Embracing Gendered Space: How Women Manipulated the Settlement Home to Engage

in Progressive-Era Politics

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

This thesis titled

Embracing Gendered Space: How Women Manipulated the Settlement Home to Engage

in Progressive-Era Politics

BECA R. SCHUMANN

has been approved for

the Political Science Department

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Judith Grant

Professor of Political Science

Florenz Plassmann

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

Abstract

BECA R. SCHUMANN, M.A., April 2021, Political Science

Embracing Gendered Space: How Women Manipulated the Settlement Home to Engage in Progressive-Era Politics

Director of Thesis: Judith Grant

This research aims to insert the theory of gendered space into the narrative history of the

American settlement movement by analyzing how settlement residents manipulated private spaces to engage in Progressive-Era politics. Hull House, the first settlement home, is used as a case study to demonstrate how female settlement residents utilized the settlement home as a hybrid public-private space to legitimize their social reform activities in urban areas. By embracing gendered spaces and cultural feminist beliefs about the natural role of women, settlement residents were able to effectively bargain for a more active role and voice in political life. Despite the social and political gains female settlement residents were able to achieve, their approach has been widely criticized by feminist scholars, since the embracing of gendered spaces and essentialist female traits continues to inhibit women from breaking free from structural forms of patriarchy.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Judith Grant for her guidance and advice in advising this thesis.

I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Delysa Burnier and Dr. Julie White

for helping me complete this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my partner for his

constant encouragement and support.

Table of Contents Page Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgments ...... 4 Introduction ...... 6 Chapter 1: Gendered Space ...... 15 A Woman’s Place ...... 16 Woman and the Home ...... 22 Inferior Knowledge ...... 27 Space and Feminine Identity ...... 31 Alternative Conceptions of Space ...... 35 Chapter 2: The Settlement Movement ...... 41 Educating Young Women ...... 44 Women’s Colleges: Building Sisterhood Through Gendered Space ...... 45 A Search for Purpose ...... 49 Making a Home in the Urban Slums...... 52 The Home...... 53 The Residents ...... 55 The Urban Poor ...... 60 US vs. UK Comparison...... 63 Chapter 3: Settlement Homes and Progressive Era Politics ...... 68 Active Citizenship ...... 69 City Planning and Public Health ...... 71 Immigrant Services ...... 77 The Labor Movement ...... 80 Woman’s Role in Democracy ...... 86 Chapter 4: Legacies and Critiques of Embracing Gendered Space ...... 94 Public Legacies ...... 95 Feminist Legacies ...... 101 Female Colleges ...... 102 The Home and The Family ...... 104 Patriarchal Institutions ...... 107 Conclusion ...... 110 References ...... 112 6

Introduction

Structural gender inequality is reinforced throughout society in many ways, one of them being through the use of space. “Gendering” spaces has been a way to segregate spaces and keep members of a certain gender from the knowledge that can be learned in that space. While there have been certain historical and cultural shifts and exceptions, usually men have had the upper hand in how spaces are segregated by gender. Usually, these specifically male dominated spaces are where more important societal functions take place, while the female dominated spaces revolve more around “daily life” (Spain,

1992, p. 3). For example, until the late 1800s, colleges and universities were closed to women, since (male) physicians warned that higher education could be unhealthy for a women’s mental health and dissuade them from motherhood (Spain, 1992, p. 4). Baring women from educating themselves professionally, left higher learning solely to men, thus maintaining masculine power and status.

Since each space becomes the location for a specific function, the space then contains a certain set of knowledge that only those who are allowed inside are granted privy to. If only certain people have access to a space, it is only that same group who will have access to that knowledge, which gives that group of people a certain power over the others who do not have access to that knowledge or that space. Therefore, the more spaces that one group of people is allowed to occupy while certain other people are banned, the more knowledge, privilege, and power that group holds over the other. This power dynamic can easily be seen in reference to gender. Historically and culturally, men have had freer access to not just more spaces, but more important spaces than women, which has led them to often be considered the dominant sex. 7

There seems to be no end to the list of spaces where women have been unwelcomed or unallowed. However, while research tends to focus on this gendered segregation and the ways it has limited the development of women, what is often overlooked is the way that women have used the spaces they were allowed to occupy to explore their femininity, form sisterhood bonds with other women based off of shared experiences and evolve the role of woman both inside and outside of private spaces. The home is considered the most fundamental feminine gendered space. It is a space for the family: where a woman works. The home also, incidentally, has often been considered to be associated with the least socially important knowledge (Spain, 1992, p. 27). Places like the university or a townhall contain knowledge that must be learned and studied, respected and protected, but the knowledge of the home is often reduced to biological female instinct. Women keep the home because it is her biological destiny as a wife and mother. While there is knowledge to learn from the older women in the home, it is not a knowledge that is respected outside of the home, deeming it inferior.

Though the knowledge of the home is considered inferior, a history of home design, layout, and function tells a story of a deep structure of gender in the home that goes beyond images of the “happy 1950s housewife” (Spain, 1992, p. 111). Women’s historical roots in the home and homemaking is imbedded in Western culture. Educating women was, in a sense, training them in the values of the family and domesticity. Since, in early, colonial America, it was female duty to keep the home and raise the children, girls were not allowed access to public schools (Spain, 1992, p. 146). Any education that they would receive, then would be done in the home.

As access to education became easier for girls in the United States, there were certain beliefs and attitudes that helped it to develop. Towards the end of the 19th century, 8 colleges began to make changes to their curriculum that focused not just on the young student’s aptitude but also his “character” (Carson, 1990, p. 11). The college graduate was to be the epitome of what man could be: moral, confident, intelligent, respected.

How to train a man to embody these qualities lay in teaching him through Christian morality and leadership (Carson, 1990, p. 22). Oddly enough, it was this shift in the focus of college curriculum that actually played in the favor of women, who, were already taught to embody the characteristics of Christian morality.

After colleges began adopting this new curriculum focusing on the building of the

Christian character, it seemed only natural for women’s colleges to follow suit. This new curriculum, according to women’s colleges would actually help prepare its students to be better, more prepared wives and mothers, since they would be professionally improving upon their Christian morality (Carson, 1990, p. 24). Knowing that their daughters would be receiving a Christian education eased the minds of middle-class parents, who began to allow more of their daughters to pursue a higher education.

In the United States, by the mid-19th century, more white women from middle- class families were graduating from these female colleges than ever before. While practicing their domestic duties and improving their Christian morality, they were also gaining an education in the social sciences, which was considered a practical discipline for women to study. Like the Christian curriculum, the social sciences already valued what was considered to be woman’s’ natural interests and concerns which had already begun to be developed in the home: poverty, the family, and philanthropy (Carson, 1990, p. 24). Upon leaving women’s colleges, young, middle-class women found themselves dissatisfied with the limitations of a traditional, domestic life (Addams, 1961, p. 46).

With their education in social sciences, middle-class women began to change the norms 9 surrounding ideal womanhood. Rather than finding a husband and caring for the home, middle-class women chose employment as nurses, teachers, or settlement workers

(Cruea, 2005, pp. 194 – 200).

The settlement movement first originated in London’s East End in 1884 by

Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta with the construction of Toynbee Hall (Barbuto,

1999, p. 208). Toynbee Hall was created as an academic settlement where recent graduates from Oxford or Cambridge would come and live, in order to educate and mingle with the lower classes of London’s east side. Through education and a sharing of cultures, Toynbee Hall sought to equalize class differences (Abel, 1979, p. 618). Inspired after visiting Toynbee Hall, Jane Addams, an educated young woman from a well-known middle-class family in Illinois brought the idea of the settlement home to the United

States. Hull House, a large, residential home located in Chicago’s Near West Side became the first American settlement home, founded by Jane Addams and her partner,

Ellen Gates Starr in 1989 (Barbuto, 1999, p. 99). Settlement homes became an attractive alternative for newly graduated middle-class girls who were not interested in marriage but instead wished to gain experience in social reform. While the American settlement home was not exclusively a woman’s movement, many of the founders and settlement residents were women (Carson, 1990, p. 49). For that reason, the American settlement movement engaged in social reform differently than their male predecessors in Europe.

Like European settlements, US settlement homes like Hull House offered academic lectures or classes, but they also tended to focus on the health and wellbeing of the families in the poor neighborhoods they had moved into. They opened daycares to watch over the children while their mothers worked and took care of young pregnant woman and women with no families (Addams, 1961, p. 65). Perhaps just as well-known 10 as Hull House, the Henry Street Nurses’ Settlement, founded by Lillian Wald took their dedication to treating the poor to the next level. Aside from bringing free health care services into the homes of the New York poor, Wald and her team of “public health nurses” taught the people of the neighborhood better hygiene, sanitation practices, and preventative medicine (Buhler-Wilkerson, 1993, p. 1780). They even took on young, aspiring nurses to train at the Henry Street Clinic and in the tenement homes, giving aid to the poor.

Though caring for poor families was an important job of settlement homes like

Henry Street and Hull House, settlement homes were also a place where social clubs could gather. The earliest clubs that were started were generally for entertainment purposes. Children’s story hour, literary societies, knitting circles, etc. were formed early, and were a huge success in the communities. Settlement founders, like Addams were determined for the neighborhood to decide what social events or programs they wanted to have, rather than Addams and her settlement workers to decide for them (Addams, 1961, p. 79). Eventually, the neighborhood decided that settlement homes would be the ideal place for people to gather to bring about social and political change. Due to this decision settlement homes like Hull House gradually became very active in the support of workers unions and to the fight for women’s suffrage.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement gained in stamina at the turn of the 20th century, just as the settlement movement continued to gain in popularity amongst young, female graduates. Many settlement founders and their residents joined the suffrage movement. Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House and the American Settlement

Movement toured the country, giving lectures to women to join the fight for universal suffrage (Abbott, 1950, p. 500). In her speeches, Addams reasoned that women should be 11 granted the right to vote in order to “extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety”

(Addams, 1914, p. 1). This defense was commonly made on behalf of women’s role in social reform through settlement work; now it was similarly being extended even further.

Continuing the traditional belief that a woman was naturally moral and nurturant, women of the late 19th and early 20th century celebrated these female traits, creating a Cultural

Feminism (Echols, 1983, p. 38). They then used these traits as bargaining tools to achieve access to a wider variety of public activities and spaces.

This thesis is primarily concerned with three areas of scholarship: gendered space, the first women’s movement (or first wave feminism), and the American settlement movement. First wave feminism and the American settlement movement are both well documented, however alone, they tell incomplete stories. The purpose of this thesis is to combine these two movements and add the study of gendered space to complete the story. In both the first women’s movement and the settlement movement, women used and manipulated gendered spaces like the home and female colleges to achieve access to public spaces and engagement in political activity. By manipulating female colleges and settlement homes into hybrid public-private spaces, women were able to both stay within the safety of the home while engaging in public, social reform. Since they were still from within their private, gendered spaces and in accordance with their feminine natures, women were able to subtly evolve the way that they could interact with the public world.

I argue that without the manipulation of private, gendered spaces, women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would not have been able to engage and influence in Progressive-

Era politics, leading to the granting of women’s suffrage. 12

In Chapter One I examine the theory of gendered space in order to show how women have been isolated on the basis of their nature to private spaces, while men have been free to exist in both the private and public sphere. The segregation of women into the private sphere has limited them from engaging in public, political life, and historically limited their knowledge to that which can be learned in private, domestic spaces. In their segregated gendered spaces, women have evolved their thinking about what it means to be women. The chapter shows how as the role of woman changed socially and culturally; woman was able to manipulate her gendered spaces in order to better support her evolving role in society. By analyzing gendered spaces like women’s colleges and the home, the chapter will explore woman’s complicated relationship to these spaces. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on the ways that social philosophers began to reimagine dwelling spaces in 19th century America. As the country sought out new ideas on how to dwell, women were influenced by the changes being made to traditional domestic spaces. As their own role in society was shifting, they too would use alternative dwelling spaces to continue to evolve their role in public and private spaces.

Chapter Two uses the history of social reformer, Jane Addams and the first US settlement home, Hull House as a case study to examine the beginnings of the settlement movement in the United States. By following Jane Addams and her early life at Rockford

Seminary, a woman’s college in Illinois, the chapter examines how young, middle-class women like Jane Addams were inspired by the all-female environment. The chapter then moves on to discuss the daily activities of Hull House. By discussing the home itself, the residents and their role in the home, and the poor, urban neighbors who benefited from the home, the chapter shows how the settlement home existed as a hybrid public-private space. Since the settlement home was a residential home for the middle-class female 13 residents, it existed as a private space. However, the home and its surrounding campus served a public function for the neighborhood and the city at large, making it a public space, as well.

As settlements established themselves further, they continued to take on more public responsibilities. Chapter Three follows the narrative into the start of the 20th century as settlement homes and their female residents become more involved in local politics, labor union organization, and the women’s suffrage movement. Settlement homes were the hub of public action and social reform, yet they remained still partially private, continuing to house residents and act as spaces of feminine legitimacy. Though settlement women were often criticized for the masculine way they were involving themselves in politics, women argued against the critique, using their natural female benevolence and nurturance as the very reason they concerned themselves with modern problems like poverty and public health.

The fourth and final chapter discusses legacies and critiques of the way that the first women’s movement and settlement women embraced gendered spaces in order to gain a public presence in politics. In examining their legacy of social reform, the reader will understand that while the role of women in public life has changed drastically from the 18th and 19th centuries, there are still great structural gendered divides. Despite their access to more public spaces, women’s work is still overwhelmingly gendered, reflecting the types of care work done by settlement women. Lastly, the chapter offers modern feminist critiques about the methods used by early female pioneers. Rather than challenge the structural gender inequalities, the first women’s movement and settlement women instead compromised with the patriarchy to gain single-issue rights. The choices made by the first women’s movement have gone on to affect future waves of feminism, but the 14 chapter acknowledges that these women started the fight for the most basic rights for women. By manipulating their private spaces to evolve the role of woman publicly and politically, they were giving women a platform to conduct more radical, transformative work in the future.

Chapter 1: Gendered Space

Throughout history and across the world, men have used the segregation of space to maintain a gendered privilege over woman. The segregation of space for the purpose of limiting knowledge has been used to reinforce the status and power of one group over another. The gendered segregation of space has created isolated, private spaces for woman, limited her “nature” and identity to her biology, and pronounced her knowledge accumulated in her private spaces as inferior. In the following chapter, I will address the gendered segregation of space and how it has been used to keep woman from accessing the knowledge and privilege of the public sphere.

Spaces of politics, education, spiritual worship, etc. all are considered important to the function of society. Inside of them men learn, socialize, and make decisions. By denying woman access to such spaces, her voice was directly excluded from social forums and political decision-making (Massey, 1994, p. 193). By disallowing woman into such spaces, woman’s access to the knowledge of those spaces was also denied. If woman is not privy to the knowledge of male-dominated spaces, she is therefore unable to rise to the equal status of man; she is considered of lower intelligence, lower ability, and of lower status in comparison to man (Spain, 1992, p. 3).

While she may historically be barred from male-dominated spaces, woman is not without spaces of her own. Female dominated spaces exist, but female relationships to them are complicated. Firstly, unlike male dominated spaces that were created and cultivated by men, female dominated spaces are places given to them by men; they are told this is their designated space. Second, woman has been told that the spaces they occupy best suit her “nature” as woman, which limits their identity to better suit the needs of men. Last, female designated spaces, like the home, contain a domestic knowledge that 16 is considered gender-specific, unprofessional, and less important than the knowledge held in male dominated spaces. This ensures that so long as woman stays in their own gendered spaces, they cannot compete with men for privilege or a higher social status. In this chapter, I examine these three points to understand the relationship between gender and space as a reproducer of power relations of gender itself.

A Woman’s Place

Feminine work is that which men have deemed below their status or outside of their masculine nature. Feminine education was done apart from him, the curriculum altered from his to “better suit” her capacities (Rousseau, 1979, p. 365). Even her position in the home, the space most commonly regarded as female, is one that best suits the needs and comforts of man (Welter, 1966, p. 163). Despite the fact that woman has designated, gendered spaces of her own, they are hardly ever spaces uniquely for her. The knowledge she gains and function that she serves there is either for man or because of man. She has not even the option to the spaces which she occupies, but rather has been given them by man.

As the dominant gender across region and history, man has been the decision maker of the human race. One of these decisions was the function of woman by his side

(Rousseau, 1979, p. 361). Using the excuse of her biology, woman was considered more corporal than man. She was chained to her relationship to her body and therefore limited in her duties (Rousseau, 1979, p. 362). Because of her ability to birth and rear children, she was kept behind when men were free to explore their world, thus creating the first gendered segregation of space (Spain, 1992, p. 72). Men left their dwellings and participated together in the conquering of the world, thus making their spaces those of the 17 public sphere. Conversely, woman stayed behind, taking care of the dwelling and raising the children, thus making her space those of the private sphere (Welter, 1966, p. 151).

By beginning her relationship to space in this way, by being given the space she was to occupy, woman’s relationship to that space is already impersonal. She did not choose it. She was being kept there. This was a space she was allowed to occupy.

Philosophers as early as Plato were struggling with the issue of a woman’s place. In The

Republic, Plato makes a radical statement in denying the accepted “nature” of the female by giving her equal access to education and place in the guardian class alongside men.

What is interesting about this decision is that he continued to use the argument of nature, which usually limits the capacities of woman, especially in ancient Greece. Plato writes that Socrates insists that individuals, regardless of their gender, are born with certain

“natures” that will determine their place in the Republic (Okin, 1979, p. 57). Through education, they will be able to develop their skills that best suit their nature, and this will cause the Republic to thrive, since everyone will be living and acting according to their designated function (Okin, 1979, p. 54).

While the designated function of woman in ancient Greece was that of wives, concubines, and mothers, in the Republic, the guardian class no longer had the legal capacity to marry or have children freely that they would have individual legal claim to.

In order to make the guardian class a “brotherhood,” not easily torn apart by jealousies of love, lust, and ownership of a family, they would all be one collective unit. By doing away with the ownership of marriage and legal parenthood, or what he referred to as private property, there was no role left for the women of society (Okin, 1979, p. 44).

Faced with this challenge, Plato was forced to find a new place for them. 18

Plato concluded that woman, while always less than man, can have a similar nature that allows her to act in a similar capacity to man, so long as she receives access to proper education. However, when private property is still a factor in society, Plato once again places woman back below man as a wife, mother, or concubine, as can be seen in

Laws (Okin, 1979, pp. 49 – 50). Plato’s inconsistency is clear regarding the “nature” of woman. Though he himself acknowledges that there is no such thing as a universal

“female nature,” in order to better the function of a society that has private property,

“private wives” are a necessity so there is someone to manage the home and raise the children (Okin, 1979, p. 69). He admits that since this domestic role is not necessarily

“female nature,” society needs to use a lie similar to the noble lie to convince woman that she naturally has a domestic “female nature” which is better for society (Okin, 1979, p.

