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 Beca R. Schumann April 2021 © 2021 Beca Renee Schumann. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Embracing Gendered Space: How Women Manipulated the Settlement Home to Engage in Progressive-Era Politics by 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. 4 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. 5 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