Sense and sensibility: Dual knowledge bases of Greenwich House,NYC,1902

Abstract

Both interpretive and positivist research were a daily part of early work by social workers in settlement houses of the US Social Workers from 1902 to 1922 at Greenwich House, a settlement house (neighborhood center) founded on the west side of Greenwich Village, New York City in 1902, involved themselves in diverse investigative methods. As this analysis reveals, Greenwich House workers pursued case studies of families, residential blocks, neighborhoods, and workplaces; ethnographic depictions of an alley and a garment workers’ strike; participant-observation of tenement households, small businesses, street life, and urban factories; and social surveys on the sanitary conditions and degree of housing congestion in the neighborhoods surrounding Greenwich House.

Keywords

History case study ethnography insider/outsider participant observation positivism

Sense and Sensibility, one of Jane Austen’s most important novels, was published in 1811 (Austen, 1949). Almost a century later and an ocean away, resident researchers at Greenwich House, a settlement house founded in 1902 on the west side of Greenwich Village in New York City, relied on both sense and sensibility as their guides in shaping and executing social research about their neighborhood and city.¹ Early neighborhood-based social workers purposefully mingled interpretive and positivist forms of inquiry in their sustained efforts to understand, document, and persuade prevailing city and state authorities about the urgency of multiple urban reforms, such as ending child labor and making industrial work and tenement housing safer and healthier.

At the very time that settlement houses were emerging in the 1880s and 1890s, many early social scientists in the United States began to look to the physical and natural sciences for approaches that would make their research less naturalistic and more akin to laboratory sciences. Economists, sociologist, psychologists, and political scientists sought ways of measuring continuity and change that were more precise and replicable than the methods they had been using. This search for scientific anchors for their fledgling disciplines and for respect in the academy led many social scientists in the United States to distance themselves from advocacy and hands-on social reform. However, the particular social scientists who collaborated in a sustained way with Greenwich House in the studies discussed below proved to be disciplinary anomalies.

Sense and sensibility

Sense, as a way of knowing, is best linked to the valorization of reason and to Western approaches to knowledge-building using methods refined in the natural and physical sciences during the scientific revolution of the early modern period. Sense has historically involved both deduction and induction and the rapid interplay of these two forms of thinking in relation to information gathered systematically. Enthusiasts of the Age of Reason, of the Enlightenment—18th- and 19th-century champions of rationality and the scientific method—became embroiled in sustained and often bitter conflict with Romantics, who endorsed key aspects of sensibility, such as appreciation of nature and beauty, of personal inner truths, and of emotional sincerity, elements treasured by influential writers and artists like Goethe, Hugo, Wordsworth, and Rossetti. Many literate citizens and residents in the United States, as well as those of many other nations during the 19th and early 20th centuries, sought to mine the riches of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, while recognizing the distinctions—which were, at times, blurry—between them.

Internal epistemological tensions within social work in the United States

These two transformational cultural movements—the Enlightenment and Romanticism—competed in the 18th and 19th centuries for first place in the loyalties of people fortunate enough to be educated. Less lucky individuals—those with far less access to formal education—also took note of the twin and sometimes overlapping legacies of reason and science from the Enlightenment and worship of nature and appreciation of the humanities that Romantics highlighted.

Leaders of the early settlement-house movement, many of them college-educated, were familiar with scholarship from the sciences, literary traditions, fine arts, and religious works of Great Britain and its empire, the European Continent, Russia, and the US. Many had been exposed through formal education and family libraries to Enlightenment theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Jefferson. Similarly, early social workers were likely to have read Romantics such as Byron, Shelley, Balzac, Poe, and Hawthorne. Moreover, they were alert to the power and possibilities of Charles Darwin’s ideas about the evolution of species through natural selection and the misappropriation of Darwin’s theory that social Darwinism represented (de Jesús Cortés, 2010/2011; Hawarth, 1997; Horowitz, 1984; Solomon, 1985).