57). Her relationship to her spaces then would always also be in relation to man, since he gave her this space to occupy based on the “nature” he constructed for her.

Aristotle, in his philosophy of public and private spheres, did not allow the possibility of woman existing outside of private spaces, based on the merit of her

“nature,” alone (Elshtain, 1981, p. 41). Men, according to Aristotle are naturally suited for public spaces (polis) since, by the merit of his sex, he is in possession of reason, goodness, and therefore has the capability of reasoned language (Elshtain, 1981, pp. 47 –

49). Woman, like slaves and children, existed for Aristotle, within the realm of necessity, which barred them access to the natural abilities that would suit them for life in public spaces (Elshtain, 1981, p. 47). However, public men could still benefit from the existence of private spaces. A good, public citizen was one who lived a full life in both public and private spaces (Elshtain, 1981, p. 47). A woman’s goodness was deemed with regards to her management of the household and her family (Elshtain, 1981, pp. 45 – 46). 19

While philosophers theorized about the nature of woman and her proper place in the private sphere, these beliefs influenced woman to both accept their roles in society as well as challenge them. As the role of woman in the United States began to be challenged throughout the 19th century, there were common beliefs of woman’s nature that continued to determine how a woman should behave and the spaces she was allowed to occupy. At the start of the 19th century, the True Woman was the ideal for any white, middle-class

Christian woman to achieve (Welter, 1966, p. 152). The ideal of the True woman was born as industrialization began to shape the rapidly growing cities, which found man working long hours to achieve greater material success. As he was spending more time in the harsh, public world of the new, industrial city, did man rely on the gentleness and calm of his home and wife (Cruea, 2005, p. 188). A True Woman stood as a foil to the rough, impersonal nature of the city, marked by her piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (Welter, 1966, p. 152). Reminiscent of Rousseau’s description of Sophie, or the Woman, True Woman’s traits of being submissive to her husband and quietly domestic made her perfectly suited for remaining totally within the private sphere of the home (Rousseau, 1979, p. 358; Welter, 1966, p. 159).

In order to be a good wife and a True Woman, she had to be both morally and emotionally virtuous and delicate and need of her husband’s protection (Cruea, 2005, p.

189). While a True Woman relied on her husband to keep her and their family safe and financially solvent, it was her job to emotionally and physically care for her husband, keep the home to his liking, and raise his children to be strong in character to be good citizens of the state (Welter, 1966, pp. 160 – 171). The home was the castle of True

Womanhood. Domestic ladies’ magazines promised the True Woman that if she were to keep herself and her home pleasant and at the comforting service to her husband, it would 20 protect him from seeking comforts outside of the home (Welter, 1966, pp. 162 – 163).

While the ideal of the True Woman praised a woman’s natural gifts in order to keep her in the home, those traits of superior morality and nurturance began to lay the groundwork for what would come to be known as Real Womanhood.

Following the logic that woman was needed as a moral force in the home to protect her husband and family, it became a common thought that that goodness should be moved outside of the home in order to offer moral guidance to the public sphere

(Cruea, 2005, p. 191). The American Civil War forced many women out of their homes to join in the war effort, but after the war had ended, many women were hesitant to resume their lives cut off from active engagement outside of their homes (Cruea, 2005, p.

191). Real Womanhood urged woman to take up physical exercise, perform her own domestic duties, and even pursue an education (Cruea, 2005, p. 192). In the past, an education was considered unsuitable or even dangerous for a woman, but with an adjusted, feminine curriculum, an education could improve a woman’s ability to be a good wife and mother (Cruea, 2005, p. 192). It was also through the ideal of Real

Womanhood that woman became encouraged to take up charity work or other active engagements through the church, since there was a new belief that idleness led to immoral temptation (Cruea, 2005, p. 193). Once again, through the features of this ideal of Real Womanhood, a new type of woman was born through the increasing presence of woman working outside of the home in benevolent work: the Public Woman.

Armed with an education and norms that encouraged woman to conduct benevolent work outside of the home, the Public Woman began to challenge how far she was able to exist in the public sphere. Women began taking on jobs as nurses and teachers, since the nature of the work was considered fitting to their natural feminine 21 traits of nurturance and guidance (Cruea, 2005, p. 194). As woman began working outside of the home, she began to form a community of female peers. The shared experiences and passions of these women in sisterhood communities often translated themselves into new, women’s clubs that celebrated woman’s moral superiority and sought to translate their domestic efforts more broadly to assist those in need outside of their homes (Cruea, 2005, p. 196).

Through this evolution of types of womanhood, one can see that though the role of woman is evolving to give her access to more public spaces, she is still remaining faithful to the idea that her nature as a female keeps her both different from man and therefore better suited for certain social functions. As the types of womanhood evolved, woman’s nature was incrementally challenged. While she might no longer be considered weak or delicate during the phase of Real or Public Womanhood, she maintained her features of nurturance, morality, and domesticity. Woman was able to then transform these traits as positive ones. This dedication to and celebration of the positive traits of female nature has come to be known as Cultural Feminism (Echols, 1983, p. 38). Public

Woman began to use these celebrated, superior female traits to gain access to more public spaces and a more active role in public and political society.

Besides the traits of female nature remaining consistent, the value of the home also continued to be linked to a woman’s identity. A True Woman was the “Queen” of the home (Cruea, 2005, p. 190). She remained there both for her own protection and in order to protect the morality of her husband and family. The Real Woman, though allowed to pursue education and religious word outside of the home, still performed those activities with the home in mind. Her education was to ensure that she would be able to find a proper husband and one day keep him comfortable in their home together (Cruea, 22

2005, p. 190). Likewise, her charity work utilized her domestic nature to care for those in need. Lastly, the Public Woman continued to use her traditional affiliation with the home to gain her access to professions like teaching and nursing. Women’s clubs like the

Women’s Christian Temperance Union modeled their work on the domestic care work originally learned in the home (Cruea, 2005, p. 196). In the next several sections, I will continue to examine how woman remained connected to the home through the enforcement of her feminine nature. Then, I will begin to describe the ways that the evolution from True Womanhood to Public Womanhood used private spaces like the home to challenge traditional conceptions of the home.

Woman and the Home

Gender scholar, Iris Young summarized the relationship between gender and space as a dichotomy of creator and occupier. “Man builds for the sake of dwelling,” she says, but he also builds with the assumption that woman is already included in the dwelling (Young, 2006, p. 129). The connection that man has to a dwelling space as a home, a highly personal space is connected to the occupation and nurturance that a woman gives to the space (Young, 2006, p. 129). Even though man has his spaces in the public sphere, he still has his refuge, his dwelling in the private sphere, as well. After he has spent a weary day in the public sphere, he may always return home, to his private, safe space, which he conceives as comfortable and relaxing, in part because of the nurturant role that woman plays in that space (Welter, 1966, p. 152).

It is exactly this dichotomy of creator and nurturer that supports that woman can never have the same kind of personal relationship to the home that a man has. While he leaves the home each day to perform his labor, the woman stays behind in the home for her own. Her domestic labor begins as she rises and ends only when she goes to sleep. 23

For the domesticated woman, this routine is on an endless loop. The look and feel of the home as one that is clean and pleasant to her family is her duty. The preparation of the food she and her family will eat is her duty. The raising and care of the children is her duty. The rest of her family leaves the home to fulfill their roles either at work or school, but all of her labor is done in the home and she does not get time off, since her work is linked to her natural sex function. Since her labor is done in order to create a personal space for her husband and family, the space will remain impersonal for her (Gilman,

1899, pp. 258 – 259). Though the home is where she too dwells, it is also where she labors, which means the space will never have the same relaxing, personal connection that it does for her husband and family.

Henri Lefebvre wrote about the importance of dwelling spaces to the human species. “The material habituation, the dwelling, the fact of settle on the ground, the fact of becoming rooted, the fact of living here or there, all these facts and phenomena are inherent in what it is to be human” (Lefebvre, 2003, p. 123). Aside from being considered a “natural” function of humanity, for Lefebvre, the personalization of dwelling spaces become important to inhabitants to secure a sense of identity and security with their dwellings. In a private home, the family organizes the space to suit their needs and daily functions; they decorate it to fit their individual tastes. By personalizing one’s dwelling place, one is thereby forming an emotional attachment to that space (Lefebvre, 2003, pp.

129 – 130). As the nurturer of the home, woman’s domestic function is already built into the entire concept of the home. To put the situation back in Plato’s terms, since she is living as a part of society that has private property, it is her designated function to serve domestically in her private space in order to keep everything running smoothly. 24

To better support the growing capitalist model of production and labor in the late

19th century and early 20th century, the belief of the natural domestic female was a celebrated idea (McDowell, 1983, p. 62). By keeping the wife at home to care for the domestic aspects of life, it enabled the husband to procure more wealth for his family

(Gilman, 1889, p. 13). As wealth increased and became more accessible to families through labor, the domestic ideal of a breadwinning husband and a domestic wife became what families strove to achieve (Gilman, 1889, p. 13).

Connected to this domestic ideal was an exodus of families from the urban centers of production to the nearby, growing suburbs. These suburbs were just close enough to the city so that the husband could have a comfortable commute to work, while the wife and children would be kept from the immoral, dirty hustle and bustle of urban life.

Suburban neighborhoods were designed in the early years of the 20th century with the domestic ideal in mind. The typical suburban neighborhood was neat and organized, with parks, schools, and shops nearby for convivence (Gilman, 1889, p. 64). By having their own social neighborhood, wives and their children could grow close to their neighbors and feel connected to their social space, while still remaining separated from the outside world, safe inside of their private sphere.

The American exodus to the suburbs in the early decades of the 20th century also refocused the importance and significance of the home, specifically. While there was already a domestic culture related to the home before the great transition to the suburbs, a home was often kept by traditionally wealthy families. For example, country homes of the 18th and early 19th centuries were indeed places of refuge and privacy. These homes however were often run by a domestic serving staff, overseen by the woman of the home.

They were meticulously organized in their layout and design to segregated spaces 25 according to function and gender (Spain, 1992, p. 113). In fact, though the wife was often in charge of the decoration and domestic run of the home, she had very few spaces she was permitted to enter, and even fewer spaces within the home she could personally call her own (Spain, 1992, p. 114).

The suburban home, did away with the formality of the country estates, placing more of an importance on happiness, personality, and comfort. A key feature of the home becoming a place that makes its inhabitance feel such things was the woman being at its center. “Home is where the heart is… and where the woman is also” (Massey, 1994, p.

180). With her husband away in the city for most of the day, and her children either at home with her or at school, the home was the realm of the woman. Just as her husband did his duty in the public sphere, it was her job to do hers in the private. Her feminine specialties: housework, preparing the meals, caring for the children, and making the home a pleasant place to live, occupied each and every one of her days. The domestic labor that the woman completes in the home, however, has no economic value. Though she too labors and her labor is deemed necessary, she is expected to perform her labor for free (Gilman, 1889, p. 13). Unpaid domestic labor is justified by insisting again that woman has a natural disposition to behave domestically (Welter, 1966, p. 160). She is taught and convinced that her role as a woman is to serve her husband and her children, in order to make the home a pleasant, happy place for them to live Ahmed, 2010, p. 55).

The linking of woman and privacy was not limited to suburban homes, however.

Female education too was considered something that should be done separate from men and public spaces (Spain, 1992, p. 146). Traditionally, the lessons that a girl would learn were domestic, educating her to be the kind of woman who could please man; therefore, they would take place in the home, under the guidance of female family members 26

(Rousseau, 1979, p. 364). When a more formal education at a school was allowed, girls’ classes would be done separate from the boys, and their lessons would be altered to disciplines that were considered appropriate for her (Spain, 1992, p. 143). In keeping the girls away from the boys’ lessons, if a girl were to wish to pursue higher education, she would not qualify to study at the same collegiate level that a boy would. In the 1800s, female seminaries began to open in the United States and Western Europe to give women the chance to study at a more advanced level. Female seminaries (and later female colleges) were often located in rural areas, miles from the nearest urban center. This was done with a high concern for the ladies’ privacy (Liu & Grey, 2018, p. 649). The campus was designed to be self-sufficient so that there would not be much coming and going from the campus, which would allow the female students to feel safe from the outside world and less distracted by urban temptations (Lui & Grey, 2018, p. 649). Self- sufficiency and privacy were also reasons given to the domestic run of these seminaries and colleges. Though there were seldom specific classes in housekeeping, the girls were often tasked with domestic duties around the dormitories (Spain, 1992, p. 153).

The architecture, layout, aesthetic, and daily routine of the dormitory buildings at female colleges/seminaries were designed for the pleasure of the average middle-class young woman, since they generally were modeled on a middle-class home. These dormitories were “embedded with femininity” not only to make the girls feel more comfortable and at home, but also to prepare them for their futures as domestic wives and mothers (Lui & Grey, 2018, p. 650). The daily routine of the dormitory, campus, and lectures also served as lessons to prepare the young woman for her busy future managing her own home and family. Along with the daily routines were rules for when girls were permitted to do certain activities or where they were allowed to go around campus. 27

Controlling daily activities were unique to female seminaries/women’s colleges, since at the typical university, the male student is encouraged to take charge of his own life and education (Lui & Grey, 2018, p. 653).

The segregation of woman to private spaces was done under the insistence that it was for her own interest in mind. Young women were given their own classrooms and curriculum to best suit their characters and futures as wives and mothers. Similarly, the private home was a separate place where she could focus on her natural, domestic inclinations, without the worry or disturbance of public, urban life. Her separateness, however, kept or confined to her private space. Trapped in her “cult of domesticity,” usually she was unable to take any real part outside of it or compete with men socially and economically (Spain, 1992, p. 144).

Inferior Knowledge

The gendered segregation of space enforces a control of knowledge. Knowledge that is valued the most in society historically was confined to masculine spaces, which meant that the knowledge gained in feminine spaces was deemed less valuable (Spain,

1992, pp 10 – 11). Domestic knowledge was considered lesser for two reasons: 1) it is concerned with necessary, bodily function ( i.e. child rearing, cleaning, and cooking) and

2) it is knowledge that is informally taught or passed down through generations (Gilman,

1889, p. 194).

To the first point, that domestic knowledge is lesser because it deals with the necessary: domestic duties are only considered female due to the absence of men. It would not be an acceptable enough argument to say that men simply do not want to do domestic work (though this argument is often made). The reality of the situation is more complicated than just what men want and do not want to do. Instead, it again comes down 28 to the beliefs of the natures of man and woman. Due to the biological fact that woman bleeds each month in order to carry and bare children, woman has been considered

“…more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men” (Grosz, 1994, p. 14).

This embodiment naturally connects them to the necessary function of life. Conversely, while man too has a biological concern with the necessary, he has long been understood to have a mastering over both his mind and his body (Grosz, 1994, p. 4). Since he is master of his mind and body while woman is a slave to her bodily function, she is a more naturally fit to be a servant of necessity.

The informal training of domestic knowledge also devalues its importance in society. Since so much domestic knowledge is linked to natural feminine ability, it is not information that can be taught formally (Gilman, 1889, pp. 193 – 194). Instead, women have traditionally taught each other how to deliver babies, how to heal simple maladies, secrets for removing dirt and stains, the best way to prepare a difficult recipe, the list goes on. While this passing on of knowledge, traditions and secrets becomes precious, or even sacred for later generations of women, it does not make that knowledge valued in society.

It is commonly thought that in order for information to have value, one must specialize in a vocation and receive formal training in it. In modern, western culture, formal education is valued above life experience. This is why, if a woman teaches herself to cook or even if she learns from her mother or grandmother, she is not considered a chef. Only with the proper education and training could she come to understand the delicate science of nutrition (Gilman, 1889, p. 229). The same can (and has been) argued for motherhood. Even if a woman reads all of the books on motherhood and is given advice from other mothers, there is really no such thing as an expert mother (Gilman,

1889, p. 293). So much of motherhood is learning the specificities of one’s own baby, but 29 it is through this individualization and trial and error that so many mistakes are made

(Gilman, 1889, p. 288). Few mothers are trained nurses or midwives, which is the closest one can come to being a professional mother. These women come to have their knowledge valued through their medical and/or educational training (Gilman, 1889, p.

293). Their training puts them in contact with many babies, sometimes many babies all at once, which will give them a wider berth of knowledge, since they are not just focusing on the needs of the individual (Gilman, 1889, p. 288). Though their training is often completed through experience, nurses and midwives will usually be considered experts over the average mother.

Even the formal education of woman has historically been deemed of lesser quality and value than a man’s. As previously stated, when young girls and women were allowed to pursue a formal education, their curriculum was altered to “better suit” her nature as well as to more appropriately align with her future as a wife and mother. For example, a typical masculine curriculum taught language, composition, and arithmetic, while girls were taught to read and write but also to sew and play music (Spain, 1992, p.

147). Their missing studies, such as Latin, Greek, and arithmetic (as well as their sex) kept them from studying at universities alongside men. Instead, due to the growing wealth of the middle class, female seminaries and women’s colleges began to open.

These colleges were controversial due to the warnings of male physicians that higher education was dangerous for a woman’s physical and mental health, believing higher education would “dissuade her from motherhood” (Carson, 1990, p. 4). It wasn’t until a liberal arts curriculum was first adopted by male universities and colleges that woman could come to benefit from higher education. The liberal arts curriculum became concerned not just with the technical study and training of young men in a vocation but to 30 improve his character, as well. University was a privilege, so it came to be believed that while there, the young graduate should emerge the very idea of what a man could and should be: moral, confident, intelligent, and respected. In order to learn to embody these qualities, a liberal arts curriculum must teach him Christian morality and leadership

(Carson, 1990, p. 22).

The young, diddle-class woman was usually already receiving a Christian education at home or in her own school. In an informal setting, they were already being taught the importance of morality, gentleness, charity, and philanthropy (Carson, 1990, p.

23). It seemed only natural, then for women’s colleges to also adopt this liberal arts curriculum. Founders and professors of women’s colleges insisted that this new curriculum would actually help prepare its students to be better, more prepared wives and mothers, since they would be professionally improving upon their Christian morality

(Carson, 1990, p. 24).

Despite their success in enrolling more young women in higher education, female seminaries and women’s colleges were never considered equals to male universities.

Though they attempted to mirror the curriculum of male colleges and universities as closely as possible, there was still a societal denial that woman would be able to perform to the same standard as a man in professional fields of work such as medicine and law

(Spain, 1992, p. 154). As more colleges and universities became coeducational in the early 1900s, there was another push to segregate learning by gender. The introduction of mandatory home economics classes for young women once again hindered woman from being able to compete with men both intellectually and professionally. Through their home economics classes, they would be tasked with tending to the dormitories of the 31 male students and even doing their laundry, which served as a reminder that the ultimate goal of their education was to make them better mothers and wives (Spain, 1992, p. 156).

