What were the goals and tactics of the settlement house movement?
Many progressives were eager to improve the conditions in American cities, which had grown rapidly in the nineteenth century. Most cities contained poor neighborhoods. Recent immigrants and poor working Americans lived in cramped conditions in tenements, crowded apartment buildings that usually lacked sufficient light, air, or sanitation. Progressives studied the conditions of the urban poor in an effort to improve their living and working conditions.
Progressives also believed that many city governments were corrupt "machines," which depended on the votes of recent immigrants to maintain their power and accepted bribes in exchange for political favors. In some cities, progressives introduced the city manager system, which placed many of the operations of the city under a professional administrator, rather than an elected official or political appointee.
The most famous progressive reformer was Jane Addams, a young woman who founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Addams believed that it was important to live among the poor, the working class, and recent immigrants in order to gain an understanding of their problems and needs. By 1900, more than one hundred settlement houses, modeled on Addams's efforts at Hull House, had been created in cities across the nation; by 1920, there were more than 400 settlements. The poor did not live in settlement houses. Instead, middle-class women lived among the poor in an effort to study and improve their living conditions. Addams helped to create the profession of social work, which sought to use scientific methods to study the needs of the poor and create solutions for their problems.