The People in the Neighborhood

THE PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: SAMARITANS AND SAVIORS IN MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN’S SOCIAL SETTLEMENT WRITINGS, 1895-1914 by SARAH JO LOCK Bachelor of Arts, 1997 Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August, 2008 Copyright by Sarah Jo Lock 2008 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A lengthy project such as this accumulates a long list of debts, and this short statement cannot hope to cover them all. I have been loved, encouraged, inspired, and challenged by many people over the past near-decade, and I am grateful to each of them. I will try to identify a few of those individuals here. First, I would like to thank the graduate faculty of Texas Christian University for their instruction, guidance, and encouragement throughout my doctoral program. I would especially like to thank the members of my dissertation committee. Daniel Williams has been a wonderful director and a great champion in helping me push through the last months of writing and revising. I would especially like to thank Dan as well as David Vanderwerken for cheerfully joining my committee at later stages of my project. Theresa Gaul and Charlotte Hogg have been steadfast supporters and have offered great insight from their areas of expertise since the beginning of my Ph.D. candidacy. I would also like to express my gratitude to Sharon Harris and Karen Steele for helping get the project off the ground and for challenging my thinking at early stages of the process. This journey has also been brightened by my fellow graduate students at TCU, who have been tirelessly encouraging. Special thanks are due to Diann Ainsworth, Brian Fehler, Lisa Cooper Kirby, and particularly Margaret Lowry. I count Margaret’s friendship and mentorship as one of the greatest gifts of my graduate education. I owe an enormous debt of thanks to the people outside of academics who have helped keep me grounded. I thank my parents, John and Sandie Lock, for encouraging my early love of learning and for valuing what I do. My brother Sam has consistently shared his support and admiration, and in times of discouragement he also reminded me why law school ii would not, in fact, be a better path for me. My brother Jeb provided never-ending love and a laid-back sense of perspective. I owe simple and deep thanks to them both. I am also immensely grateful for Greta, the indomitable dachshund who has been the most faithful of companions since that first lonely year of graduate school. Thanks to Brooke, who has added a new kind of joy to my life and has been respectful of the demands of these last few months of writing. And thanks most of all to Shawn, who believes in me more than I do myself and whose love and respect humble me every day. This journey has been so much more enjoyable because of his company. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter One “The Foremost Woman in the United States”: Jane Addams as Model Settlement Reformer ……………………………………… 17 Chapter Two “The Gospel of Clean Backyards”: African American Women’s Contributions to Social Settlement Literature …………………………………………………………. 69 Chapter Three College, Community, Christ, and Contemplation: The Settlement Novels of Margaret Pollock Sherwood, Vida Dutton Scudder, and Florence Converse …………………………. 112 Chapter Four A New (White) Husband for a New (White) Woman: The Settlement Novels of Clara Laughlin and Elia Peattie ………. 174 Concluding Thoughts …………………………………………………………………….. 197 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………….. 203 Vita Abstract iv 1 Introduction “Father, I was talking to a classmate of mine that’s working for the Associated Charities—oh, Dad, there’s the sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!— and I feel as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.” “What do you mean ‘worth while’? If you get to be Gruensberg’s secretary—and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn’t go sneaking off to concerts and talkfests every evening—I guess you’ll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!” “I know, but—oh, I want to—contribute— I wish I were working in a settlement house.” --Verona Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), page 17 My introduction to Jane Addams began with a children’s book read to me a quarter of a century ago by my aunt. Laying in my cousin’s pink-canopied bed as a seven-year-old, I listened attentively to a story of a woman who, even as a girl like me, shared my incipient feminism and my already-overactive concern for the underprivileged. The book, The Value of Friendship: The Story of Jane Addams, was part of the Valuetales Series of the 1970s and ‘80s, which aimed to teach moral and ethical values to children through the illustration of a major figure whom the authors believed embodied that virtue. This series, published in the wake of second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement, is notable for its inclusion of such lesser-known and diverse historical figures as Nellie Bly, Albert Schweitzer, and Jackie Robinson. Members (like myself) of Generation X or later may class the incorporation of Jane Addams’s biography in the series as a similar attempt at multicultural inclusion, but for many U.S. readers born in the first half of the twentieth century, Jane Addams’s name (though not always her reputation) is better known. Even so, most Americans today are unfamiliar with the social settlement reform movement that Addams helped initiate and that in turn initiated her celebrity. This dissertation examines the construction of the identity of the Woman Reformer in texts by women engaged in and writing about the problems of the urban poor during the 2 Progressive Era. In my project, I analyze women’s fictional and nonfiction writings from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century settlement movement, which negotiated questions of class, race, and gender as its leaders sought to redress both industrial ills and middle-class ennui. Starting in the late 1880s, middle-class U.S. reformers founded social settlements in working-class neighborhoods in an effort to bridge class differences while providing educational and cultural opportunities to their neighbors. Though mostly forgotten today, the settlement movement was one of the most visible of urban reform efforts from the 1890s to the start of the First World War, and Jane Addams was a titanic figure who dominated discussions not only of settlement work, but also of reform efforts in general. Addams’s memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes (1910) is the best-known example of settlement literature, but hers was not the only textual discussion of social settlement work. Countless writers and reformers of the era wrote about the movement—in nonfiction narratives such as Addams’s memoirs; in the press, popular and professional; and in fiction, written by both settlement workers and professional writers. Today, references to the literature appear occasionally in discussions of women’s reform literature and frequently in histories of Chicago letters, but as this project shows, the movement and its texts transcended that city. Though Clarence Andrews in Chicago in Story lists approximately fifteen novels under his section “The Social Service and Settlement Novel,” and Guy Szuberla revises that number to “some twenty or more novels,” the reality is that authors outside of Chicago also engaged the topic of settlement reform, and the inclusion of nonfiction essays and other periodical literature pushes those numbers considerably higher (Andrews 109-10; Szuberla 60). Jane Addams—and occasionally her peers—is studied by historians, sociologists, philosophers, cultural critics, and scholars of 3 religion (to name just a few of the disciplines that discuss the settlement movement), but literary critics have only recently begun to examine Addams as a writer. And though scholars such as Sidney Bremer have devoted occasional articles to the literature and Bremer recovered one settlement novel republished in 1989,1 there is currently no book-length work focusing on settlement writing. The settlement movement had a significant cultural presence that is virtually unknown to literary scholars today; this project aims to address that gap in our knowledge. Jane Addams clearly stands as the foremost representative of settlement work and settlement writing. She sets up a model of settlement work, and her memoir creates a carefully crafted persona. But the other writers in this study demonstrate that Addams’s conception of settlement work was not the only vision of such reform in her era. Taken together, this literature offers insight into Progressive-Era debates about the causes and cures of social ills, and it reveals the intricacies of constructing identities through texts—whether those of the writers or the reformers or both. I argue that in writing about the settlement movement, each middle-class author in this study offers her own vision of what a Woman Reformer is and should be. Though Addams’s memoir identifies the female activist as a singular, individualistic, and somewhat masculine figure along the lines of Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy, other writers challenge this identity even as they refer and defer to Addams and her dominance. Most of the writers emphasize the importance of factors such as community, religion, and partnership through their texts, but ultimately, the literature as a whole largely relies on an image of a strong middle-class heroine who will help save industrial America, and except in the articles by African American women in chapter two, that figure is also white. “The People in the Neighborhood” illuminates the extent to which 1 Elia Peattie’s The Precipice, discussed in chapter four of this project.

Load more