Space and Feminine Identity

The segregation of woman from public spaces has often been justified on behalf of her “nature” as female. By defining woman by the supposed “natural “domestic and motherly duties she performs, femininity itself seems to call out for the segregation of spaces. In turn, woman’s identity becomes imbedded in the very spaces that she occupies.

“Spatial control, whether enforced through power of convention or symbolism, or through the straightforward threat of violence, can be a fundamental element in the constitution of gender in its (highly varied) forms” (Massey, 1994, p. 180). Through a reiteration of belief in the function of segregated space, a structure of norms embeds itself into gender identity. The symbolism tied to gender in a space becomes normalized and accepted. This would explain why the home is considered a natural place for a woman, and the thought of a woman leaving the home to work in the public sphere would seem

“unnatural.” The spatial control of woman to the private sphere is intrinsically linked to femininity in two dominant beliefs about the natural role of woman: woman as a domestic worker and woman as a natural mother.

Femininity itself is linked with domestic work; therefore, domestic work being done in one’s own home should be the feminine ideal. A woman is taught that her domestic work should be done with a sense of pride, since she is fulfilling her biological role (Welter, 1966, pp. 164 – 165). In the most traditional teachings, woman would only be happy if she was fulfilling her biological role as a wife and mother (Ahmed, 2010, p.

52). By limiting a woman to domestic function, however it limits her capabilities outside of the home. Domestic knowledge is considered inferior knowledge; therefore, domestic 32 labor is considered inferior labor. It is commonly believed that the only “real work” is done outside of the home, and by not participating in the public sphere, that person will be less “developed, civilized, and socialized” (Gilman, 1889, p. 222). In this way, woman’s evolution as an individual has been stunted (Gilman, 1889, p. 262).

Similarly, a woman’s identity is often reduced to motherhood. A biological function of her sex alone, woman is often defined as “womb” (Beauvoir, 2009, p. 21).

Since she alone has the ability to birth children, it is inherently assumed that she has the natural ability to raise them, as well. She alone is expected to understand how to care for the health of her child, the education of her child (at least during infancy and toddlerhood), and the emotional love and support of her child (Gilman, 1889, p. 292). A women who become overwhelmed by motherhood or seemed to lack the “natural” nurturance of motherhood was often considered an unnatural woman. Linking woman to her child: her ability to properly care for the child and bond she forms with the child (and the child with her, in turn) once again strips her of her own independent identity (Gilman,

1889, p. 126). The nostalgic attachment children have to the idea of the always accessible

“servant-mother” grounds woman’s identity within motherhood (Gilman, 1889, p. 279).

The domestic identity of woman, embedded in the “nature” of her gender, limits woman to the private roles of homemaker and mother. The acceptance of a universal feminine nature has been criticized and rebelled against by second and third wave feminists, since it accepts a collective experience of all women (regardless of age, race,

SES, ability, etc.) that continues to accept the biological difference between man and woman is the reason for the lack of equality between the sexes (Echols, 1983, p. 40). By accepting the existence of a female nature, one is accepting the narrative that one’s personality and ability is rooted in one’s biology rather than realizing that structured 33 gendered norms and expectations play a crucial role in shaping the individual. Despite its complications, cultural feminists accept this gendered divide in “natures” and use the gendered difference to empower woman on behalf of her femininity, challenging the traditions that state being woman means being inferior. By reclaiming her “nature” in a positive, empowering way, woman found a way to become an active citizen who did not have to deny her “femininity” (Echols, 1983, pp. 40 – 41).

First-wave suffragette feminists of the mid-to-late 19th century accepted and even embraced cultural feminism, and through it they were able to create a starting point for finding a place in the public, political world. First, a culture of womanhood needed to be founded by women coming together through their experiences to find a common ground, which they linked to a universal womanhood (Grant, 1993, p. 27). Through the sharing of experiences and feelings, woman came to create a culture around what it means to be a woman. Though their experiences, women were not only forming a network of understanding and solidarity, but they were finding pride in the work they did for their families and for their communities. A bond of sisterhood was thus struck through domesticity and motherhood (Lasser, 1988, p. 164).

Some modern feminists believe that accepting a cultural feminism roots woman back to their biology and the limiting “nature” of being woman that was decided by man.

Throughout the chapters to come, I will use modern feminist discourse to critique the choices early feminists used in embracing their gendered spaces and “female natures.”

However, while there are many critiques to be made, one must also accept that the path forward is rarely perfect, especially for the earliest pioneers. At the time of the first women’s movement, woman had few individual rights, and she was often financially dependent on her father or husband (Gilman, 1889, p. 38). Choosing to embrace one’s 34

“nature” and then to use it to demand a place in politics was a big step forward. If their natures told them that they were natural mothers, then these first-wave feminists used their new-found empowerment to claim then that as natural mothers, it was then the role of woman to nurture and care for all. It was already perfectly natural for Christian woman to nurture and care for the poor who were unable to take care of themselves. In fact, it was considered “womanly service” to take part in philanthropic efforts (Carson, 1990, p.

25). It was from this place, in her role as a mother to her own children and the children of the earth that she could make her claim that she should serve as a mother to all.

In the mid-19th century, woman started to become more organized in her demands for women’s suffrage, using their bonds of sisterhood, culture feminism, and frankly, their privilege as white, middle-class women to situate themselves in the public sphere, namely in politics (Lasser, 1988, p. 168). Together, suffragists used their role as “natural mothers” to convince the rest of society that their influence would benefit politics. During the Progressive Era, suffragists claimed that there needed to be more services to protect the impoverished women and children who were crowding the cities. Woman’s voice and advice was necessary to implementing such programs, she argued, since it was woman’s natural inclination to serve that population (Burt, 2004, p. 247). She used the same arguments that were often used against her to make her case: politics were dirty and corrupt, which was precisely why women were needed to “apply their motherly, feminine, and nurturing skills to the nation’s business” (Burt, 2004, p. 246) She would give a softer, moral voice to political disagreement. Without sisterhood, without her belief that their femininity drew them to a higher, social purpose, and without the manipulation of gendered spaces like female colleges and the home into hybrid public- 35 private spaces, woman would not have been able to situate herself within the public sphere, with a voice and influence in politics.

Alternative Conceptions of Space

Throughout the 19th century more women came to join their voices together to decide the future of their role as women in both the private and public sphere. As they made decisions concerning what they wanted for their future, some of them began to also imagine ways they could rearrange certain structures of society in order to better promote gender equality. Oftentimes, these thinkers focused on a restructuring of dwelling spaces.

By reshaping the way that individuals and families dwell, they hoped to blur the lines between public and private spaces, thereby desegregating the spaces, in turn. One of the most common ways to restructure dwelling spaces was through the promotion of communal dwelling. Communal dwellings banished the idea of private family homes, favoring instead larger communities that functioned as a harmonious unit, with each person given a role in the community.

Particularly focused on the desegregation of gender, novelist and social reformer,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposed her plan to restructure dwelling spaces. She believed that the adoption of her plans would effectively emancipate woman from her economic dependence on men as well as sever the chains a woman has to the home and her domestic servitude. Gilman’s argument pushes directly against the traditional belief that woman was born naturally more domestic than men. She claimed that this was simply not true, but rather acted as an excuse given by men in order to keep economic, social, and political power over women (Gilman, 1889, p. 8). Woman, she insisted, has similar capabilities to men, so long as she are given the equal opportunity to learn and train in the vocations which they are drawn to, the same way that men do (Gilman, 1889, p. 8). In 36 order for a woman to evolve in her character, she must be allowed economic independence, which would mean removing her from the home in the private sphere.

Since as humans there still needs to be a place for people to live, she calls for a restructuring of the home. Rather than private homes, however there would be communal living with certain necessary features that would ensure a more harmonious gender equality. Among the most important features are communal kitchens, staffed by professionally trained chefs who would feed the community rather than just their families

(Gilman, 1889, p. 229). Due to their formal culinary education, Gilman argued that they would better serve the nutritional needs of the community than individual, untrained wives and mothers. With trained chefs feeding the community rather than wives/mothers, the labor of food preparation would no longer be considered a devalued, since it would be done at a professional level.

Alongside professional chefs, there would be professional cleaners to keep the individual living quarters tidy. She poses a similar argument here, insisting throughout her plan that equality is best established when professionals take over domestic duties, rather than an untrained or an informally trained woman. The other area of her proposed communal dwellings that she highlights in importance is her idea for the nurseries.

Woman, she believed, become a mother with little to no idea how to properly raise and care for her children. Motherhood, she argued could not be boiled down to a natural ability of one’s sex (Gilman, 1889, p. 292). Instead, she envisioned communal nurseries where the children were raised together by women who had the skills and desires to care for them. Communal nurseries would best serve the children raised there since not only would they be receiving professional care, but they would also benefit from being around 37 other children, since they could learn and be comforted by their own infantile community

(Gilman, 1889, p. 288).

Ultimately the goals of these communal homes proposed by Gilman are the economic independence of woman and the dismantling of the domestic ideal that convinces woman that their biology makes them naturally fit for housework and motherhood. Many women, she admits would choose to stay in domestic service, but the choice should be up to them to choose their own professions (Gilman, 1889, p. 246).

Until woman is able to leave the home at her own will, she would continue to live in a

“servile world” (Gilman, 1889, p. 262).

It was not just women who were coming up with solutions for a more equal world during the 19th century. Still a relatively new nation, Americans were excited and eager to find a way to make their country a utopia. Philosophers, religious groups, and social thinkers across the United States were developing new theories about the natural ways of men and how to form a more harmonious society (Guarneri, 1994, p. 9). Most of these groups, like Gilman thought that the best society would live more closely in communal groups rather than remaining in private family homes. By living as a collective, society would be forced to work together for the greatest good for the many rather than act on their own selfish desires. In the communal dwellings, each person would have their role to maintain order in the community at large.

One of the most popular communal movements in the United States was a group called the Fourierists. The father of the movement, Charles Fourier, a self-taught social thinker developed a meticulously detailed blueprint for his proposed utopian society, which many idealist Americans devoted themselves to in the mid-1800s. According to

Fourier, the evolution of man had been stunted by its current state, “Civilization,” and the 38 only way to achieve a higher way of living in the future is to follow a certain set of living guidelines that he had discovered through scientific exploration (Fourier & Brisbane,

1857, p. 84). In order to transcend past “civilization” to one of the higher evolutions of mankind, Fourier insisted that society must rework the way that it behaves socially and economically, moving from a path of individual need towards developing a more collective mindset.

To achieve this, Fourier proposed the building of communities, or phalanxes, which were large, rural estates that would be run (ideally) by 1,800 men, women, and children (Fourier &Brisbane, 1857, p. 137). Ideally for Fourier, around the phalanx would be acres of land for farming and industry to keep the community prospering financially. Inside, the members of the phalanx would live, work, and socialize. Each person living in the phalanx would be free to choose their own profession based on their own natural preferences and abilities, so long as they were contributing to the industry and wealth of the community. Though in the phalanx there was an emphasis on community engagement, Fourier allowed private dwelling quarters for couples and families, complete with private kitchens so that families could still function traditionally

(Fourier & Brisbane, 1857, p. 138). Despite some phalanx members having private homes, Fourier still believed that other communal aspects, such as democratic politics and freedom of choice in one’s labor would enforce equality amongst its members.

This mixing of industrialization, capitalism, and utopian socialism attracted many

American idealists who were searching for a better way to live as a society. Freedom of choice and greater equality particularly drew woman to the Transcendentalist Brook

Farm after it implemented Fourierist ideas. In his original plans for the phalanxes,

Charles Fourier had a particular adamancy regarding economic equality for woman. 39

Similar to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s communal homes, the phalanx would allow woman to “emancipate herself from domestic servitude, from dependence on man, from inferiority of position and from her present restricted and subordinate sphere of action”

(Fourier & Brisbane, 1857, p. 142) In reality, however the women of Brook Farm found that their situation as dependent, inferior, domestic servants was harder to shed in reality.

Fourierist woman did, however have access to more public rights than woman living in standard society. For example, in Fourierist communities like Brook Farm, a woman could attend community meetings and lectures, socialize openly with other young men and women, and even in some cases own stock in the property of the phalanx

(Guarneri, 1994, pp. 204 – 206). That being said, woman was often excluded from making important community decisions and their sphere of work options was relatively as limited as it would have been in standard society. The failure of phalanxes to offer true gender equality is due to the structured beliefs that women are naturally better suited for domestic labor. Even Fourier, for all of his talk of emancipating woman from the private sphere, wrote in his blueprints for the phalanx that the domestic work of the communities would be done by woman and not by man, because of their natural gravitation towards domestic service (Fourier & Brisbane, 1857, p. 142). Some women, he believed would be fit for intellectual or creative labor, but most, he believed would choose to continue to work domestically. Rather than challenge the notion of a universal female nature, alternative dwelling communities continued to insist that woman fill domestic roles in order to act as a moral guardian (Guarneri, 1994, p. 206). Like Gilman, Fourier was more concerned that woman had the choice of domestic labor, rather than the subjugation.

While these alternative dwelling communities were on a path towards the desegregation of gendered spaces and the equalizing of the sexes, dominant structures 40 about universal feminine natures still prevailed. Woman lived segregated in her spaces, feeling her lack of valued, public, but she knew she could handle more. Through time, patience, and sisterhood, woman began to use cultural feminism and its acceptance and empowerment of female nature to expand her role in society. It was the combination of their socialization of the home, female education, cultural feminism, and the curiosity of alternative dwelling spaces that she was able to plan the next steps for woman’s more equal place in the United States.

Chapter 2: The Settlement Movement

Unregulated industrialization increased in western Europe and the United States during the mid to late 1800s. Between 1880 and 1890, the total population of the United

States increased by as much as 30%, due to the steady increase of immigrants flocking to urban areas with hopes of financial gain and prosperity (Burt, 2004, p. 18). Despite the idealism of these workers, the conditions of the factories and of the cities themselves were appalling, due to the lack of regulations on businesses or city planning. As the businessmen grew in wealth, the workers and their families who they exploited for their labor grew in poverty. The divide between classes was growing, and the lowest classes were outnumbering the wealthy ones. Poverty was becoming an urban problem. The streets were full of disease and filth, due to unregulated sewage and garbage collection

(Davis, 1994, p. 153). Any able-bodied person, man, woman, or child was used for labor, working in poor conditions, for long hours, with meager wages (Davis, 1994, p. 130).

Something needed to be done to help the poor. In Europe and the United States, middle- class university graduates decided to take care of the problem themselves. Though the method varied across the continents, the solution was the same: the settlement movement.

Originating in London, Toynbee Hall was established in 1884 as the first settlement home by Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta (Barbuto, 1999, p. 208). Born from the ideals of Christian charity and Victorian philanthropy, the settlement movement began in the hopes of equalizing difference between the classes as well as to provide aid to those in need (Abel, 1979, p. 607). Settlement homes offered university classes and lectures, social clubs, and cultural events to their neighborhoods, exposing the poor to middle class beliefs and privileges (Abel, 1979, p. 611). However, despite the good that they brought to city slums, the early settlement movement did little to recognize the 42 origins of poverty that lay in the hands of wealthy capitalists (Able, 1979, p. 608). Rather than turning to law and policy to protect the poor, exploited laborers, settlement residents instead expanded the role of the citizen. By living amongst the poor and getting to know them as neighbors, residents of settlement homes believed that they would be able to make individual differences in the lives of the poor (Abel, 1979, p. 609).

By the 1890s, the settlement movement had weaved its way through Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Inspired by the good work that they were observing across Europe, middle-class, college educated women from the United States visited European settlement homes and returned determined to effect change in their own cities (Carson, 1990). Unlike the European settlement homes, however, the women founding homes in the U.S. were bringing their own experiences and education as women to the settlement movement (Carson, 1990, p. 71). As well as providing aid to the poor, the settlement movement in the U.S. also provided middle-class, college-educated women with personal autonomy and active citizenship, not traditionally afforded to women during the 19th century (Carson, 1990, p. 52).

In the following chapter I will discuss the origin and function of settlement homes in the United States in order to show how women began to use gendered spaces to gain access to public spaces and expand their roles to that of active citizenship. I will do so by following the life and experiences of social reformer and the founder of the first

American settlement home, Jane Addams. The chapter will begin by explaining the importance of higher education for middle-class women in the 19th century. Through a feminized curriculum at newly opened female colleges, women like Jane Addams were inspired by the gendered space. There they learned to embrace a culture of womanhood, which encouraged women to see themselves as natural mothers and caregivers. By first 43 examining women’s colleges, it will also help to explain why so many women were drawn to the settlement movement, rather than follow the traditional route to marriage and children.

The chapter will then focus on the daily function of the settlement home in order to show how settlement homes were manipulated as a hybrid public-private space which allowed women to actively engage in public life while still dwelling within the comfort of a private home. Hull House, the first American settlement home, founded in Chicago in

1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr will be used as a case study (Barbuto, 1999, p. 99). In order to show how women actively manipulated the space to evolve their role in public life, the chapter will focus on the importance of the homes themselves, the residents who worked there, and finally the people whom they served. By decorating the settlement homes to resemble a family estate, by treating their fellow residents as a large family, and the people they served as their neighbors and friends, the American settlement homes not only embraced the idea of the home as a feminine space but saw it as a space that could evoke change.

Lastly, in order to understand the success of the American settlement movement, this chapter will compare Jane Addams’ Hull House with Toynbee Hall in London. By comparing the two settlement homes, this chapter will make the argument that the success of the American settlement movement lies in the gender of its founders. While

Hull House was directly inspired by Toynbee Hall and Addams remained close with its founders, the two settlement homes were vastly different in the people that they served, how they served them, and the overall relationship that the homes had in the neighborhoods where they resided. Because of their feminized education, beliefs that social work complimented the natural role of women, and their personal relationship to 44 the home, female American settlement founders were able to provide more aid to their communities and evoke more social change than their European counterparts.

Educating Young Women

As discussed in Chapter One, the formal education of young, white, middle-class women began to change in the 1800s as seminaries and women’s colleges began to open.

By adopting a liberal arts curriculum, these schools were able to make a new case in favor of educating young women (Carson, 1990, p. 23). Unlike math and sciences, the social sciences of the liberal arts curriculum were considered safer for young women, as their subject matters were better suited to their female natures (Carson, 1990, p. 24). The social sciences were said to better prepare young women for their social roles and obligations upon leaving school and becoming wives and mothers (Carson, 1990, p. 23).