As social work researchers, educators, and practitioners in the 21st century, we continue to face the epistemological menu of choices that Progressive-era founders of social work confronted in their search for reliable knowledge: (1) reliance on reason and science; (2) dependence on human sensory antennae, emotions, relationships, and experiences; or (3) trust in a combination of these two realms of exploration. At certain points in our profession’s history within the United States—the current time, for example—reason and systematic measurement have been heavily favored as bases for social work knowledge claims. At other times, such as the Progressive era (ca. 1885–1920) in the United States, emotional candor, spirituality and religiosity, human interconnections, experiential reflections, narrative accounts, and practice wisdom have been equally valued alongside the findings of empiricists’ studies as pivotal pools of information, springboards for theorizing, and guides to practice (Turner, 1996).

The current call from some quarters of social work in the United States, to demote some interpretive and theoretical approaches that challenge Enlightenment-era premises while returning empiricism to the head of the researcher’s table, is an act of nostalgia, an expression of longing for a research homogeneity and consensus that never existed within the profession (Caputo et al., 2015). The historical record of Greenwich House in New York City offers one case study of heterogeneity in early social work research. This historical analysis seeks to make clear that settlement house researchers counted upon sustained ethnographic observations, case studies, conversations, and unstructured interviews as invaluable arrows in their quiver of research methods, just as they treasured empirical neighborhood surveys.

It is well known that empirical social surveys were one mainstay of early social work in the United States. Hull House Maps and Paper; Women and the Trades, Pittsburgh, (1907–1908); and The Pittsburgh Survey are among the best known of systematic research studies conducted at the neighborhood and city level in the urban United States.² The significance of social surveys in early social work’s investigative realms is revealed by the title chosen for the primary journal of early social work in the United States, The Survey: Social, Charitable, Civic: A Journal of Constructive Philanthropy. The Survey, as it was commonly called, was published by the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York from 1909 until 1937, the year the journal ended publication.

At the same time, interpretive research involving case studies and ethnographic immersion by social work practitioners in families and neighborhoods was also invested in by early social work institutions. One important illustration is: Young Working Girls, A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers.³ A publication of the National Federation of Settlements in 1913, this study focused on the welfare of adolescent girls living in tenement houses and working in urban factories or department stores. The work was an edited compilation of impressions gleaned by 2000 practicing social workers from across the country who were interviewed by researchers at social work conferences. Jane Addams, the first president of the National Federation of Settlements, stated the purpose of the published study:

Settlements have always hoped to know something of the inner lives of their constituents, realizing that such knowledge must be based upon years of simple companionship and mutual understanding. In so far as the conclusions of this study show sympathetic insight, that mission has been successful … the study, … records the experiences of more than two thousand people who are daily concerned with the welfare of young girls, and that these experiences gathered from a score of cities fall so easily into a composite impression.⁴

Evidence of the importance of case studies to early social workers is found in the title for another major journal published by US social work institutions: Social Casework. Published by the American Association for Organizing Family Social Work, Social Casework lasted from 1920 to 1989, when the journal’s name was changed in 1990 to Families in Society by the Family Service Association of America. Organizational case studies were also abundant in Progressive-era social work. One illustration is Justice for the Poor, an ethnographic organizational study of a New York State specialized court that heard cases of adults who were charged with committing petty crimes. The study that culminated in Justice for the Poor, was conducted and published by the Committee on Criminal Courts of the Charity Organization Society of New York in 1915.⁵ Another example of an organizational case study is Humanizing the Greater City’s Charity; Public Charities of the City of New York, published in 1917 by the Public Welfare Committee of New York State.⁶ Shirt Waist Strike, an ethnography of a 1910 strike by garment workers in New York City, was written by Charles Seligman Bernheimer and published by the University Settlement of New York City in 1910 (Bernheimer, 1910).

Accounts of the epistemological stances of early settlement-house researchers

Allen F. Davis, the historian on whose shoulders all subsequent scholars of the US settlement-house movement stand, was clear about the admixture of ways of knowing that settlement researchers and leaders deployed. “Over and over again the settlement workers made their point; they cited statistics and related personal experiences, and gradually the nation woke up to the fact that something needed to be done about the evils of child labor” (Davis, 1967).

