The Progressive Era was marked by an invigorated middle class to which things besides the excesses of industrial and land acquisition were newly important. Middle-class and upper-middle-class reformers appear to have sought to improve the lot of the less fortunate classes that had populated and were contiuing to populate the industrial urban centers of the United States. The settlement-house phenomenon was a significant response to the problems of the lower classes in that context.
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 the Progressive Era (Elshtain, 2001). Addams was one of the Americans from well-off families who visited Toynbee Hall in the 1880s.
The vast inequities of wealth in the U.S. and the enormous economc and social disadvantages that confronted the immigrant, especially in industrial urban areas, informed the impulse toward creating settlement houses. That in itself was controversial because there was widespread popular fear and loathing of immigrants arriving afte...