Since they would most likely marry middle-class, educated young men, by studying the social sciences, “she was to be prepared not by shielding her from the harsh realities of public life, but by educating her about them” (Carson, 1990, p. 23). Furthermore, social science addressed the importance of benefitting one’s community through charity, which women were encouraged to take part in, since it was woman’s “natural” place to care for children and those less fortunate (Carson, 1990, p. 24). Through the adoption of a liberal arts curriculum and presenting young female students with the study of the social sciences, educators were still limiting female education by relying on traditional beliefs about “female nature.” However, by broadening the way that women could access knowledge and allowing them to take part in a type of knowledge that was not entirely domestic, women were also being given the tools that they would come to use to liberate themselves as active citizens. 45

Women’s colleges were gendered spaces, created specifically for the education of women. Not only were the students female, but the educators themselves were female, also (Knight, 2005, p. 80). In this all-female community, women’s colleges encouraged young women to learn and form ambitions (Knight, 2005, p. 80). To better emphasize the importance of female education as a precursor to the settlement movement in the United

States, this section will focus on the life experiences of Jane Addams. The founder of the first American settlement home (Hull House) and the mother of social work, Jane

Addams was a social reformer and progressive activist (Barbuto, 1999, p. 5). Her influence in the field of social work and her political reforms will be discussed in the chapters to come, but first, this section of this chapter will follow her education, since it was there that her duty to serving the urban poor began. It should be noted that though

Addams is the pioneer of the American settlement movement, there were many young women who share a story similar to hers. This fact was one that Addams repeatedly acknowledged and used to encourage young women to join social reform activities. It was not through the strengths of just one woman that a political voice was gained but through a collective effort of many. For Addams and many other middle-class women, education was the place where she felt both called to a vocation and embraced by a community, which would shape the rest of her life.

Women’s Colleges: Building Sisterhood Through Gendered Space

In 1877 Jane Addams began attending Rockford Seminary in northern Illinois

(Knight, 2005, p. 80). Though Addams had more ambitious goals to study medicine at

Smith college and earn a degree, her father denied her wishes, sending her instead to

Rockford to earn a collegiate certificate like her sisters before her (Knight, 2005, p. 26).

From this first denial of her wishes regarding her education, Addams and her father 46 would remain at odds. Following the traditional thinking of the time period, John

Addams ultimately expected his daughters to grow up to be wives and mothers, which meant that their education should reflect lessons in morality rather than leading them towards a career. While historical letters lead historians to believe that John Addams was supportive of Jane’s desire to serve the poor, his persistent denial of her to pursue a more challenging course of study, causes one to assume that he did not want her to put educational training before a domestic future (Knight, 2005, p. 78).

Despite her longing for a college environment to stimulate her intellectually and prepare her for a career in medicine, Jane Addams was very familiar in the challenges that she faced as a woman. Like other middle-class girls of the time period, Addams was raised from infancy to know that women were to be self-sacrificing and self-forgetting, meaning that they should have little concern for their own hopes of accomplishments

(Knight, 2005, pp. 12 – 61). Though she entered Rockford begrudgingly, the school would influence her positively as being the first place she’d ever experienced that was led entirely by women that encouraged women to seek ambitious futures (Knight, 2005, p.

80). During her time at Rockford Seminary, Addams would learn to compromise her own ambition with the limitations that society placed on her sex.

While at Rockford, Addams excelled in her studies. Determined to get the most out of her education, Jane not only began to improve her writing and public speaking, which would benefit her future career as a social reformer, but she also used the opportunity to become an active member of the literary society and oratory club (Knight,

2005, pp. 97 – 95). The oratory club finally gave Addams the chance to share her ideas about society with an audience, and her gift of public speaking assured that she had plenty of opportunities. In her first public speech, “Breadgivers” it is clear how the all- 47 female environment was beginning to influence the beliefs Addams held about womanhood and a woman’s true place. In the speech, Addams challenged domestic gender traditions that kept woman in the home, insisting that a woman could and should do more (Knight, 2005, p. 97). By the speech’s end, she vowed to dedicate her life to serving the poor. Given that Addams’ own family expected her to submit herself to a traditionally domestic role, the speech reads as a fierce act of rebellion. This speech, just the first in what would become a lifetime of others similar was so popular amongst her peers that they adopted the term “breadgivers” as their class motto (Knight, 2005, p. 97).

By doing so, they not only were praising Addams for putting into words what they all had been feeling, but they too were acknowledging their own determinations to do more with their lives upon graduating from Rockford.

Though the coursework often failed to challenge her intellect, her extracurricular achievements and the friendships she made with her fellow students made her time at

Rockford special. In her own memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, she writes of her friends often in the early pages of the book, describing a group of girls who are equal to her in their desire for knowledge and desperate for a future that held more than marriage.

With the help of her favorite teacher Miss Potter, Addams and her friends would read philosophy and history, talking endlessly through the night about the ways the works inspired them (Addams, 1961, p. 26). The intellectual and social stimulation she received through her female friendships helped her to form the bonds of sisterhood that many women were forming at this time through shared experiences. As she would later go on to establish the first American settlement home, she would continue to live surrounded by girls similar to her friends at school, making them her own nontraditional family. Though there were many friendships that meant a great deal to her at Rockford, Addams’ 48 relationship with Ellen Gates Starr was arguably the most influential, as the two of them would come to found Hull House together years later (Barbuto, 1999, p. 195).

As her time at Rockford was nearing an end, there was a tension surrounding what Addams’ life would become. As other girls made plans to teach, join mission work, marry, or travel, Addams, more passionate than ever to dedicate her life to the poor, felt the pressure to join the church to achieve her goals. As time would tell, however, she would not yield. In the speech, “Cassandra” that she delivered at commencement,

Addams’ anxieties and fears about her own future were apparent. In the speech, Addams described a scene in Greek mythology where the daughter of the King of Troy (named

Cassandra) warns the soldiers of defeat in battle (Barbuto, 1999, p. 106). The soldiers laugh, disregard her warning, and Cassandra is forced to walk away. Cassandra’s failure to be taken seriously was the same situation women of Addams’ generation were faced with. Women, she said were gifted with a “natural intuition” and “perception of truth,” however, because they were women, they lacked the authority to effect change in public life (Barbuto, 1999, p. 107). In order to gain more authority, women needed to study logic, reason, and science in order to learn to think more independently which was needed to be competitive with men in society (Barbuto, 1999, p. 107). Given her new authority, this well-rounded woman, she said would be intellectually capable of succeeding independently in a man’s world, while still maintaining the natural gifts of femininity that she could use to better society.

Addams’ admiration and acceptance of “natural female” traits affirms traditional beliefs of a universal feminine nature discussed in Chapter One. It also speaks to a cultural feminism that not only accepts a universal female nature but uses it to praise women and argue that their “feminine” attributes are the reason they deserve a place in 49 public life. Though her experience at Hull House would help her to better formulate the ways women could effect change in public life, her use of a cultural feminism as the reason women deserved a political voice would not change. Her views of a woman’s place in the public sphere were already challenging accepted norms and beliefs about gender, but her acceptance of a universal female nature would remain grounded in traditional thinking.

Much to her dismay, upon graduating from Rockford Seminary, Addams’ father once again denied her wishes to attend Smith College to study medicine. She had been granted the privilege of an education, so now it was her duty as a daughter to put her own personal ambitions aside and do what was best for her family, which was to marry

(Knight, 2005, p. 143). Like Addams, most of the other girls from her graduating class were suffering the same responses from their families regarding their own future plans

(Knight, 2005, p. 110). Women’s colleges had inspired women to dream ambitiously outside of their traditional roles, but upon graduation, they found that reality had not changed their position in the public world. Though Jane’s speeches about the bright future of female achievement had influenced her peers, it seemed their parents and the rest of the world were not yet convinced that a woman’s place was in the public sphere.

A Search for Purpose

Her life after college was plagued with disappointments. The death of her father and her own ill health upset her ambitions future plans. Unable to continue down her chosen path, she embarked instead on a two-year tour of Europe that would come to help her make permanent decisions regarding what she would do with her life. While in

Europe, Addams’ life was influenced by two important experiences. The first was the rekindling of her friendship with Ellen Gates Starr. Though the two of them had kept up 50 their correspondence over the years, while Addams lay sick and disappointed with herself, she came to find a new appreciation for her kinship with Starr. Addams had always valued Starr, but she was never a sentimental person. For that reason, she was usually keeping Starr at a distance emotionally and intimately. Perhaps it was the loss of her father, her own bout of illness, or just her growing up, but while in Europe, she allowed herself to open up to Starr. “I am more convinced every day that friendship… is after all the main this in life, and friendship and affections must be guarded and taken care of just as other valuable things” (Knight, 2005, p. 136). Strengthening her relationship with Starr would become one of the most important decisions of her life, especially after she observed the urban poor for herself.

While in London, Addams received a pamphlet to take a tour of the East End, the poorest, most miserable section of the city. The tour existed to bring the harsh realities of industrial poverty to light in the minds of wealthy and middle-class people. Whether it existed purely as a tool to draw sympathies from the curious middle-class spectators to help the poor is a matter easily contested. The modern reader cannot help but understand the tour as a spectacle, a way for the middle-class to gawk at the destitute, feeling pity, revulsion, and pride that they are not subject to similar horrors from their comfortable lives elsewhere. During a time when class divisions were widening and becoming more apparent, tours like the one Addams took in the East End appear to readers now as a kind of cruel voyeurism of human suffering. While tours like these might have served as helpful and informative purposes for some, I feel that as a modern scholar it is important to criticize the elitist nature of their existence.

Despite current critiques of the East End tours, Jane Addams was fascinated, and she went to a midnight market, where she watched the poor bid on rotten vegetables, just 51 to keep themselves and their families alive (Addams, 1961, p. 40). After that experience,

Addams was both disturbed and curious. The event would linger in her mind, and for the remainder of the trip, she would seek out more examples of the urban poor in each city that she visited (Knight, 2005, p. 137). Her letters to Starr began to formulate an idea that had been growing in her mind. This idea would allow her to live out her long-time goal to live amongst the poor and bring them aid, however, it was no longer an independent, girlish fantasy, but something concrete and practical, and she would need a community to help her. In her own words, Jane Addams (1961) described her plan:

I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over to exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where they might try out some of the things they had been taught and put truth to the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or inspires. (p. 51)

Shortly after voicing her plans to Ellen Gates Starr, Addams read in a magazine about a new philanthropic organization in London called a settlement home. Like her own vision, the grand home, called Toynbee Hall, was located in a highly impoverished area of the city and offered educational classes, social clubs, and culture to the urban poor, in the hopes to alleviate their suffering and bridge the growing gap between the social classes (Knight, 2005, p. 154). Intrigued and excited that others were already actively doing something similar to her own proposal, Addams grew more confident in her new plan.

Addams would go on to tour Toynbee Hall and become close friends with the founder, Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta. From there, she and Starr would begin the plans to open the first settlement home in the United States. There, they would take their education and community at Rockford Seminary, Addams’ new experiences from 52 her two-year trip to Europe, and their beliefs about the social role of women to start a new course for social reform in the United States. At Rockford they were taught to believe in female excellence. Their education there encouraged them to accept that benevolence was their birthright as middle-class, educated women (Knight, 2005, p. 153).

Their bonds of kinship and intellectual stimulation caused them to make promises to one another to do something with their education, something active (Addams, 1961, p. 37).

The settlement movement became the space that would allow women to engage with the public actively. The settlement homes themselves would be their tool with which to engage in public spaces. By settling a great home in the middle of an urban slum, settlement residents would be able to use their education in the social sciences, along with their “natural” female traits of nurturance and self-sacrifice to bring aid to the poor.

Making a Home in the Urban Slums

There were several factors that set American settlement homes like Hull House apart from charity organizations of the time. First, they had no relation to the church, meaning they neither took church donations nor did they affiliate themselves with any

Christian religion or practice religious teachings. Next, settlement homes in the United

States were usually founded and run by women. Though the settlement movement was not exclusively female (there were both male settlement founders and residents), the majority of founders and residents in American settlement homes were female (Carson,

1990, p. 49). This was due to the growing influence of a Public Womanhood and the liberal arts education that so many middle-class women were receiving in the mid to late

19th century (Cruea, 2005, p. 193). Lastly, American settlement homes rejected the traditional notion of charity, insisting that it was impersonal and created more social distance between the classes (Cruea, 2005, p. 67). Instead, American settlement homes 53 focused on strengthening the neighborly bonds between residents and those they served by forming personal relationships through “friendly visiting” and by organizing the settlement home as a nurturant place for all in the neighborhood (Cruea, 2005, p. 66).

They did this by decorating and designing the home itself in a “pleasant,” comfortable way, by following a routine inside of the home that resembled a domestic home lived in by a typical middle-class family (including the eating of the meals together, informal socialization, chores, etc.), and by treating those who lived outside of the home as a neighbor, rather than a stranger or a beggar (Cruea, 2005, pp. 54 – 88).

As discussed in Chapter One, women are raised with a special relationship to the home. In the home, they learn what their role will be as women, both in domestic duties like housekeeping but also in their behaviors and attitudes. They were raised to see the home as “the center of the moral, educational, industrial, and social life” (Cruea, 2005, p.

110). Opposite to the home, the city was an impersonal, immoral place, which led to its disfunction. Settlement founders relied on their own privileged experiences of a middle- class home as a good and moral space to bring nurturance to the city and its inhabitants.

The following section of this chapter will focus on the daily function of the American settlement home, using Jane Addams’ Hull House as a case study. In order to understand how the American settlement home used the traditional concept of the home as a gendered space this section will examine the physical home itself, the residents who lived and worked there, and the people they served.

The Home

Ever since Jane Addams was a little girl, she dreamed of one day having a home like Hull House, where she could live amongst friends and help those in need (Addams,

1961, p. 2). In order to do so, it meant living in a poor, urban space. Described by the 54 residents of Hull House in 1893, the neighborhood was both residential and commercial with a dense population of neighbors living in crowded tenement homes amongst a scattering of small shops and several large factories (“Hull House Maps and Papers,”

2007, p. 53). Amongst the businesses that littered the neighborhood were saloons, tabaco stands, and brothels, the types of places the residents of Hull House would seek to make less popular as they became more established in the community (“Hull House Maps and

Papers,” 2007, p. 53). The types of businesses and crammed living quarters of the poor were not the only unsavory aspects of the neighborhood. Not far from where they were settling was one of the most infamous crime areas and all around the neighborhood was garbage, waste, offending odors, illness, and forgotten adults and children (“Hull House

Maps and Papers,” 2007, p. 54).

Once Hull House officially opened its doors and began its work in 1889, Jane

Addams and Ellen Gates Starr got to work making the old mansion into an attractive place that would be a home to every person in the neighborhood. Though located amongst crowded tenement homes and industrial factories, their settlement home and its growing campus existed as a cross between a large, family home and a small urban college, both places that its founders and residents were familiar and comfortable. Hull

House prided itself for its domestic comforts: its library, art gallery, gymnasium, and coffee house, all locations that served important to the countless clubs and social gatherings that Hull House provided (“Hull House Maps and Papers, 2007, pp. 153 –

168). Like the liberal arts colleges many of the residents had attended, these spaces and clubs were kept up and run by the residents who lived and served at Hull House. Though the residents were there to work and serve the urban poor with public engagements such as personal visits, classes, clubs, and social events, they were also there to live. For that 55 reason, Hull House was not just another institution, but a home in a very traditional, middle-class sense.

Addams and Starr furnished and decorated Hull House to their tastes, not just to feel at home themselves but also to attract other women like them to move in and join the settlement cause. Like Toynbee Hall in London, the inside of Hull House was furnished in the upper-middle class style of the time with elegant furniture and dark wood (Hull

House Maps and Papers, 2007, pp. 157 – 162). Though they would be serving the poor here, they wanted their live-in residents to be comfortable and for their impoverished visitors to have the chance to share in the privilege of an upper-middle class home. As residents began moving in, it seemed that Addams and Starrs’ plan had worked. The residents were encouraged to treat the home as they “would naturally have if they lived anywhere else” (Carson, 1990, p. 58). The residents were expected to keep their private rooms clean and tidy, as well as engage in simple household chores, which would be decided on between the residents themselves (Carson, 1990, p. 58). There were servants to tend to the cooking of shared meals and to keep the floors scrubbed and clean, but in a feeble attempt to stay conscious of equalizing classes, Hull House was mainly run by the founders and its residents (Carson, 1990, p. 59). Besides the residents taking domestic responsibility for their home, their daily schedules were also important to the function of the home as one that belonged to a large family (Carson, 1990, p. 88).

The Residents

Just as Hull House functioned both as a place that would bring aid to the urban poor and house the residents who served them, Hull House was also meant to serve the residents themselves. Upon graduation, Jane Addams and many other young women from her graduating class were faced with disappointment and defeat. Their lofty plans for 56 their futures were forbidden by their parents, who wished for them to pursue a more traditionally feminine role of wife and mother. For Addams, the settlement home was a way for her to live out her own dreams of actively serving the poor while still maintaining a “natural” femineity, and she wished for other young, educated women to be able to do the same. Caught up in a world of her own experiences, she believed that a girl who was educated in the social sciences who was not able to actively participate in the real-world practice of philanthropy and charity was a waste of training and talent.

Action, Addams believed was “the only medium that man has for receiving and appropriating truth” (Addams, 1961, p. 73) Like her, newly graduated middle-class women were determined to actively serve their communities and put their education to good use. The settlement movement gave such young women the opportunity not only the chance to use their education, but the work itself, bringing aid to the poor, served as a cross-cultural learning experience.

The message of Hull House and its promise to give college-educated girls a chance to gain experience worked in recruiting residents who would live in the home and serve their community. Around 90% of settlement home residents were college graduates, who would arrive, eager to get to work, but looking to founders like Addams for guidance and inspiration (Carson, 1990, p. 87). The domestic nature of the home was already familiar to them, and especially for those who had just graduated from college, the close-knit social community amongst the residents afforded them a collegiate familiarity (Carson, 1990, p. 52). Just as Addams had been intellectually and emotionally stimulated by her friends at Rockford Seminary, Hull House too was always filled with twenty to twenty-five young, intelligent residents, which rather recreated her school days spent reading and debating (Abbott, 1950, p. 377). Though settlement life had similarities 57 to the young women’s homes and colleges, it also offered them more personal autonomy and access to the public sphere (Carson, 1990, p. 52). In this way, the settlement home protected middle-class women from truly living in public spaces, by providing them with a private home in the middle of an urban space. By manipulating the settlement home to function both publicly and privately, the settlement residents could maintain within the comforts of the private sphere while working in the public.

As important as Addams found the settlement homes to be to give young women active experience, she wanted men to volunteer at Hull House, as well. Men, Addams reasoned had an important advantage over women: they had the privilege of political citizenship (Knight, 2005, p. 191). If Hull House had male residents, Hull House would have more leverage to make political changes in the neighborhood and in the city at large.