Mina Carson’s important book, Settlement Folk, expands further on the inclusive nature of early settlement workers’ approaches to social research. “Imbued with the optimistic teleology of much contemporary social science, the settlement workers believed that neighborly friendship was compatible with disinterested objectivity (Carson, 1990). Carson used as one of her key examples Robert Archey Woods, the influential first head worker of Andover House in Boston, founded in 1891 and renamed South End House in 1895.⁷ Carson, in the following passage, both described and quoted Robert A. Woods:

Comfortably juxtaposing clinical objectivity and value-laden subjectivity, Woods argued that social science could be true to its human subject only through intimate familiarity, as demonstrated by Charles Booth and Frederic Le Play … Boothlike, the resident [of a settlement house] would note the details of each family’s environment, income and expenditures, daily habits and mode of living, characters, influence on each other and the neighborhood and “all matters which affect their bodily health, labor education, sobriety,

honesty, nationality, and religion” – all without resorting to the “mechanical and inquisitive methods of the census taker.” (Carson, 1990: 64–65)

Woods in the portions quoted above by Carson was emphasizing his commitment to a research stance at settlement houses that privileged organic and authentic relationships between social work investigators and neighborhood informants, rather than dispassionately distanced links. Because he died in 1925, Woods never had the chance to benefit from an insightful distinction between “experience-near” and “experience-distant” concepts made long after his death by the psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, a comparison that anthropologist Geertz deployed in his book, Local Knowledge, published in 1983:

An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that someone—a patient, a subject, in our case an informant—might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when applied by others. An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort of another—an analyst, an experimenter, or ethnographer, even a priest or an ideologist—employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical aims. “Love” is an experience-near concept; “object-cathexis” is an experience-distant one … To grasp concepts that, for another people, are experience-near, and to do so well enough to place them in illuminating connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life, is clearly a task as delicate, if a bit less magical, as putting oneself in another’s skin. (Geertz, 1983: 57–58)

To read retrospectively Robert Woods’ guidance to settlement-house researchers through the lens created later by Kohut and Geertz, this author argues that Woods was urging the social work investigator to garner in a respectful, warm, and interconnected way experience-near information from people living in the community. Then the settlement researcher’s responsibility was to generalize from experience-near concepts with the help of pertinent, experience-distant theories, census reports and other large-scale data, and survey findings.

Another major contributor to our knowledge of the history of the settlement-house movement in the United States, Judith Ann Trolander, also emphasized the combination of knowledge bases that early settlement workers used in investigation and advocacy: “When settlement workers, armed with investigative reports and firsthand knowledge of slum life, lobbied local governments for the establishment of public playgrounds, housing codes, and mothers’ pensions, they often got a positive response” (Trolander, 1987).

While immersed in the sizable published literature on settlement houses in the United States, this author has investigated the epistemology of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch and the multiple settlement-house residents (workers who lived at Greenwich House) who conducted research under her leadership in the first two decades of Greenwich House’s history (1902–1922). The archival papers of Greenwich House that are lodged at the New York University Library, along with many secondary publications, served as the sources for this study.

Simkhovitch’s ideas about settlement-house research

Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder and head worker at Greenwich House for an impressive 44 years, from 1902 to 1946, asserted in a 1906 essay “that the fundamental settlement idea, [was] that of identification of its life with that of the neighborhood” (Simkhovitch, 1906). She expanded on this idea:

The first stage is social impressionism, the pouring in of the vivid life about one upon the sensitive and waiting personality. Group impressions then come into existence …

From these group impressions emerge the second stage, that of interpretation. The settlement group has to impart what it knows – … it has to tell what it finds of virtue and beauty, of hampered life, of tragic economic conditions. It may tell this in a thousand different ways, by the drama, by stories, by scientific reports, by conversation … (Simkhovitch, 1906: 567–568)

One can see from this quotation that Greenwich House researchers who sought to honor the expectations set by their leader, Simkhovitch, had to, first, identify with both neighbors and the neighborhood in which they were living and working. Doing so required an opening of one’s emotional and sensory self to the kaleidoscope of smells, sounds, sights, paces, conversations, acts, and emotions of those around them. The first step in Greenwich House workers’ social work and social work research, according to Simkhovitch, was grounded in their empathic sensibilities and humanistic sensitivities.

