providing space for laborers to organize. The wide variety of settlement house services reflected a pragmatic response to local needs.
Research and Reform
Settlement workers kept detailed records of their accomplishments and observations of neighborhood problems to substantiate specific cases in which immigrants deserved more equitable treatment. As settlement leaders struggled to develop more accurate assessments of the pressures of poverty, they relied upon the data they had gathered to support calls for reform. The most successful urban improvement campaigns centered on garbage removal and the creation of parks and playgrounds. Ironically, legislation requiring improvements in tenement houses tended to increase property values and sometimes displaced immigrant families unable to pay higher rents.
Settlement houses generally proved inadequate to deal with the escalating difficulties immigrants experienced, in part because their philanthropic status rendered them ill-equipped to address deep-seated political and economic issues. Immigrants were forced to contend with unfamiliar institutions, language barriers, isolation, low wages, and unemployment. These challenges prevented the majority of them from achieving the self-improvement that settlement founders expected. Most immigrants utilizing settlement services were women, and settlement organizers seldom recruited them to assess neighborhood needs or to participate in program planning. Although immigrant leaders viewed settlements positively and encouraged cooperation with them, newcomers relied on local politicians and contacts in religious and ethnic communities to provide key resources.
Settlement house workers soon extended their efforts beyond neighborhoods, pressing for progressive reform through city, state, and national legislation. As reforms took hold, alternate employment opportunities for settlement workers increased, and they continued relief efforts as researchers, union organizers, lobbyists, and administrators of charitable foundations. Others served as teachers in expanded nursing schools and social work programs.
Settlement houses were institutions that emphasized the American ideal of personal service and moral responsibility, and in so doing, they encouraged cities to become more responsive to the needs of their immigrant populations. After World War I, the importance of settlement houses declined as government-sponsored social programs developed and efforts to build cooperative neighborhoods came under the auspices of nonprofit organizations and other sponsors. In the modern era, community centers, shelters, and organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) continued to facilitate similar neighborhood cooperatives.
As further evidence of the transformation of the establishments recognized as settlement houses, Hull House was forced to permanently close its doors in 2012 due to financial struggles, which many saw as a pitfall of the trend toward reliance upon government funding. One of the most prominent neighborhood cooperatives, the United Neighborhood Centers of America, founded by Addams in 1911, merged its 150 members with the Alliance for Children and Families in 2014 to exert more significant influence. In New York, the United Neighborhood Houses operated forty-five settlement houses in New York City, providing a wide range of social services for the state and serving over 750,000 people. In the mid-2020s, settlement houses continued to operate throughout the US, serving low-income families while adapting to modern challenges. Many settlement houses have become community centers providing early childhood programs, after-school care, job training, and counseling services. Many continue advocacy work and campaign for policy change. In the US, there are over 900 operating settlement houses.
Bibliography
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Friedman, Michael, and Brett Friedman. Settlement Houses: Improving the Social Welfare of America’s Immigrants. Rosen, 2006.
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Kelly, John. "Alliance-UNCA Merger: 2015 Will Tell the Tale." Chronicle of Social Change, 14 Jan. 2014, chronicleofsocialchange.org/youth-services-insider/alliance-unca-merger-2015-will-tell-the-tale/4869. Accessed 10 Oct. 2016.
Koerin, Beverly. "The Settlement House Tradition: Current Trends and Future Concerns." Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 30, no. 2, 2003, pp. 53–68.
Thayer, Kate. "Jane Addams Hull House to Close." Chicago Tribune, 19 Jan. 2012, www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-jane-addams-hull-house-to-close-20120119-story.html. Accessed 10 Oct. 2016.
Trolander, Judith Ann. Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement House Movement to Neighborhood Centers, 1866 to the Present. Columbia UP, 1987.