In 1891, Hull House made history as the first co-ed settlement home in the world when

Edward Burchard came to live there as a resident (Knight, 2005, p. 226). After Burchard, there were numerous male residents and visiting lecturers, but the home would remain largely a female institution (Knight, 2005, p. 226). The incorporation of male residents in

Hull House added to the familial nature of the place. Like a family, each resident had their own interests, talents, and opinions. It was important to Addams that the group of residents be diverse, since different political beliefs and various specialties would better serve the poor of the community (Abbott, 1950, p. 376). The residents challenged each other daily and added to the educational experience that was living communally in a settlement home.

Each morning, the residents would pile into their designated table in the coffee house to share breakfast and argue over politics and socialize over their own daily news.

Then they would be off to do their settlement work around the city or at the house. Later, 58 they would all again meet up in the formal dining room for dinner, where Jane Addams always served as the mediator to the disagreements thrown across the table (Abbott,

1950, p. 380). Addams herself had decided in the early days of Hull House that if this were to be a home, the residents a family, and the poor their neighbors, she would be the grandmother. It was not that Addams had ever envisioned herself as domestic, wifely, or even motherly, but rather she preferred the “emotional engagement” that came from the grandmotherly role (Knight, 2005, p. 183). In it, she was able to remain impartial and intuitive. Above all, she served as an example for how each resident should behave towards each other and those they served, as well as reminding everyone of the importance of the work they were doing and why they were doing it (Knight, 2005, p.

184).

Just as Hull House functioned as a blend of women’s college and middle-class residential home, it was also dualistic in the way that it both accepted and challenged traditional notions of the family. While the residents were not challenged to physically live any differently than they were used to when they moved into Hull House as

Residents, the home did offer them certain new experiences they would not have had otherwise. Like other experimental dwelling projects of the time, the settlement home challenged the notion of a typical family. All settlement residents were encouraged to treat each other as a family, yet the residents themselves were often not related to one another. Rather than being connected by blood lines, settlement residents were a family bonded through a common purpose. Furthermore, settlement homes challenged notions of a traditional family by the mere fact that often there was a matriarchal head at each home, since American settlement founders were often women. By sitting herself as the 59 grandmotherly matriarch, Jane Addams, whether intentional or not was directly challenging the traditional patriarchal head of the home.

For all of the importance of the family dynamic of the settlement home, they were all there not just for experience, but to do the work. The work itself was social service.

“People living in settlements,” Jane Addams once wrote, “live for the good of those around them” (Knight, 2005, p. 214). Doing good for the poor around them came in many different forms, that evolved and were added to over the years. The most popular work, especially in the early days of the settlement was the care of children in Hull

House’s nursery (which was established during the very first month), teaching college extension courses, organizing or leading social clubs and lectures, and visiting neighbor’s homes daily to find out what they might need (Hull House Maps and Papers, 2007, pp.

152 – 170). No matter what capacity the residents were interacting with their poor neighbors, the most important thing to Addams was that it be personal rather than institutional. Addams did not want the settlement work to be mechanical charity work that kept the residents separate from the poor; the very purpose of Hull House being amongst the urban poor was so that the residents would personally feel committed to the people and the neighborhood they were serving (Carson, 1990, p. 65). After all, it was the belief of Real Womanhood and Public Womanhood that women had a natural proclivity for benevolence (Cruea, 2005, p. 193). In order to act on behalf of their natures, a personal approach to settlement work was a necessity.

The very concept of “friendly visiting” was very important to the work of Hull

House, since it accomplished more than just getting to know one’s neighbors. It also allowed the residents and founders to keep a detailed map of the ethnic and economic demographics of the neighborhood, which they put together and published in order to 60 provide public officials with information regarding immigrant life in Chicago as well as explain the work that they did in the settlement (Schultz, 2007, p. 17). The Hull House

Maps and Papers was an extensive sociological study completed mainly by women, which spoke to urban conditions of the poor during the progressive era. Aside from making progress for women in the field of sociology, friendly visiting also was a way to find out what the poor needed and wanted.

The Urban Poor

Addams and Starr believed that since they had opened Hull House to serve the poor, it should then be up to the poor to decide the way they would be most helpful. “Hull

House stands not so much for a solution of problems as a place of exchange” (Moore,

1897, p. 640). It was important to the founders that Hull House not simply be a “relief center” or a “genuine refuge” (Carson, 1990, p. 61; Abbott, 1950, p. 382). While they would house the desperately poor occasionally when there was not an empty bed available at a local boarding house, Hull House was focused more on ways that would allow residents to help the poor “raise themselves up” (Abbott, 1950, p. 381; Carson,

1990, p. 53) By listening to their new neighbors, it was established very quickly that the children and working mothers of the community needed help the most.

Though Addams and Starr had not intended for the settlement to be exclusively for mothers and children, it was through the care of the children that Hull House became a useful addition to the neighborhood. Not only where children cared for and taught in the nursery and kindergarten, but visiting nurses also made the rounds at tenement homes, caring for sick children and their families (Moore, 1897, p. 635). In the earliest days, the founders and residents humbled themselves with the most basic and intimate of services:

“we were asked to wash the newborn babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse 61 the sick, and to ‘mind the children” (Addams, 1961, p. 64) These acts of care proved to the urban poor that the residents were there not to exploit them but to offer them devoted, neighborly care.

Once trust was established, Hull House became robust with activity. The campus expanded, adding rooms to accommodate classes, clubs, events, and public programs.

The private home was becoming more public as the neighboring poor expressed their needs. Since the settlement residents had established the home first as their dwelling place, the rest of the campus felt a natural extension of the place (Addams, 1961, p. 109).

The nursery and free kindergarten took off, averaging between thirty and fifty children year-round (Hull House Maps and Papers, 2007, p. 165). Besides being looked after, there was a playground built on the Hull House campus so that children could enjoy the outdoors, as well as excursions to the countryside during the summer months (Hull House

Maps and Papers, 2007, p. 165). There were also numerous clubs and activities for young children as well as the older ones, such as story hour, debating and literary societies, and classes for them to learn practical skills like cooking and sewing, but also classes to teach them appreciation for the arts (Hull House Maps and Papers, 2007, pp. 163 – 167).

Vocational classes like these were common not just at Hull House but in settlement homes across the United States. Settlements working closely with children and education found that students needed not only their minds to be stimulated with formal education but with vocational guidance that would aid the practically for the jobs they would one day take up as adults (Wald, 1915, p. 113). At the Henry Street Settlement in

New York City, for example, their cooking and housekeeping classes became very popular with local girls who were engaged to be married. Using the domestic lessons learned from their own mothers or female family members growing up, the settlement 62 workers at the Henry Street settlement taught girls how to how to prepare meals and keep the home the way they would be expected to do when they were married (Wald, 1915, p.

107). The classes were so successful, the settlement built a “housekeeping center,” or a small, makeshift home with a kitchen and bedrooms where the girls could practice their domestic lessons (Wald, 1915, p. 108). While certain settlement classes and clubs were more controversial, city and local government boards were more intrigued by these homemaking classes, so much so that housekeeping centers teaching home economics began to crop up in schools throughout the city (Wald, 1915, p. 109). While the lessons themselves continue to confine women in a traditionally feminine space, under the belief that women are only suited for domestic work, the housekeeping centers originating from the minds of the settlement workers at the Henry Street Settlement remain another example of the way that female settlement workers utilized their experiences with their gendered space to influence public change.

While the classes and clubs for children and young adults were plentiful, the activities open to working men and women were even more numerous. Most successful and popular of them however were the college extension courses, The Working People’s

Social Science Club, the Butler Art Gallery, and the Hull House Coffee House and

Kitchen. The college extension courses taught originally by Jane Addams and Ellen

Gates Starr were the first of their kind in the city of Chicago (Knight, 2005, p. 206). They began just as a way for Addams and Starr to share their love of learning with their community and to exercise their own educations, but they became immensely popular.

By Hull House’s third year, there were thirty-one courses being offered and around 182 students enrolled (Knight, 2005, p. 237). The Working People’s Social Science Club followed a similar success. Originating from a club at the Toynbee Hall settlement in 63

London, the social science club at Hull House brought in a lecturer each week at 8:00pm to speak for an hour on a topic of interest and expertise (Knight, 2005, p. 205). After the lecture, the audience had a chance to ask question or debate the lecturer or their fellow audience members. The topics up for lecture and discussion were often social, related to education, reform, politics, and unionism (Knight, 2005, p. 205). Since Hull House was both open to all sorts and believed in diversity these lectures and debates were often lively and opinionated. Addams saw this as the opposite of a problem; these social forums was democracy in action.

The early days at Hull House were spent establishing the settlement as a natural part of the neighborhood. By making the home itself attractive and welcoming to the live- in residents and the urban poor, the settlement home was quickly embraced as a nurturant home to all who sought its care. It was important to Addams and Starr that Hull House function as a home rather than an institution, and they practiced that belief by treating their residents as a family and the poor they served as their neighbors. Hull House attempted to bridge a gap between the classes by making residents’ service personal and by listening to the needs of the poor, rather than imposing upon them services the residents believed they should have. Though Hull House was inspired by European settlement homes like Toynbee Hall in London, the European settlement movement did not see success the way that American settlements like Hull House were observing.

Scholars have analyzed the settlement movement across the continents and come to several conclusions: one of them being the gender of the founders and leaders.

US vs. UK Comparison

In 1885 cleric and social reformer, Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta opened the world’s first settlement home in Whitechapel, London in response to the poverty 64 problem the city was facing. Industry and vice had taken over the poor neighborhoods of the East End, so the Barnetts proposed a solution: the university settlement. The university settlement would invite young middle-class men, recent graduates from

Oxford or Cambridge to live together in a large home in the middle of a poor neighborhood. They would bring college classes and cultural experiences to the people of the people of the neighborhood, which, the Barnett’s theorized would curb the crime and other immoral behavior (Abel, 1979, p. 608; Hartley, 2019, p. 281). It was the popular belief at the time that the poor were naturally inclined to immoral and vulgar behaviors because of poor breeding and a lack of intelligence. They were easily led to the temptations of sex, alcohol, and gambling, which corrupted their neighborhoods and wasted all of their money (Himmelfarb, 1990, p. 374). Victorian philanthropy considered that it was therefore the job of the well-educated middle class to clean up the streets of poor neighborhoods and guide the poor into making better, more responsible choices

(Himmelfarb, 1990, p. 374). The university settlement, Toynbee Hall was a social reform that operated under these same beliefs.

It is plain to see the similarities between Toynbee Hall and Hull House, after all

Addams was inspired by the work the Barnetts were doing in London’s East End. Though

Hull House and Toynbee Hall both wanted to solve the poverty problem in urban areas, the way they approached service to the poor highlights that they were going about the work very differently. First, Toynbee Hall was specifically a university settlement that focused on the redistribution of knowledge to the lower classes in order to give them the education necessary to turn away from their vices. In American settlement homes like

Hull House, education was also a very important aspect of settlement services. The college extension courses offered by Hull House residents were extremely popular and 65 helped many lower-class citizens access education that was not previously accessible to them. Toynbee Hall’s classes, however sought to help the “best sort of workers,” meaning those who were already “steady, thrifty, and interested in the improvement of their order” (Himmelfarb, 1990, p. 378). This meant that the classes were often filled with clerks or tradesmen, rather than the very poor and those with very little skills.

In fact, the residents of Toynbee Hall were tasked not just with teaching poor residents but in deciphering the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor (Abel, 1979, p.

619). While Hull House made it clear to their poor neighbors that they were not a refuge or a poor house, they were not selective with their services. Toynbee Hall, however believed in a different sort of philanthropy. They wanted to assure that their help would be used by those who would be able to raise themselves up out of poverty, or at least use it to align their behaviors and lifestyle with their middle-class educators. It was more than just the selection process for who to help that set Toynbee Hall and Hull House apart, it was the very style in which care was offered to the urban poor. As already discussed,

Hull House followed a very personal approach to service. The residents were encouraged to treat Hull House as their home, their fellow residents as their family, and the poor as their neighbors. Addams believed that the poor and the residents would better help one another if they broke down institutional barriers and came to know each other as people

(Carson, 1990, p. 99).

The opposite was true of Toynbee Hall. Settlement workers of Toynbee Hall kept their lives quite separate from their poor neighbors in Whitechapel (Abel, 1979, p. 611).

They taught their classes, hosted their clubs, and attended concerts and art exhibits put on by the settlement home, but there was no fraternization outside of their duties. They were encouraged to influence special individuals “one-by-one,” rather than trying to influence 66 a large group (Abel, 1979, p. 611). Unlike at Hull House, there was no “friendly visiting.”

Reform was the goal of Toynbee Hall, however because they saw the poor as personally responsible for their social conditions, there became a stark difference for how to ultimately solve the poverty problem. The Barnetts discouraged settlement workers from “service by doing,” instead preferring “service by being,” meaning settlement workers should not attempt reform by changing society through policy but rather by being an example to the poor, so they can aspire to change their own situations (Abel,

1979, pp. 610 – 611). Addams and her settlement workers at Hull House went on to do the exact opposite. It was important to Addams for Hull House residents to embody the best human characteristics so they too, like the Toynbee Hall residents, would inspire the poor whom they served, however, social reform for Addams and her residents needed to be considerably more active and radical.

Though Hull House originally sought to focus on instilling personal change in the lives of the poor, the more personally connected they became to the neighborhood where they had settled, the more they became aware that things needed to change on a larger scale. They began acting as mediators between the poor and the businessmen, the factory owners, and the politicians of Chicago (Carson, 1990, p. 53). Then they began opening

Hull House as a meeting place for unions and socialist reformers (Carson, 1990, 53).

Eventually, Hull House even began offering their own social services such as job placement, immigration services, and legal aid (Abbott, 1950, p. 382). Hull House was realizing its political power, and Addams and her fellow settlement workers were realizing that the home itself was their opening to the world of politics. 67

Hull House had started in the belief that it was a woman’s duty to serve the poor.

Hull House existed as a hybrid space, both public and private. It operated as a home, its residents worked as a family, but it was also located in the midst of an urban slum.

Though dwelling in a private home, settlement workers were able to use their location to serve their neighbors in public spaces. By first using the settlement home as a private dwelling for its settlement workers, they were then able to expand the campus to serve a more public function, without negating the fact that the settlement home was also had private spaces. As the needs of the communities continued, settlement residents began to realize that in order to solve the poverty problem in cities around the country, this system needed to be conducted more broadly, through federal policy and political reform.

Settlement residents would continue use the home and “universal” female characteristics to redefine what a citizen should be. Their new expectations for active citizenship would inspire progressive era politics and help them gain their political voice and gain suffrage for women.

Chapter 3: Settlement Homes and Progressive Era Politics

The settlement movement in the United States began in order to address problems in cities linked to industrialization, immigration, and poverty. Many middle-class women freshly graduated from female colleges were inspired by their education in the social sciences and determined to do more with their lives than just take on the traditionally domestic path of becoming wives and mothers. Instead, they operated under the belief that it was a white, middle-class woman’s calling to use their “natural” benevolence to serve the poor. Rather than falling back on religious charity, however, settlement women used their education in the social sciences to address urban problems through social reform.

While at first settlement homes, filled with middle-class residents seemed out of place at first, they quickly found their footing amongst their lower-class neighbors, attempting to blur class barriers by treating the settlement homes as domestic homes rather than institutions. Through friendly visiting, settlement residents were encouraged to get to know their neighbors on a personal level and come to know the neighborhood as their home. By doing so, social reform became personal to the settlement residents. They hosted clubs and classes that would educate, inspire, and entertain their neighbors; they humbled themselves by birthing babies and washing the dead; and they often worked as mediators between ward bosses and their lower-class neighbors, negotiating for better working conditions or safer streets.

Though American settlement homes took pride in the way that they approached social reform, as the 20th century drew to a close, settlement founders and workers across the country were beginning to understand that settlement work needed to be conducted on a larger scale. It was quickly becoming apparent that if settlements wanted to see real, 69 wide-spread change occurring in their neighborhoods, they would have to get involved in politics. Although in the beginning, many settlements operated under the belief that settlement homes and their residents should assist their lower-class neighbors as mediators, longer settlement workers lived in their poor neighborhoods, the more aware they became to the corruption surrounding them.

In the following chapter, I will chart the path of the American settlement movement into their involvement in politics, both locally and at the national level. As settlement work became more political, women were becoming more adamant about sharing public spaces alongside men. This chapter will also show how settlement women relied on their lessons learned in traditionally female spaces to carve out a space for women in American Democracy. It will also show how settlement homes continued to evolve as hybrid public-private spaces, and how settlement residents used their beliefs in a culture of womanhood to demand their place in public, political spaces.

Active Citizenship

At the time when Jane Addams and other social reformers began founding settlement homes across the United States, there was contestation in the country regarding democracy. The term and what it meant about freedoms were up for debate amongst various professional circles. Politically, the country was facing undemocratic charges since it barred slaves and women from being considered citizens when the

Constitution was ratified. Even after African American men were granted suffrage in the

1860s and 70s, barriers were placed to ensure that they would continue to remain second class citizens, while white men would remain in power and control (Knight, 2005).

As for women’s suffrage, campaigns were mounting for women to win the vote, but traditional thinking about the proper place of women were still widely popular across 70 the voting population. The belief stood that women rightly existed in private spaces, which barred them from active participation in democracy. According to popular thought, there were many reasons why women did not need the right to vote, most of which are linked to her position in the private spaces such as the home as a woman’s proper place.

By allowing women to concern themselves with the unpleasantness of politics and public life, it would undermine a woman’s character, as well as the entire domestic system that relied on keeping women separate in their private spaces (Burt, 2004, pp. 246 – 247).

For decades, suffragists challenged popular beliefs that limited women’s involvement in democracy. The popularity of female colleges and the founding of settlement homes directly rebelled against the traditional life course of middle-class women. Still, as Chapter Two showed, even while diverting from the traditional path, settlement women were still relying on commonly held beliefs about feminine nature.

They embraced long held beliefs about feminine nurturance and benevolence and used the beliefs to give legitimacy to their actions. By accepting female stereotypes and approaching public spaces using lessons learned in the home, settlement women were using their given narratives to write their own story of femininity.

As they continued to embrace traditional beliefs about the nature of women, they were also using them to convince the rest of society that because of these traits, the role of woman could be so much more than what was allowed in private. In fact, they argued, public spaces could use a woman’s guiding hand (Burt, 2004, p. 246). It was from these messages that social reformers like Jane Addams began to encourage women to embrace the social aspects of democracy. While they still had no place in the political side of democracy, women could still experience democracy through active citizenship or “good citizenship” (Knight, 2005, p. 220). For Jane Addams, Hull House and the other 71 settlement homes around the United States were centers that promoted this form of good, active citizenship. The work that the residents did through the settlement home was for the good of the entire community as a whole. This was the reason for settling in the heart of a neighborhood: to become a part of the community, to understand it personally, to make it a home and for those living there to be neighbors, family, and friends. “Without the advance and improvement of the whole,” Addams wrote, “no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition” (Addams, 1961, p. 76).