Then, they were to form nonjudgmental inferences about individuals, families, and entire population groups in the West Village and do their best to appreciate and interpret the meanings, contours, and lineaments of neighbors’ behaviors, speech, everyday rhythms, and human bonds. This second charge from Simkhovitch to Greenwich House residents was for them to ground themselves in inductive reasoning and generalization based on the sensory impressions they had gathered from daily interactions with people who came to Greenwich House and lived near it. Simkhovitch called first for a form of inquiry that what we now term “emic.” Then she directed settlement workers to gather statistical portraits of populations, industrial processes, and residences in Greenwich Village—to conduct systematic surveys and interviews on a wide variety of topics, such as household spending patterns, families’ health and sickness patterns, school attendance records, accounts of workers’ incomes and workplace conditions, and residential congestion. She was demanding that settlement workers also invest in what we now call “etic” research. To quote a prominent contemporary anthropologist, Jay Bernstein: “The emic/etic distinction refers to the distinction between the subjective or internal viewpoint on the one hand and the objective or external viewpoint on the other hand. This distinction … can be most simply glossed as “insider” (emic) as compared to “outsider” (etic) outlooks, … (Bernstein, 2010).

Mary Simkhovitch was unusually well prepared as a person, and, particularly, as a woman of her time to help shape insider and outsider research at Greenwich House. While earning a bachelor’s degree at Boston University, she volunteered with a teenage girls’ club at the African American St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church; with St. Monica’s Home for Old Colored Women; and at Denison House, an important early settlement house in Boston.⁸ Coming from an old, prosperous, and respected white family in New England, Simkhovitch hoped through volunteer work to learn firsthand about the experiences and perspectives of some of the most stigmatized and economically marginal citizens of Boston.⁹

After earning a bachelor’s degree, she spent a year at Radcliffe College studying economic history. On the basis of her academic performance there, she won a scholarship from the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston to pursue advanced graduate study in Germany. She did so in academic year 1895–1896 at the University of Berlin, where she attended graduate-level lectures on historical method of economist, Gustav von Schmoller; on democratic socialism of social policy scholar, Adolph Wagner; and on sociology and social psychology of sociologist, Georg Simmel. Though women could not matriculate or earn degrees at that time at German universities, Simkhovitch reported that she learned much about social science theory, research, and the practical application of both while in Berlin.¹⁰ Perhaps the most important bit of enlightenment she took away was Wagner’s concept of municipalization, meaning, the transfer to the urban public sector of some of the core goods of the private sector for the sake of the public good, a process that Bismarck’s government had begun implementing in the 1880s (Rodgers, 1998).

Upon returning to the United States, Simkhovitch moved to New York City and completed a year of study in the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, as one of the first women to be permitted to attend graduate classes at Columbia (a university where women were not yet allowed to earn credits or degrees). At Columbia, she studied, among other topics, sociology with Franklin Giddings, historical methods with James Harvey Robinson, and urban taxation and public finance with Edwin R. A. Seligman.¹¹

In late 1902, Mary Simkhovitch, together with other colleagues, launched Greenwich House.¹² Quickly, the settlement house’s first research and publishing initiative took shape. Emily Dinwiddie, an early resident worker of Greenwich House, published in 1903 the Tenant’s Manual, which was composed as a guide about housing for both residents in tenements and Greenwich House workers (Dinwiddie, 1903).¹³ The Tenant’s Manual’s opening section concerned Greenwich Village’s residents’ health. The guide noted ways of reducing the spread of infectious diseases and provided salient details of the Sanitary Code of New York City. More “how-to” information for tenants discussed ways of seeing a doctor for free and the means to make chemical disinfectants for household use. The guide included early signs to watch out for of tuberculosis, eye diseases, chicken pox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and measles (Dinwiddie, 1903).

