Settlement movement significant person Jane Addams
United States
The settlement movement model was introduced in the United States by Jane Addams after travelling to Europe and learning about the system in England. It was Addams who became the leading figure of the settlement movement in the United States with the help of like-minded personalities such as Mary Rozer Smith, Mary Keyser, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and Ella May Dunning Smith, among others.The settlement movement became popular due to the socio-economic situation in the United States between 1890 and 1910, when more than 12 million European people immigrated to the country. They came from Ireland, Russia, Italy and other European countries and provided cheap factory labor, a demand that was necessitated by the country's expansion into the west and rapid industrialization following the Civil War. Many immigrants lived in crowded and disease-ridden tenements, worked long hours, and lived in poverty. Children often worked to help support the family. Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives in 1890 about the lives of immigrants on New York City's Lower East Side to bring greater awareness of the immigrant's living conditions.The most famous settlement house in the United States is Chicago's Hull House, founded by Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 after Addams visited Toynbee Hall within the previous two years. Hull House, unlike the charity and welfare efforts which preceded it, was not a religious-based organization. Instead of Christian ethic, Addams opted to ground her settlement on democratic ideals. It focused on providing education and recreational facilities for European immigrant women and children.Katharine Coman, Vida Scudder, and Katharine Lee Bates were among a group of women who founded Denison House in Boston in 1892. Union Settlement Association, founded in 1894, Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, founded in 1894, Friendly Inn Settlement House, founded in 1894, Henry Street Settlement, founded in 1893, Hiram House, founded in 1896, Houchen House in El Paso Texas, founded in 1912 and University Settlement House, founded in 1886 and the oldest in the United States, were, like Hull House, important institutions for social reform in America's teeming, immigrant-dominant urban communities. United Neighborhood Houses of New York is the federation of 38 settlement houses in New York City. These and other settlement houses inspired the establishment of settlement schools to serve isolated rural communities in Appalachia, such as the Hindman Settlement School in 1902 and the Pine Mountain Settlement School in 1913.A count of American settlements reported: 74 in 1897; 103 in 1900; 204 in 1905; and 413 by 1911 in 32 states. By the 1920s, the number of settlement houses in the country peaked at almost 500. The settlement house concept was continued by Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker "hospitality houses" in the 1930s. By 1993 the estimated number of houses dropped to 300 in 80 cities.The American settlement movement sprung out of the-then fashionable philosophy of "scientific philanthropy", a model of social reform that touted the transmission of "proper" [i.e.WASP) values, behavior, and morals to the working classes through charitable but also rigorously didactic programs as a cure to the cycle of poverty. Many settlement workers joined the movement out of a strong conviction that impactful social welfare programs were the only thing that could prevent the pernicious development in the United States of a European-style entrenched social class system.