City Planning and Public Health

In order to be good citizens, settlement workers began to expand their community efforts. While clubs, classes, and kindergartens were helpful to their community, it was becoming apparent that there was still a lot of work to be done to improve life in poor, urban neighborhoods. As settlement workers in cities across the countries looked around their neighborhoods, there were clear obstacles that must be overcome in order to improve the lives of their neighbors. The corruption of landlords and ward bosses had caused garbage to pile in the streets and overcrowded tenement buildings to fall into disrepair (Davis, 1994, p. 65). Driven by their own privileged experiences growing up in small towns and the nostalgic notions of community that had given them, settlement workers threw themselves into city planning (Carson, 1990, p. 101). Just as Hull House and many other settlement homes had organized themselves as a residential home in the middle of the city, the neighborhood where it stood was an extension of the home. In that same vein, the residents were a family, and their neighbors were an extension of that family. Therefore, “the urban neighborhood should echo the best aspects of village or town, offering its residents neighborhood should echo the best aspects of village or town, 72 offering its residents a sense of rootedness and intimacy as a bulwark against impersonal exploitation by the modern economy” (Carson, 1990, p. 101).

The tenement buildings crowding the dirty streets of the city were originally designed as a “modest” housing option for working families and were built to an easy standard for landlords to keep and follow (Davis, 1994, p. 65). However, without effective laws regarding the standard of tenements, landlords often cut corners and/or ignored their obligations to the buildings. This left tenement buildings overcrowded, filthy, and falling apart. Coming from their own privileged experiences of the home as a personal, nurturant space, settlement workers were appalled by the lack of natural light, poor ventilation, and inadequate bathing and toileting facilities as they began investigating tenement conditions (Davis, 1994, p. 65). Using the research collected from their investigations, settlements began agitating city councils demanding more and better tenement house laws (Davis, 1994, p. 66).

In a bold attempt to get the public on their side, the University Settlement in New

York City opened an exhibition in 1900 that exposed the horrors of tenement life through photographs and models, compared with plans and models of what a safer, more efficient housing plan would look like (Davis, 1994, p. 68). The exhibition was noted by many influential people, which led to the formation of the New York Tenement House

Commission, which drafted a new (imperfect but better) housing code that was adopted in 1901 (Barbuto, 1999, pp. 154 – 155). The exhibition was such a success that it inspired other settlements to replicate it in their own neighborhoods and cities. Hull House even opened the Municipal Museum as a permanent exhibition, dedicated to city planning and urban reform activities in the city of Chicago (Davis, 1994, p. 68). 73

Settlement residents were not satisfied just with pressuring city councils to improve housing codes. Better housing was just a single step in a larger effort to improve not just their immediate neighborhoods but the cities a as whole. For that reason, city planning efforts also took on the effort of building public baths and playgrounds towards the goal of “city beautification” (Davis, 1994, p. 74). At Hull House two clubs concerned themselves primarily with city planning and urban reform: The Nineteenth Ward

Improvement Club and The Hull House Women’s Club. The Nineteen Ward

Improvement Club was concerned with “the improvement of the ward in all directions,” which included overseeing street cleaning and the building of public baths (The Residents of Hull House, 2007, p. 161). As for the Hull House Women’s Club, aside from acting a social club, it also dedicated itself to neighborhood relief work, especially concerned with improving the lives of children living in the Nineteenth Ward (The Residents of Hull

House, 2007, p. 165). While efforts to assist the children living in the neighborhood often focused on improving public education and providing children with opportunities to experience life out of the city during trips to the countryside, club women also used their time to build public playgrounds. Connected to the rising crime rates among young people in cities, playgrounds were suggested as a behavioral modifier. Since children had little to do in the city streets besides get into mischief, playgrounds were suggested to give children an outlet for their energy. In 1893, Hull House erected the first public playground in Chicago (The Residents of Hull House, 2007, p. 165).

Street cleaning and garbage pick-up, improving tenement conditions, and the building of public bath houses, playgrounds, and gardens was all organized with the goal of making urban neighborhoods better places to live. Settlement residents were determined to give themselves and their neighbors a community that they could feel at 74 home in, but they also insisted on city improvement in response to a popular belief that was spreading regarding the poor living conditions in cities. Rather than seeing overcrowding and poor sanitation as the fault of corrupt city officials, ward bosses, and absent landlords, blame often fell to the poor. Since the poor often were forced to live in unsatisfactory conditions, the belief evolved that this was somehow their fault that cities fell under harsh conditions (Davis, 1994, p. 70). The solution then was to encourage immigrants to move from the cities and take up residence in rural spaces instead (Davis,

1994, p. 71). This suggestion, of course, totally ignored the reasons that immigrants were flocking to cities in the first place: convenience, community, jobs, money, and access to education. A particularly vocal advocate for city planning, Mary Simkhovitch, a former resident of the College Settlement in New York City and later, the founder of Greenwich

House in 1902, spoke out against the suggestions that immigrants make an exodus from the cities (Barbuto, 1999, p. 190). “The reason the poor like to live in New York is because it is interesting, convenient, and meets their social needs,” she lectured; “They live there for the reason that I do; I like it” (Davis, 1994, pp. 72 – 73). Rather than continuing to ignore the corruption of city leaders and urge people to flee the cities, reformers like Simkhovitch instead pushed for active urban reform that would make the city more livable.

A part of larger efforts to positively reform urban communities, settlements also began to turn their sights to public health. Investigative social work and the friendly visiting conducted by settlement workers found their poor neighbors living in highly unsanitary conditions. Like their other endeavors, settlement workers went to work both personally educating their neighbors on proper sanitation and cleanliness as well as starting campaigns urging their local governments to set higher standards for cleanliness 75 in the streets, tenement homes, and schools (Carson, 1990, p. 72). The most notable reformer of public health, Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement in New

York City dedicated her life to the research, education, and implementation of public nursing (Barbuto, 1999, p. 224). Like many other female settlement founders, Wald also came from a respected, middle-class family, which afforded her the opportunity to pursue higher education. Her passions led her to nursing, a profession that was acceptable for a woman, since it gave her the opportunity to nurture and care for others. Also like her fellow settlement founders, though Wald would follow her passions in “womanly work,” she would push the boundaries of nursing and help it to evolve into a public profession that brought about radical change in urban communities (Carson, 1990, p. 73).

As one of the few occupations acceptable to young women in the late 19th century, girls flocked to study nursing as a chance to fulfill their womanly duty to practicing care and benevolence (Cruea, 2005, p. 194). While the Henry Street nurses may have upheld beliefs related to womanly duty, female nature, and continued to honor the sanctity of the home and family, like other settlement residents, their work was done first and foremost, to better the lives of the urban poor and to invoke change in public life that would give women a place in it. Though Wald was an influential reformer outside of public health, her legacy makes her best known for the work she did for children and public health care services. Through her settlement home, the Henry Street Nursing

Settlement, Lillian Wald created the first community health care program in the world

(Philips, 1999, p. 194). The Henry Street nurses provided education and medical services to the people of the Lower East Side, both at their clinic in the settlement home and as visiting nurses in the community. Their services were mostly free, since their neighbors could not afford to pay (Carson, 1990, p. 74). 76

One of the places the Lillian Wald and her public nurses made the most lasting impact was in public schools. Under a new public health initiative to study “social diseases,” doctors were place in public schools to review the students and send them home if they displayed symptoms of transmittable diseases (Wald, 1915, p. 45). In none of these cases was the doctor attempting to treat the sick children. Wald and her nurses were disappointed. Not only were sick children being refused care by a medical professional, but by being sent home, they were also barred from receiving an education.

In response, Wald suggested an experiment: the schools would allow a nurse to see the children deemed infectious by the doctor, the nurse would then treat the student, and if infection rates were to remain low at the school under this experimental system, public funds would pay to hire a nurse at each public school to treat students (Wald, 1915, p.

51). Most students required only simple care and could return to class immediately, and those that required more intervention would be taken to a dispensary (sometimes by the visiting nurse herself) for treatment or taken home where care could be done by the family under the instruction of a visiting nurse (Wald, 1915, p. 52). The experiment was a success and led to the induction of school nurses in every public school.

The care of children was of great concern to the Henry Street nurses in their crusade for improving public health, but the care of the child went along with their care of the family. Like other settlement homes, the Henry Street Settlement was concerned with the ills and dangers of poverty. Wald’s commitment to public health care was done directly to combat the dangers that come from poverty, while giving her patients respect and sympathy, she knew they were often denied when they sought more traditional treatment in hospitals (Phillips, 1999, p. 74). For that reason, Wald and her nurses preferred at-home care to hospitalization so that the sick could remain comfortable in 77 their own home, surrounded by their family (Carson, 1990, p. 74). Besides keeping them healthy, the Henry Street Settlement performed other family services, such as foster care placements, work placements, and access to other charity services (Carson, 1990, p. 74).

Wald’s public nurses show how the ideals of Public Womanhood influenced young women to commit themselves to a life in a public occupation while still acting in accordance to their “female natures.” Without the founding of the Henry Street

Settlement and Lillian Wald’s formation of the profession of public nursing, women would never have had this opportunity in public spaces, nor would the field of public health had been influenced in this way.

Immigrant Services

Like the Henry Street Settlement’s devotion to the entire family, other urban settlements focused their reform efforts not just on ways to assist the women and children of their communities but to provide necessary care to each person who needed help.

Being located in cities, most settlement homes shared their neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, and for that reason, these settlements focused their energy on immigrant services. Their work in assisting immigrant families took various forms: legal, cultural, educational, and in each category of their work, settlement women have been criticized. As middle-class women from reputable families, their experiences in the home and at female colleges led them to a develop a dedication to a universal feminism which accepted and magnified traditional traits of femininity. Similarly, their upbringing in those same middle-class homes would instill in them a set of middle-class, American values and morals. The criticism settlement women receive with regard to their work in immigration services is concerned with the ways that they imposed their American, 78 middle-class values on their immigrant neighbors as a form of social control (Batlan,

2006, p. 243).

While reading the writings of the settlement founders and residents, one will observe the attempt at thoughtfulness they had practiced in their work for their immigrant neighbors. In Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams describes the efforts taken by the home to encourage national pride towards the immigrants’ home countries through classes and festivals (Carson, 1990, p. 103). Observing the disconnect between first- generation Americans and their immigrant parents, Hull House residents attempted to force an appreciation for their home countries and the culture that families had left behind

(Addams, 1961, pp. 143 – 144). One can appreciate the sentiment and the gentle intentions behind such festivals and classes, but reading it from a modern perspective, one can also feel critical of the elitist position from which these events were carried out.

In the writings, one will also observe an ongoing education of the settlement founders and residents as they continue to live amongst their immigrant neighbors.

Perceptions or beliefs about immigrant populations change over the course of their writing, and oftentimes there are even admissions of misunderstandings or mistakes the residents had made towards their neighbors. Grace Abbott, a resident of Hull House and life-long immigration reformer, dedicated her work at Hull House not just to improving the lives of immigrants in the United States but also to educating herself and others in how to cast aside old assumptions and prejudices long held against foreign populations

(Barbuto, 1999, pp. 2 – 3). While to modern readers, this education that Abbott sought might seem trivial, her experiences must be taken in their historical context. The massive influx of immigrants to American cities was still a relatively phenomenon. In order for a young middle-class woman to come to form her own opinions and beliefs about people 79 foreign to her and not just take popular prejudices as truth, an education of sorts would be necessary. Besides her friendly visiting done as a settlement worker, Abbott also took a four-month trip to visit central and eastern Europe to see the homelands of the immigrant populations she was regularly serving in Chicago (Abbott, 1950, p. 494). Her trip to

Europe inspired her and helped her to better understand why so many people fled their homes in favor of starting over in the United States. It also helped her to better understand what the promise of America meant to the immigrants she was serving, and it drove her to make their experiences better and more rewarding (Abbott, 1950, p. 494).

In 1908, Abbott and other Hull House residents founded the Immigrants’

Protective League in order to provide immigrant communities protection from exploitation and to assist them in integrating successfully into their new American homes

(Barbuto, 1999, p. 103). While the league can once again be criticized for its

Americanization and social control of the immigrant, there were solid benefits for immigrants that came from the league’s founding. Sympathetic to the confusion of arriving in a new place, Abbott and the League established “waiting rooms” at train stations where incoming immigrants could meet with a liaison who knew their native language and was ready to assist them in finding transportation, a place to stay, or even to help them contact relatives or friends who had already arrived (Davis, 1994, p. 93). By welcoming new individuals and families into the city and introducing themselves as friendly helpers, through the League settlement residents were also introducing them to the services that Hull House could provide, further establishing it as a home to all.

The League also conducted investigations into immigrant banks and employment agencies, uncovering the ways that they were exploiting the immigrants they were supposed to be helping (Abbott, 1950, p. 384). In response to the exploitation in their 80 labor, money-handling and housing situations (as already discussed), settlement women continued to as a bridge between professional men (landlords, ward bosses, managers, bankers, lawyers, etc.) and the immigrant (Batlan, 2006, p. 247). Continuing their settlement purpose as moderators, settlement residents were entering a new, more public territory in acting as liaisons in legal and labor disputes.

The Labor Movement

It was not just through immigration reform that settlement homes were to become involved with the labor movement. When observed as part of a larger picture, the labor movement and settlement homes were connected from the very beginning. At Hull

House, Jane Addams was already fascinated with labor reform before she had even approached Ellen Gates Starr with the idea for the settlement. During her second trip to

London, Addams attended a meeting held by the Match Girls who were striking for better wages, hours, and working conditions (Addams, 1961, p. 48). They were the first active example of a labor union, and while she was intrigued, she was not yet moved to action.

While she had read the work of Karl Marx’s Capital, Addams was still too idealistic to appreciate the material action that Marx suggested (Knight, 2005, p. 172). It would take her own personal experiences living amongst working-class individuals and her friendships forged with more radical reformers than herself to truly inspire her to play an active role in the labor movement.

One of Addams most influential friends into the world of labor reform, Florence

Kelley was one of Hull House’s early residents, as well as one of its most productive in bringing about progressive change (Barbuto, 1999, p. 109). Kelley’s impact on Hull

House is unmistakable. An intelligent, resourceful, and passionate woman, Kelley proudly referred to herself as a Marxist and urged her fellow residents to see the evils of 81 capitalism and the need for radical labor reform (Knight, 2005, p. 232). While her peers would not agree fully with her politics, they were influenced and excited by them,

Addams included. Straight away, she was made the head of Hull Houses’ new labor bureau, tasked with finding employment for young women in the neighborhood (Knight,

2005, p. 229). Her dedication to labor would not stop there. While under the throes of unregulated capitalism, all workers were facing exploitation, women and children, with little to no agency or power, faced a mountain of hardships. Just as women and children were the first groups helped by settlement homes when they had first opened their doors, with regards to the labor movement, settlements also believed it was their duty to protect them from labor exploitation.

In the fight for women’s labor, one can once again see the influence of the home as a feminine space in the arguments made on behalf of the need for fairer wages, regulated hours, and better, safer working conditions. In making a case for women who work, settlement workers appealed to policymakers from the traditional beliefs still held about the nature of women. While they were not making claims that women should remain in the home, they were continuing to make their case with reference to a woman’s place as the moral center of the home.

Since Hull House had opened its doors to offer care to its impoverished neighbors, the services that were most immediately utilized were those which aided working mothers, such as the kindergarten and other childcare services. Young mothers worked to support themselves and their families, but without regulations on their labor, the hours were long, the wages low, and often the work was grueling or even dangerous.

This outraged Addams and other settlement workers rallying for labor reform. For all the talk of women’s rightful place being in the home to nurture her children, it seemed 82 hypocritical that these women work all day, leaving their children in the care of strangers

(Addams, 1961, p. 104). At Hull House, an Eight-Hour club was formed where working women could share their experiences, read literature on the labor movement, and prepare their own public demonstrations (Addams, 1961, p. 124). Moved by the club’s purpose,

Addams herself addressed other women’s clubs that met at the house, encouraging all of the working women to join the Eight-Hour club and the fight for labor reform, appealing to them as mothers (Addams, 1961, p. 125).

It was not just well-known reformers like Addams who were raising arguments using the traditional role of women as mothers and wives. As Wald and her settlement workers in the Henry Street Settlement found themselves becoming involved in the labor movement, union members were making similar observations amongst themselves at meetings. Even young women who were not yet mothers or wives, continued to argue on behalf of their femininity. If they were forced to labor all day for very little pay and under harsh conditions, there would be little time to prepare themselves as wives and mothers, much less find a suitable husband (Wald, 1915, p. 204). “We must work for bread now, but we must think of our future homes,” a young immigrant woman named Minnie urged her fellow union members, “We never see a meal prepared. For all we know, soup grows on trees” (Wald, 1915, p. 205).

Statements like Minnie’s are reminiscent the appeals once made on the good that could come from female colleges. Though higher education was traditionally considered useless or even dangerous for young women, women’s colleges, armed with their new liberal arts curriculums claimed that this kind of education would better suit young women to be better wives to their professional husbands (Carson, 1990, p. 24). While advocating for expanding the spaces women would be permitted, they still relied on 83 traditional beliefs about the role of women. Minnie does the same in her plea for regulated working hours. Though unionizing was considered very “unladylike” behavior,

Minnie and her fellow union members were making their case that without regulated hours, they could never be the right kind of woman for society (Wald, 1915, p. 203). By using the traditional role of women and the home as their argument, they were saying that without labor reform, their femininity and the entire domestic order was at stake.

Women from various professions began to use settlement homes as spaces to conduct their union meetings, further stressing the settlement home as a hybrid public- private space. Despite their good reputations, some settlement homes were not trusted by union leaders and members. It was suspicious to them that middle-class women were so interested in the cause of working women, but in many cases, settlements were able to convince unions that they were on their side, not the side of the employers (Davis, 1994, p. 144). Settlement involvement in reform female labor was not charity work, president of the American Federation of Labor and supporter of the Women’s Trade Union League,

Samuel Gompers urged hesitant union members; “What the working men want is less charity and more rights” (Davis, 1994, p. 144) Through the Women’s Trade Union

League, settlement residents and union women fought tirelessly to secure labor reform bills being voted into place.

Besides protecting the well-being of women, settlement homes were also well- known for their defense of children. Just as settlement homes became the rallying point for union meetings, they also concerned themselves with reforming child labor. If women needed labor reform in order to better care for their children, settlements surely had a place in the movement of child labor reform, since it seemed to be their natural role to protect the children from corrupt factory bosses. Part of the problem for reformers in 84 banning child labor was the issue that school was not yet mandatory, nor did many public schools have space for the number of students in a neighborhood (Knight, 2005, p. 243).

If children were not working, school was decidedly where they belonged, so the building of more schools was added to the agenda along with making school for children compulsory.