Dinwiddie, who had worked as a tenement house inspector before arriving at Greenwich House, came to her new position steeped in technical and general knowledge about New York City’s tenement house conditions, laws and regulations concerning renters in tenements, and tenement owners’ obligations and legal maneuvers. She took a special interest in children, noting sites in and near Greenwich Village where parents could bathe them and find milk stations. Dinwiddie made sure that the handbook included important parts of the New York Tenement House Law.¹⁴

Greenwich House re-published Dinwiddie’s book in 1913 as The Social Worker’s Handbook: Revised Edition of the Tenant’s Manual (Dinwiddie, 1913). Clearly, generating reliable local knowledge for consumers and citizens was a top priority of the staff at Greenwich House. One sign of the significance assigned to knowledge building is the fact that Greenwich House Publications was established within Greenwich House’s first year of life and thereafter frequently published studies about the 9th Ward, poverty and unemployment, and many other aspects of work and life experienced by the elderly, working adults, and children among the immigrant and migrant poor.¹⁵

Greenwich House’s Committee on Social Investigation

Mary Simkhovitch, during the very first year of Greenwich House’s existence, 1902–1903, formed a Committee on Social Investigation, a body of hand-selected social scientists from Columbia University and key staff people living at the settlement house. Her intention was to make social research one of the three pillars of Greenwich House, along with services and activities requested by neighbors and advocacy for social reforms. In peopling the Committee, she relied upon contacts she had made while studying at Columbia and also upon men who were the colleagues and friends of her husband, Vladimir Simkhovitch, a Russian immigrant who was a professor of Russian history and economics at Columbia University.

Who constituted the academicians on the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigation? Mary Simkhovitch appointed to the Committee her husband, Vladimir Simkhovitch; sociologist; Franklin Giddings; economist, Henry Seager; anthropologist, Franz Boas; public health physician, Livingston Farrand; and economist, Edwin R. A. Seligman, the younger brother of New York City banker, Isaac Seligman. Later in the decade, educator and philosopher John Dewey supervised educationally oriented research projects at Greenwich House. Mary Simkhovitch secured private funding for the Committee’s research from Isaac Seligman. She and the Greenwich House Board kept that research fund operationally separate from the main budget of Greenwich House. Isaac Seligman and other private contributors enabled the Committee on Social Investigation to offer competitive research grants to settlement researchers whose proposed studies were then supervised by the academic volunteers who had been appointed to the Committee. The first president of the Committee on Social Investigation was Columbia University Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman (Simkhovitch, 1937).¹⁶

The Committee on Social Investigation selected three research fellows in its first year, people for whom Mary Simkhovitch had secured philanthropic funding. The first research fellow chosen was Louise Bolard, who studied the living standards and cost of living of neighbors in New York City’s 9th Ward, the area in which Greenwich House was located. She and a research assistant, Elizabeth Lennox, interviewed and visited 200 families, who kept daily logs of their expenses.¹⁷ Her study, published in 1907, was entitled, Wage-Earners’ Budgets (More, 1907). The rave review her study received in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science began: “A more accurate, intense and sympathetic statistical study of the standard and cost of living of wage-earners has never been made, either in this country or in Europe” (Raper, 1908).

Bolard and her research assistant juxtaposed many charts, graphs, and tables of figures about wages and prices with multiple anecdotal observations about households they studied and paraphrases and quotations from wives and mothers who reported on their varied ways of stretching modest household wages far enough to cover the costs of food, fuel, clothing, shoes, school supplies, and other basic necessities.

The second research fellow at Greenwich House was Mary White Ovington, who chose to study the living and working conditions of Negroes (the respectful term then in use) living in Greenwich Village and in several other sections of Manhattan.¹⁸ Her study was published in 1911 as a book, Half a Man, The Status of the Negro in New York (Ovington, 1911). A review that appeared in The Nation in 1911 noted:

Miss Mary White Ovington’s monograph on the negro in New York (“Half a Man” Longmans) is marked by frankness and thorough knowledge. It was feared that, as one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and long a worker among the colored people of New York, she might let her sympathies override her judgment. This proves not to be the case … The picture is the drama of a worthy race struggling upward under most difficult conditions … The question is simply whether those of white skin who are rising in the social and industrial scale shall be permitted to thrust back those who are toiling up after them … Such sane, wise, and sympathetic studies as Miss Ovington’s ….¹⁹

