The Progressive Era

The origins of the American settlement-house movement were actually in England, where in 1884 Toynbee Hall was established by Samuel Barnett. It was located in London's East End, historically an impoverished area whose residents were industrial workers (Settlement, 2004). Reform-minded Americans from the middle and upper-middle classes--many of them women--visited Toynbee Hall and took away the implicit lessons of public service, applying them to the plight of the poor in the U.S.

The settlement-house concept in the U.S. took physical shape as structures or complexes of structures located in or near impoverished urban neighborhoods. Three of the most notable American settlement houses were in New York City (the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side), Boston (South End House), and Chicago (Hull House). The most prominent of these three was Hull House in Chicago, established in 1889 and run by Jane Addams, a reformer who rose to national fame as a leader of American social reform during th

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as they sought entry into the industrial economy of the Progressive Era. Broadly speaking, this hostile interpretation is also consistent with the view that middle class reformers involved in the settlement house movement may have been guarding their own social position by way of taking control of the positions of the alien "Other." However, other scholarship evaluates Addams and similar reformers as commuitarian in character. In that regard, Whipps (2004) characterizes commuintarianism as linking individual experience with "community associations, values, and political life, and advocates for political actions that reinforce and protect those values," noting that Addams's management of Hull House and social writings are more in line with communitarian theory. It is undeniable that the settlement-house approach to linking clients with American society was less confrontational in the manner of class warfare than it was aimed at finding methods of integrating inhabitants with the social mainstream as far as possible. These were not radicals but reformers. Whipps (2004) describes Jane Addams as a "pragmatist communitarianism" who wanted to embed individuals into the community, not oppose it. That positioned her as a social authorit
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