Similar to the fight for women’s labor reform, banning child labor was also a slow fight with many setbacks. From the minds of settlement workers, the problem was obvious: in the United States, it seemed that “industrial prosperity was more important than the protection of children” (Abbott, 1950, p. 512). Settlement workers had established themselves in their poor urban communities as middle-class women doing their natural duty of benevolence. As women, it was their purpose to care for the those in need. Once again, they used their traditional roles as women to defend working children in America. In a speech against child labor Jane Addams compellingly stated, “Children are put into industry very much as we put in raw material, and the product we look for is not better men and women, but better manufactured goods” (Davis, 1994, p. 130). Groups like the National Child Labor Committee made undeniable progress in the fight against child labor, but it was not until the creation of the United States Children’s Bureau that progress would really be achieved at a federal level. The brainchild of settlement founder,

Lillian Wald and eventually founded by Hull House resident Florence Kelley, the

Children’s bureau was signed into effect by President William Taft in 1912, making a statement that the United States government was dedicated to the wellbeing of the nations’ children (Barbuto, 1999, pp. 212 – 213). Thanks to the Children’s Bureau, the federal government would conduct investigations into the conditions of child labor and 85 even provide the first federal aid grants to assist needy mothers and their children

(Barbuto, 1999, p. 213).

Settlement homes were dedicated to the labor movement not just for women and children but for all workers facing exploitation. Just as they opened their doors to union women, male unions too used settlement homes for meetings and organizing. Their involvement in labor reform was inevitable, as Jane Addams states in Twenty Years at

Hull House. The settlement home was established to alleviate suffering amongst the poor in urban communities, and the labor movement was seeking to do just that (Addams,

1961, pp. 137 – 138). While the attention given to all unions was plentiful, for the purpose of staying true to the theme of this thesis, the work done by settlement homes and their residents on behalf working women and children remain the most important. It was in the fight for women and child laborers that settlement women were able to use their feminine spaces and their culture of womanhood to demand rights for marginalized groups. By reminding lawmakers of the long-accepted role of women as mothers and the moral centers of the home, they were able to negotiate progressive policies on their behalf.

Furthermore, as women themselves, they were making a public statement that it was up to women to protect the weak. They would be mothers of the nation. If that meant getting involved in politics, they were prepared to do so. Politics, they were told, was no place for a woman (Burt, 2004, p. 247). Settlement women, however, were beginning to fight back against that belief. Politics, they pressed, needed women to protect the nation from corruption.

Woman’s Role in Democracy

As settlement women took a more public approach in their work for the protection and betterment of marginalized groups like immigrants, women, and children, they began to realize that despite all of their efforts, no real change could occur without becoming involved in politics. They could continue their clubs and classes, give unions a place to organize, and even create nationally recognized organizations, but without ousting the corrupt politicians who were exploiting the poor people of their neighborhoods, reform would continue to move slowly. As this fact dawned on settlement workers across the

United States, they began to campaign in their neighborhoods to give the voting people more control over their own districts.

Jane Addams, once an avid believer that the settlement movement should remain impartial in politics, firmly took up a role in political involvement and would become a very influential political force in the years to come. Observing the corruption around her, despite the reform Hull House and other settlements worked so hard to achieve, she decided that Hull House had no business involving itself in any other endeavors if it did not also involve itself in the politics of its community (Davis, 1994, pp. 151 – 152). In

1896 and again 1898 Addams and Hull House took direct action, launching two separate campaigns to challenge the power of Johnny Powers, the ward boss of the nineteenth ward in Chicago (Davis, 1994, p. 154). While the campaigns were hard run, neither was successful in removing Powers from his position. However, Hull House’s attempts in the realm of local politics was not completely useless, but rather it proved to be significantly educational. Both campaigns offered a chance for the settlement workers to educate the people of the Nineteenth Ward about the dangers of corrupt politicians who win their voters by material promises, the need for reform throughout the community, and the 87 importance and weight of casting ones vote in an election (Addams, 1961, p. 193). After losing the fight against Powers, some settlement workers wanted to return to the days when reform was done through clubs and organizations, Addams and others saw this as further proof that they should move forward. Influence in local politics was important for reform, but more important was political intervention at a federal level.

The most influential chance for federal involvement came in the form of a new political party. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt walked out of the Republican Convention, setting the stage for a new party, the Progressive party, to emerge from the division

(Davis, 1994, p. 195). Social reformers had already begun planning a platform, rooted in reform that they were determined for the Republican party to adopt. At the National

Conference of Charities and Correction, a group led by Jane Addams as president and made up of social workers a reform-focused platform was devised, influence by entirely by settlement experience and investigative of social work (Davis, 1994, p. 195). The draft outlined a bare minimum, calling for demands such as an eight-hour workday, a six-day work week, improvement of housing conditions, the abolition of child labor for those under the age of sixteen, and insurance for the injured, the aging, and the unemployed

(Davis, 1994, p. 196). When the proposal, titled Platform of Industrial Minimums was presented to the Republican party, it was rejected outright but Roosevelt had his interest peaked. When Roosevelt accepted the nomination as the candidate of the new

Progressive party, he used many ideas from the Platform of Industrial Minimums in his speech (Davis, 1994, p. 197). Soon after, the reform draft was adopted into the

Progressive party’s platform, as well as a promise to endorse women’s suffrage (Abbott,

1950, p. 502). 88

The emergence of the Progressive party caused excitement throughout the settlement movement in the United States, but some remained skeptical of Roosevelt as the head of the party. Some settlement workers believed that the party should be focused more on the reform platform than on the celebrity of Roosevelt and refused to join

(Davis, 1994, p. 200). While she did have fault with several points on the platform of the

Progressive party, such as the advocacy for two battleships and the refusal to seat two black delegates in southern states, Jane Addams became one of the most prominent social workers on the campaign (Davis, 1994, pp. 196 – 203). Like Hull House’s first campaign against Johnny Powers, the campaign of the progressive party did not expect to win their race. Rather, they sought the chance to educate the public and influence them to weakening the reigning parties’ majority (Davis, 1994, p. 205). Perhaps one of the greatest influences of the Progressive campaign was the impact that Jane Addams had on women and her fellow social workers, especially on the subject of women’s suffrage

(Abbott, 1950, p. 502).

Despite the gains of the first Progressive campaign, time was limited for the new party. After suffering the defeat of the election, Roosevelt turned to George Perkins for counsel, a partner in J.P. Morgan who advised Roosevelt to take the party in a more conservative direction (Davis, 1994, p. 214). The relationship between Roosevelt and

Perkins created a faction between the leaders and the social workers in the party. As

Perkins railed against the social workers, he began to raise doubts in Roosevelt’s mind about their necessity to the party, while the social workers urged Roosevelt to fire Perkins

(Davis, 1994, p. 215). Jane Addams remained the only social worker that Roosevelt trusted, but she was unwilling to give her energy to a party at war with itself (Davis,

1994, p. 215). Over the next several years, Addams descaled her responsibilities to the 89 party, taking many social workers with her, their new allegiance mainly falling with the

Democratic party (Davis, 1994, p. 216).

As important as the issue of social reform was to settlement women when they became involved in politics, so too was the issue of women’s suffrage. Hardly a new topic, women had begun the fight for suffrage around 1848 (Burt, 2004, p. 245).

Settlement women were familiar with the movement having grown up in homes where their mothers fought for the same cause. Edith and Grace Abbott, residents of Hull House were raised as third generation suffragettes, their mother and grandmother involving them in the movement in their childhood (Abbott, 1950, p. 500). Women like the Abbotts who had seen the long-time struggles of their mothers and grandmothers knew the fight for suffrage would be long and disappointing. Over the seven-decade fight, there would be incremental gains in states with allowances to vote in municipal or schoolboard elections, and sometimes states would grant women’s suffrage only to revoke it once again (Burt,

2004, pp. 245 – 246).

“We had been brought up to believe that women must have courage and that we should never accept a defeat as final,” wrote Edith Abbott about the suffrage movement in her account of her and her sister’s time at Hull House (Abbott, 1950, p. 500). The tenacity of women who believed that they too deserved an active role in democracy was strong, and settlement homes, run mostly by women soon became epicenters for suffrage organization. Just as Jane Addams had given speeches to women, urging them to join the fight for social reform and to do their part as active citizens, soon the speeches turned to encouraging women to join the suffrage movement (Addams, 1915, p. 11). Her speeches for the role of women in social reform, described that since women had no political role in democracy, they must take a social role to live up to their duty; in her speeches for 90 suffrage, Addams changed the conversation, claiming instead that women could never live up to their civic obligations if barred from politics (Knight, 2005, pp. 242 – 380).

The civic obligations of women, suffragists like Addams believed followed the values of morality and Christian charity they had been raised on. They had been taught in the home and in school that the role of women was a benevolent force, uniting the home in morality, and nurturing their families and caring for the weak (Addams, 1914, p. 8).

Settlement women took these lessons with them into the urban streets. Since the modern world had caused so much suffering amongst the poor, specifically immigrants, women, and children, women needed to expand their roles outside of the home in order to protect and help these degraded populations (Addams, 1915, p. 11). Women could use their

“natural tendencies” to help the poor women and children of urban communities by practicing good citizenship and by behaving neighborly, friendly, and motherly (Addams,

1914, pp. 8 – 9). They would apply the same tendencies to their fight for suffrage, appealing to the powerful men in charge as women above all else.

Women have been barred from public spaces and public activities for the mere fact that they are women. As the fairer sex, they must be protected so that they could continue to protect the innocence and morality of their family. Granting women access to public spaces and a right to vote would corrupt women and therefore corrupt the home.

Antisuffragists even went so far as to insist that it was simply unwomanly for a woman to vote or demand the right to participate in public spaces (Burt, 2004, p. 247). Politics was a masculine business just the same way that the public sphere was made up of masculine spaces; therefore, any woman desiring to exit the private sphere of the home was unwomanly. 91

When suffragists began using their femininity as the reason why they deserved the vote, it was a direct response to these antisuffragist claims that it was unwomanly to actively participate in democracy. They accepted their given roles as natural mothers and the moral center of the home, but rather than agree that those qualities made them unfit for politics, they applied a counter argument, insisting that the dirty, corrupt world of politics needed the softening, moral influence of womanhood to set it right (Burt, 2004, p.

246). Their work in social reform spoke to this belief. It had mainly been women (with male advocates) who had fought for women and child labor laws, public health and education, safer streets, homes, and working conditions; they had proved themselves as protectors of the weak through their settlement work. Despite testing the norm by their founding of settlements, they had ended up using the settlements to show their devotion to the home. Unlike bureaus or even charities, settlement homes engaged with their communities on a personal level, treating the settlement as a private home rather than an institution, some residents living there for the remainder of their lives. Settlement women had used their loyalty to femininity as their legitimacy for the work that they did and now they were using it in the fight for suffrage.

Despite their acceptance of traditional beliefs regarding the nature and role of women, suffragists had far from swayed public opinion on the matter. Mainstream press continued to print jokes, cartoons, and articles that presented suffragists as “manly” and aggressive and all women as silly, vain, and ignorant (Burt, 2004, p. 249). Though they acknowledged that there were women who demanded suffrage, popular belief was spread that the average woman did not even want the right to vote. “The average woman is too much occupied with affairs close to the true nature of her sex, to waste thought and time 92 in public demonstration against the ballot,” claimed the Milwaukee Free Press in 1911

(Burt, 2004, p. 258).

However, despite the antisuffragist noise of the mainstream press, some smaller papers did their part to print editorials in favor of women’s suffrage or at least presented both sides of the debate (Burt, 2004, p. 250). Newspapers printing in favor of women’s suffrage restated female-positive claims originally made by suffragists, listing their accomplishments for women, children, and the poor in their social reform efforts. Pro- suffrage allies believed that with the vote and a more active place in politics, women would be able to accomplish more for disenfranchised groups. As to the argument that the vote would cause the home to disintegrate, the Milwaukee Journal wrote, “Nature has planted in the heart of most women that love of home which would keep her there” (Burt,

2004, p. 252). In their plea for the vote, suffragists were not claiming to be anything more than what the home had made them. They were merely asking for the right to occupy a more public space in society.

Settlement workers and suffragists of the 19th and early 20th century paved the way for women’s rights in the United States. Women’s colleges gave middle-class white women access to higher education that had earlier been denied them. It exposed them to the social sciences and inspired them to seek out a new way to live according to their feminine natures. The settlement movement blended private female life and obligations with public activities in urban communities. Using domestic attitudes and benevolence, settlement women evolved the role of women as a private actor dedicated to the wellbeing of the public. After being granted suffrage in 1920 with the passing of the 19th amendment, one battle was won, but the fight for women’s place in public spaces was far from over. 93

At the time suffragists, now often referred to as “first wave feminists,” were demanding radical change by gaining the right to vote, however they were basing their arguments on traditional beliefs and stereotypes that continued to root them in their sex.

For their dedication to social reform, they did little to reform opinions on gender. Rather, they chose to celebrate the “natural” difference between the sexes and to make “female traits” like gentility, patience, nurturance, and beauty strengths instead of weaknesses

(Echols, 1983, p. 42). However, history is rarely made up of unproblematic stories. While settlement women and suffragists did open new doors to public spaces and pave the way for women to gain more social and political equality, their methods were far from perfect, as has briefly been discussed throughout this thesis. Already granted a level of privilege due to their race and class, settlement women approached social reform and early feminism acting in solidarity with capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. By embracing the home and a cultural womanhood, settlement homes, their residents, and founders brought about positive change to the areas of public education and health, labor reform, city planning, and social work, as well as provide women with early paths into public spaces and political activity. Both good and bad, settlement women changed the United

States with their work.

Chapter 4: Legacies and Critiques of Embracing Gendered Space

The settlement movement in the United States was a time when middle-class, white women used the privilege of their race and class to gain significant public and political achievements for women. As this thesis has shown, access to female colleges provided middle-class women with education in the social sciences that would help to inspire them to challenge the public role of women in society. Though educated women helped to disrupt the traditional role of women by occupying public spaces outside of the home and involving themselves in active public and political social reform initiatives, settlement workers continued to rely on their middle-class values in order to make public, societal gains for women. Relying on universal notions of womanhood, settlement workers practiced Christian charity and benevolence as a woman’s natural role. Rather than challenge gendered traits, settlement women embraced them, asserting themselves publicly as mothers of the world.

The settlement home, a grand residential home in the middle of the urban sprawl stood as a symbol of middle-class femininity. Settlement workers occupied the settlement homes as if they were the very homes where they had been raised. Women, living together, working in the city, caring for the urban poor: these were all radical achievements for women at the time. These activities were influenced by traditional femininity, while also evolving the role of women to be more public and active. Female founders sat as matriarchs of most settlement homes, directly challenging ideas surrounding a traditional family. Though settlement homes reflected middle-class aesthetics settlement workers were used to from their upbringings, the bonds they shared with their new settlement family were built on shared experiences, education, and the reform work they did in their communities. 95

This blend of accepting universal womanhood and the use of the home as a nurturant space with woman’s evolving role in active, participatory democracy was undeniably successful in achieving not only countless social reform policies for women, children, laborers, and immigrants, but it also influenced a feminist movement that continues to the present date. In the following chapter, I will discuss the legacies of settlement women in their fight for public reform. While settlement workers achieved a great deal of success in the area of public administration, the chapter will also discuss the ways in which their gender proved an obstacle constantly to be dealt with. The chapter will then pivot to critically examine feminist legacies of the settlement movement. Just as the thesis thus far has pointed to various racial and classist critiques of settlement women’s approach to social reform and the fight for female independence, this chapter will tie all of those critiques together in order to analyze the ways that embracing gendered space and universal womanhood has influenced more modern waves of feminism in the United States.

Public Legacies

Built in the heart of urban slums, settlement homes put their workers face to face with problems of poverty. For settlement women, the work they did to aid the poor was congruent with the natural role they played as women. As women were considered the moral and nurturant center of the home and the family, their benevolence then should be transferred to public life, making all of society a family that women should be in charge of caring for (Stivers, 2000, pp. 90 – 91). Settlement work was personal to the women involved; it allowed them to work in the public sphere, while still maintaining their traditional femininity. Though they were challenging traditional notions of a woman’s place, they were still being true to their female natures by doing work that was good for 96 the whole of society. Through settlement clubs and organizations, women became major contributors to some of the first social welfare policies (Stivers, 2000, 48). Not only were they directly addressing problems of poverty in the neighborhoods where they settled, but they were also effecting legislative change that would continue to shape public policy in the United States today. Projects like The Hull House Maps and Papers remains to be one of the first studies of urban sociology in the United States (The Residents of Hull House,

2007, p. 2). Studies like those undertaken at Hull House would inspire a whole new type of research in the field.

Despite their contributions to local urban reform, federal legislation, and academic sociology, settlement work has often been reduced to the gender of its contributors. Though the settlement movement helped to evolve the way that women were able to interact with public and private spaces, public spaces were still considered masculine and therefore, inappropriate for a woman. Settlement women used their gender to make a case for why this needed to change. By asserting that public spaces needed women to care for them, they were not denying traditional beliefs about the differing natures of men and women. Rather, they were disagreeing with the way that their gender barred them from work they believed their natures best suited them for.

As bureaus focusing on municipal research began to be founded at the start of the

20th century, their research became focused on the same issues that settlement homes had been concerned with for the past decade. However, bureau approaches to urban research would differ greatly from settlement work. Settlement reformers had done important work, but they were criticized by bureau men for their personal, feminine approach

(Stivers, 2000, p. 33). Friendly visiting and settlement reform was considered slowly paced, individually helpful, and ineffective in bringing about wide-spread change. While 97 they agreed that government should be used to better citizens’ lives, bureau men approached the work scientifically, treating social welfare as a business, which they considered more effective (Stivers, 2000, p. 33).

Settlement workers defended their work. As the 20th century came under way, settlement homes were beginning to realize that their work did to be more widespread.

Their gender, of course blocked them from more active participation in politics, and the reform men who could speak for them were often not taken seriously by the political men in charge (Stivers, 2000, p. 26). Since women had dominated social reform, they had thereby gendered the practice of social reform as a feminine activity. Any work they would do would be considered feminine: too personal, less effective. When pushed to conduct more scholarly research rather than continue their clubs, classes, and friendly visiting, settlement workers like Jane Addams fought back, reminding bureau men and politicians the nature of settlement work. “The needs of the people came before the needs of urban researchers” (Stivers, 2000, p. 94). Only by immersing oneself in the neighborhood and coming to know the real, personal needs of those who lived there, could meaningful work be done to help those effected by the hardships of poverty and industry.

While municipal research was needed to influence a federal welfare policy, settlement workers like Addams were skeptical of its scientific and businesslike approach. Addams and other settlement workers feared that laws built upon a scientific rather than experiential observations would lead to ineffective, blanket policies that did little to better the lives of the people they were written for (Stivers, 2000, p. 97).

