The American Settlement Movement 1885-1940: Sociology, Progressivism and Intersectionality—Experimenting with and across Lines of Difference

This paper traces the presence of intersectionality in the persons and relations between persons in a currently little known, but one formidable branch of sociology, one that challenged the then-emerging model of academic sociology as a value-neutral scientific enterprise disengaged from the communities of regular citizens who made up the population of the US as it experienced rapid industrialization. That challenge came from the equally rapid expansion of a social invention, the settlement house (spreading from three settlements in 1889 to 74 [1897], 103 [1900], 204 [1905], 413 [1910], and 500 [1920], that grew into a social movement of sociologically-oriented members who collectively sought to ameliorate the social problem they called “poverty amidst riches” by practicing “neighborly relations” with the varied communities of poor workers whose labor fueled the American Industrial Revolution. The paper makes eight points about the movement:

• its importation and reframing of the settlement idea from Great Britain into the much more diverse population of the United States
• the rapidity of the growth of the settlement idea in the US
• the professional-class origins of the settlement residents, typically drawn from the first generation of college-educated women
• the leadership of Jane Addams and Hull House
• the ethics and method of “neighborliness”
• the Settlement’s neighbors
• settlement policy efforts from local to national
• settlement sociology—theory, research, relations with academic sociologists

At each point of the presentation we trace the dynamics of intersectionality not only in the personhood of the residents and their neighbors but in the actions and relationships among residents, among neighbors, between residents and neighbors, and, above all, in the status of neighbor and the processes of “the neighborly relation” from ancient religious injunctions to social science method.