Settlement workers believed that it was the personal nature of settlement work and social reform that made it so effective in helping the poor in their communities. 98

The legacy of this gendered schism between masculine municipal research and feminine settlement work is still present today. The area of public administration continues to be dominated by scientific and businesslike research, rather than by the personal, care work originally done by settlement women. Women, of course are still involved in community development and reform, but they are still often gendered into personalized, care-based work. Like their foremothers of the settlement movement, women have continued to dominate the fields of nursing and social work.

Lillian Wald, the founder of the Henry Street Nursing Settlement, created the field of public nursing, which remained active well into the 20th century. Public nurses, with their focus on home-based care were assets to urban communities, assisting in studies around infant mortality, sanitation, communicable diseases, and immunization (Buhler-

Wilkerson, 1993, p. 1780). Despite the worth that they showed in protecting poor, urban populations from illness, by the end of the second World War, public nursing was beginning to be phased out of community health practices. Advances in medicine, surgery, and technology were advancing, and with those changes, more trust and legitimacy was placed in the hospital system, which meant that it was becoming increasingly more difficult for public nursing agencies to work independently (Buhler-

Wilkerson, 1983, p. 1783). Though the field of nursing in modern society is institution- based, Lillian Wald and her settlement nurses changed the way that public health is researched and practiced.

Like nursing, the field of social work has undergone some changes since Jane

Addams and her settlement workers first began their practice of friendly visiting in

Chicago’s Near West Side. Since the 1960s a rise in social activism, thanks to civil rights and women’s movements, social work gained a renewed interest since Addams’ time 99

(Ruth &Marshall, 2017, p. 240). However, with the ever-changing social climate, social work today is not just concerned with family services, public education, urban clean-up, and immigration as Addams and her settlement workers had been at the start the profession. As advanced capitalism and globalization continue to change the face of society, social workers have added a list of new concerns to their field of research and community aid, such as mental illness and suicide prevention, trauma, violence, substance abuse, homelessness, and racial inequality (Ruth & Marshall, 2017, p. 241). As the list grows of societal ills, private organizations outside of social work have stepped in to aid communities. While some may see this shift as social work influencing a new generation of active citizens, others view the situation more critically. They believe that social work has become too institutionalized, moving away from its personal, community-centered approach that Addams and the settlement movement had seen as most important (Johnson, 2004, p. 321).

A version of settlement homes still exists in a modern context (as neighborhood homes or community centers) though, much about them has changed. For social reformers living in urban areas, the concept of the settlement home remains a hopeful one. With the power of time on their sides, modern-day settlement workers are able to use their settlement homes to create more racially inclusive homes that are sensitive to racial and cultural difference. While settlement homes like Hull House have been criticized overtime for their attempts to assimilate and exclude racial and cultural difference, modern settlement homes, have become places that help integrate immigrant individuals and families while remaining respectful of their culture and heritage (Yan et al., 2009, p. 44). While these modern settlements continue to focus on immigrant needs like their predecessors, they also continue to be a space meant to serve urban 100 communities in general by offering them clubs, classes, and community events (Yan et al., 2009, pp. 44 – 45).

Studies of modern settlement homes have shown that it is not just through the types of events and activities provided by the homes, but also the sense of community that the space provides that make the homes an important asset to urban communities. By participating in events at modern settlement homes, both those who volunteer or work at the homes and those who are served and aided by the homes report that the homes make them feel more connected to their community and their neighbors (Yan et al., 2009, p.

43). The presence of a settlement home remains a place where people feel encouraged to volunteer their time, to serve those in their community. One can see the clear linkage between the duty college-educated young women felt about joining settlement movement and the modern desire to volunteer social service. However, there are differences between these modern volunteers and the function of the homes themselves.

Most importantly, modern settlement homes are not boarding homes as they were traditionally. In part, the function of the settlement home as a family home and the boarding residents in it as a family unit has fallen away with time. Volunteers at modern settlement homes live in their own homes and only visit the settlement home to do their work. Their fellow volunteers are not their family in the same vein that traditional settlement homes encouraged a kinship through the sharing of work and experiences.

Besides the homes themselves no longer serving as boarding facilities, they are also funded by the government, which has institutionalized them in a way that Jane Addams had always resisted (Yan et al., 2017, p. 1594). One thing that has remained consistent between modern settlement homes and their predecessors is gender. A study of modern 101 settlement homes found that 70% of settlement volunteers are women (Yan et al., 2017, p. 1597).

The success of American settlement homes has been likened by certain scholars to the gender of most settlement residents. Women, brandishing a new education worked at settlement homes in a new wave of female independence, linked to traditional notions of woman’s role as a nurturer. The settlement home stood as a hybrid space, both private and public. In it, settlement women used traditional notions of femininity to broaden their access to the public sphere and gain more political agency. However, by choosing this method of compromise, they set feminism on a course where the social structures of gender were yet to be challenged in the mainstream. This can be seen in the simple case that even today, a majority of volunteers in modern settlement homes, the field of social work, and the nursing profession are women. The settlement movement created public and political opportunities to women, who used their evolving role to generate meaningful progressive change, however, it was not without fault.

Feminist Legacies

The settlement movement is just one part of the story of the first movement for women’s rights, but it is unique because it highlights gendered space as an actor in the early fights for women’s rights in the US. During the first wave of feminism, there were common ideas and beliefs that were shared amongst the female activists and reformers, which have been discussed throughout this thesis. Early feminists were advocating for a woman’s right to education, to work outside of the home, to have an economic independence, to have an independent voice and representation in politics, etc. Their approach to achieving these goals was similar, as well. They took up a cultural feminism, where they agreed to the presence of a natural feminine difference, but rather than accept 102 those female traits as weaknesses, they celebrated them. They became prideful of their assumed patience, nurturance, temperance, and benevolence. These were not traits often associated with the public sphere, but early women’s rights activists made the argument that in order for the social ills of modern society to be helped and healed, a woman’s touch was needed. The public world of business and politics needed to be cared for like a home.

The settlement home acted as a hybrid space: a private home in a public, urban space. Settlement women used domestic, nurturant tactics to perform public services and work for social reform. This thesis has shown how settlement homes and workers managed this hybrid space of public and private and negotiate women into the world of progressive politics. However, by embracing gendered space and compromising in the role of women, the early women’s rights movement passed on a complicated legacy of feminism. In this final section, I will critique multiple areas of the settlement movement’s approach in accepting gendered space.

Female Colleges

As a space that first inspired young women to pursue a nontraditional path, female colleges provided women, not just with an education, but with a community of likeminded people. The example of Jane Addams shows that without her experiences at

Rockford Seminary, she would not have been set on the path towards founding the first

American Settlement Home. However, it must also be acknowledged that Jane Addams would not have attended Rockford Seminary if it were not for her family’s wealth and their racial category as white Americans. The story told of young women coming together to be educated and inspired to live nontraditional lives in public spaces is a story undercut by racial and economic privilege. 103

At the time when Jane Addams and other early settlement women entered female colleges, institutions of higher education were elite and patriarchal (Carson, 1990, 20).

Though some established universities began to slowly admit black students in waxing and waning numbers during the latter half of the 19th century, opportunities for graduating black students would not equal those of their fellow white students (Spain, 1992, 156).

Some all-black institutions would also open, but once again, linked to political and social racism, their education would not be held to equal standard as traditionally established universities (Spain, 1992, p. 157). Women’s colleges, even those that were attended only by white students would face a difference as education, as well, but they were still granted luxuries based on their race and economic position.

The argument made in favor of why young women should be able to attend institutions of higher education, was in order for them to be trained in the ways of becoming better wives and mothers (Carson, 1990, p. 22). This argument made on their behalf is a privileged one, itself. It must be recognized that while it was traditional for middle-class women to remain at home as mothers and wives, black women and women of lower socio-economic status had already been working in the public sphere (Spain,

1992, p. 171). This fact shows that elites involved in higher education were not concerned with the entire female population turning away from the home, but rather a certain race and class of women. These same elites were silent in advocating for black and poor women to leave their domestic, industrial jobs to enter colleges and universities.

It was only white, middle-class women that they were concerned with.

The women attending female colleges that inspired the settlement movement were white and middle-class. They were also being educated by white, middle-class instructors. The curriculum that they received was a feminized version of white, western 104 scholars. Similarly, the colleges themselves were designed and run similarly to their middle-class homes, which upheld Victorian standards of morality and practice (Liu &

Grey, 2018, p. 650). The young women attending female colleges were continuously surrounded by a familiar privilege. Their advocacy for social reform and women’s rights too would follow in a similar vein. The settlement movement would be led by white- middle class women, using white, middle-class beliefs and values to make a case for a

“universal woman” who was inherently assumed to be white and middle-class.

The Home and The Family

The settlement homes themselves stand out as the most obviously celebrated gendered space that the women of the early women’s rights movements embraced.

Settlement homes were designed, decorated, and run similar to the middle-class homes their residents were familiar with. In this way, the homes themselves functioned more as a familiar comfort to the settlement residents than as a safe haven for the poor of their communities. The settlement movement as a whole was as much about the residents themselves as it was about the work they did in their communities. In Twenty Years at

Hull House, Jane Addams writes about the philosophy of settlement work, social ethics, and social reform, but she also speaks of the importance of Hull House as a space for white, middle-class women like herself to challenge traditional paths of life.

Addams writes about the inconsistencies and disappointments that plague educated, middle-class women when they leave school and become expected to fulfill traditional roles as wives and mothers (Addams, 1961, pp. 70 – 71). Educated girls find a purely domestic life unfulfilling, needing to live an active, purposeful life outside of the home. The settlement home offered a compromise. Upon graduating, middle-class girls moved from their parents’ homes into another form of a middle-class home. While the 105 settlement homes provided young women with a new sense of autonomy and access to the public sphere, settlement residents were still clinging to the familiarity and privilege of a middle-class family home where they lived amongst their peers (Carson, 1990, p.

1952). Unlike the residents of European settlements like Toynbee Hall, settlement workers in US settlements had regular contact with their poor neighbors in classes and clubs, but also in personal and social calls. However, settlement residents were protected from the actualities of living in an urban slum like their immigrant neighbors. The settlement home was the shield that separated them from truly living amongst the poor.

Settlement workers and others involved in the early women’s rights movement consistently used the home and essentialist feminine traits to support their right to settlement work and to bargain for more social and political rights for women. In its historical context, simply advocating for more access to the public sphere was radical, however this approach has been continuously criticized from feminists of the second and third waves. First wave feminists of the late 19th century and early 20th century were more concerned with reforming woman’s place in society, rather than radically changing the system that kept them inferior to men (Firestone, 1970, p. 26). By not only accepting essentialist female traits but celebrating them, first wave feminists were colluding with patriarchal institutions like the family, which continued to ground women in their assumed inferior biology (Firestone, 1970, p. 17). Though settlement women were working and living in urban spaces, they were doing so through the buffer of the settlement home. They were taking incremental steps to fully occupying public spaces and compromising the breadth of the role of women outside of private, domestic spaces.

This compromise with patriarchy is also apparent in the arguments suffragists commonly made on behalf of the vote. Rather than cast their femininity aside and 106 demand a political voice as a human being and a citizen, they once again fell back on their female traits of nurturance and temperance (Burt, 2004, p. 252). Their right to the vote was demanded because they were women, rather than human beings or citizens.

Suffragists appealed to elites with traditional ideals in an effective way, but it continued to connect women with the identity of motherhood. Instead of challenging that a woman is more than her biology, first wave feminists rooted women further in her biology, not just as a mother to her own children, but as the mother to the nation.

The use of a “Mother” identity was proliferated throughout first wave feminism.

By accepting the role of a universal mother, early feminists were able to criticize the way that the system was turning a blind eye to social ills in urban communities. Who else but mothers would care for those in need? However, by making the argument that it was woman’s natural work to care and reform social problems plaguing the poor and troubled, it was also cementing women’s work in the realm of care. From the discussion about the modern state of the fields of nursing and social work, it is apparent that these care roles have stuck.

Later waves of feminism have attempted to move away from essentialist female traits and the home as a woman’s proper place. Starting in the second wave, feminist activists rejected traditionally gendered spaces like the home, instead pointing to them as patriarchal structures that kept women rooted in difference and separation to a private sphere. Along with this was a radical challenge to question the patriarchal structure of the family. Feminists of the second and third wave tend to resist the notion of a universal woman who embodies a gendered set of traits. However, outside of the United States, in the Global South, one can observe feminist movements using similar “motherist” arguments as justifications for public, political organizing. Women’s activist groups such 107 as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina) and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) have found agency in identifying themselves as mothers in their political activities (Bouvard, 1994, p. 187; Fluri, 2008, p. 36).

Surprisingly similar to the way “motherist” claims were made by settlement women and suffragists in 20th century America, these feminist groups in the Global South are using traditional cultural norms about the home and feminine nature to challenge the role that women have in the state (Bouvard, 1994, p. 188).

Patriarchal Institutions

As second-wave feminist activist Shulamith Firestone wrote in her book, The

Dialectic of Sex, “The goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution” (Firestone, 1970, p. 38). Underpinning most or all critiques of first wave feminism and their embracing of gendered space and essentialist female traits is that early women’s rights activists were compromising with the patriarchy rather than challenging and changing the oppressive system. In the 1890s, at the beginning of the settlement movement, women’s rights activists allowed themselves to be preoccupied with reforming single issues, like the vote, rather than creating their own systems that challenged the existing structure (Firestone, 1970, p. 27). While this helped to create women’s clubs and organizations that acted as a driving force of change, these organizations, as we have observed, kept women in private or hybrid spaces, clinging to essentialist female traits in order to gain incremental, political rights.

Settlement workers and suffragists were concerned with reforming society and politics, rather than creating a new socio-political order. In many ways, they were after gaining material equalities, rather than structural ones. They made bargains and compromises in order to gain basic rights and representation. This can be most clearly 108 observed in the merging of social reformers with the Progressive Party. The very name of the platform social reformers brought before Roosevelt was the “Platform of Industrial

Minimums” (Davis, 1994, p. 195). A new party could have been a chance to challenge the current political order, but instead settlement workers and suffragists were continuing to compromise with a patriarchal system for minimal rights. They placated political elites by embracing gendered spaces like the home and accepting essentialist feminine traits.

Rather than being truly radical, they maintained their position as reformers. Instead of challenging the gender hierarchy, they made a more positive place for themselves below men. While they evolved the way that women had access to public spaces, they continued to limit themselves to private spaces like the home, through their arguments that women deserve a political voice in order to maintain a moral order in society as she does in the home, as a mother.

While second and third wave feminists have critiqued and attempted to undo the methods of the first wave women, it has not been done overnight. Because of the compromises early feminists made, patriarchal structures have remained solid and the ideas about differing natures of man and woman have also endured. Men as well as women continue to accept that there are essential biological and sociological differences between the sexes and that those differences make each sex better suited for different roles in society. Though women in the United States today have access to public spaces, economic independence, and political agency, much of that is thanks to the feminist activists of the second wave.

Despite women having more access and agency, it is in gendered attitudes and beliefs that allow patriarchy to continue uninterrupted in the world. Because the patriarchal structures are so ingrained in public consciousness, any disruptions to those 109 accepted norms are tried as suspect. Second wave feminists took radical approaches to challenging patriarchal structures, but because of the essentialist beliefs, they had to push against the traditional form of feminism left behind from the early women’s rights activists. Those early feminists like Jane Addams, Louisa May Alcott, and Eleanor

Roosevelt symbolized a conservative, cultural feminism. Their lectures on the importance of female benevolence and altruism inspired women to accept their roles in the home pridefully and to approach female challenges with a feminine patience, gentility, and conciliation (Firestone, 1970, p. 31).

By continuously embracing the home as a gendered space, first wave feminists like the settlement workers were able to evolve the role of women in public spaces in order to influence public policy and secure a political voice for women. However, those same actions positioned privileged, white, middle-class women as the face of the women’s rights movement, while also doing little to gain legitimate power for women.

History seldom has moments where the actors behaved without consequence, yet it is important to examine all sides of the story. The settlement movement and their methods of embracing gendered spaces in order to gain political influence exemplifies this fact.

110

Conclusion

The theory of gendered space acknowledges a gender hierarchy which has historically and traditionally preferred men over women. As the dominant gender, man has been able to co-exist in both public and private spaces, while woman, on the basis of her feminine nature, has been segregated to private spaces. Cut off from the knowledge and activity of public spaces, woman has developed her own knowledge, kinships, and identity with relation to her private spaces, like the home. Using her knowledge and experiences in the home and other private, female gendered spaces, woman has sociologically and culturally evolved her role in society.

By using her gendered spaces as reference point, woman mastered traditional beliefs regarding her feminine nature, choosing to accept feminine traits as positive rather than limiting. As middle-class women gained more access to education in the mid-19th century, women’s colleges were all-female run institutions that inspired young women to aspire to lives beyond the traditional home. The settlement movement allowed women to engage in active work in public spheres. By helping the poor, women were still acting in accordance to their feminine nature, but by living in urban environments, they were rebelling against traditional lives as mothers and wives.

Settlement homes themselves became their most powerful tool in the evolution of women’s role in society. The settlement home was a large, residential home in the midst of the city. Female settlement residents lived there while they worked in the city amongst the poor. This allowed them to benefit from both the comforts of a traditionally middle- class home, while also giving them personal autonomy by living away from their family and also giving them access to the city right outside of their front door. Settlement homes also served a public role as well as a private one. Not only did they house residents, but 111 they also served as classrooms, event centers, meeting houses, restaurants, etc. The settlement home was neither exclusively public nor private. Rather, the settlement home was a public-private space, manipulated by the female residents in order to stay true to their feminine nature while also engaging in public life.

As the settlement campuses grew, women became more engaged in public life.

The settlement homes helped them to engage in social reform activities for women and children, immigrants, and labor unions. While engaging in active political life, women were able to argue that they were still acting in accordance with their feminine natures, since it was a woman’s place to care for those in need. As the modern world developed social ills, it was woman’s job to protect them, as mothers of the world. Acting through the home, women were granted a legitimacy to their argument.

By manipulating their gendered spaces to grant them access to public spaces, the first women’s movement was able to secure an active, political voice for women in the

United States. Their research, social reform, and activism influenced public policy, the field of social work, and the public health field. However, their methods of embracing gendered spaces and a universal female nature, they set feminism on a path that favored compromise rather than radical, structural change. To this day, feminists still fight for structural change rather than continue to compromise in a patriarchal world.

The first women’s movement and settlement women embraced their gendered spaces to evolve woman’s place in society. By manipulating their feminine natures and their gendered spaces, they were able to evolve woman’s role in private spaces to extend to public spaces. This thesis has shown how female settlement residents in the United

States manipulated the settlement home as a hybrid public-private space which allowed women to gain an active role in Progressive Era politics. 112

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