Ovington’s study, published as a book in 1911, was one of the first texts by a white North American that reported upon and analyzed in detail the living and working conditions of African Americans in New York City, the forms of institutional discrimination that they faced there, and health disparities among the city’s racial and ethnic groups. Her research and book were inspired by an intersecting cluster of factors. Ovington was the daughter of parents who had been active in both abolitionism and women’s suffrage, and one of her grandmothers had been a personal friend of abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison (Ovington, 1995). In 1890 at age 25, she was deeply moved by a Frederick Douglass lecture that she attended in a Brooklyn church (Ovington, 1947, 1995). Additionally, her seven years of settlement-house work in helping to found and direct the Greenpoint Settlement House in Brooklyn between 1895 and 1904 equipped her well to compete for the research fellowship publicized by Greenwich House. Ovington was aware, when she applied for the investigator’s fellowship, of the concentration of Greenwich Village residents who were African Americans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants and had been previously influenced by reading W. E. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, a book which she and many other Progressive-era contemporaries considered a methodological tour de force of sociological and historical analysis, which was published in 1899 (Du Bois, 1899; Ovington, 1995).

In Half a Man, Ovington reported on five segregated communities of African Americans living in Manhattan, New York City, between 1903 and 1910. They included parts of Greenwich Village, the Middle West Side, San Juan Hill (the area between 59th and 62nd Streets near 9th and 10th Avenues), the Upper East Side above 98th Street, and the Upper West Side north of 90th Street (Ovington, 1911: 33). She knew firsthand from prior settlement work some aspects of the living and occupational conditions of African Americans living in Brooklyn. However, she chose not to include them in her study since, as she noted explicitly, African American residents in Brooklyn were far more scattered and much more likely to live in houses that they owned than in Manhattan during the first decade of the twentieth century (Ovington, 1911: 33).

Ovington’s book is a compelling and cohesive amalgam of ethnographic accounts, narrations of informants’ remarks that she had heard or overheard, and quantitative data on a broad range of topics. The multiple birthplaces of African American New Yorkers, comparative wage and health statistics of the city’s racial and ethnic populations, job categories in which African American men and women worked, and the numbers and kinds of African American professionals practicing were some of the findings Half a Man presented. Her research was personally supervised by Franz Boas, who was arguably the most important anthropologist of the Progressive era. Following his advice that any serious ethnographer ought to live among the people she or he is studying, Ovington lived for eight months in an apartment in a Phipps model tenement on West 63rd Street in Manhattan, where she was “the only white tenant in the one hundred and sixty-one apartments” (Austen, 1949; Ovington, 1911: 33).²⁰

The third research fellow chosen was Elsa Herzfeld, who focused on environmental sanitation and the state of tenement housing in the 9th Ward.²¹ Her study, A West Side Rookery, was published in 1906. Herzfeld and her assistant, Natalie Henderson, a Greenwich House resident, repeatedly visited fifty families, conducting carefully recorded observations and interviews with as many family members as would meet with them. Greenwich House, in conjunction with the Charity Organization Society of New York, co-sponsored Herzfeld’s investigation.

A West Side Rookery gave special attention to “The Alley,” with its nine houses built of wood, five of which were rear tenements, in an area located near Greenwich House. In these nine buildings lived 52 families, consisting of more than two hundred people, who were referred to in the area as “The Alley People.” Children, adolescents, working adults, and elderly people lived in abject poverty in The Alley and were found to have a higher rate of active tuberculosis and death from tuberculosis than most other sections of New York City.²²

Herzfeld’s study focused on immediate threats from violence and environmental hazards to human health in streets, alleys, workplaces, and apartments of the west Village. A West Side Rookery soon became part of the empirical and interpretive knowledge base with which the New York City Department of Health and Greenwich House advocated and lobbied at the city level for free vaccinations, better garbage removal, and more frequent street cleaning in the community. At the state level, in Albany, New York, the study’s stories about particular individuals and households, along with the statistical data offered, were used actively in advocacy efforts to obtain new laws that would bring about tenement-house reforms (Herzfeld, 1906).²³

Greenwich House continued to sponsor and publish studies of the west Village during its first twenty years. To illustrate, in February, 1913, Mary Simkhovitch publicly sought a researcher who would concentrate on the living situations of elderly residents of the neighborhood. Mable Nassau was selected as a funded research fellow by the Chairman of the Greenwich House’s Committee on Social Investigation, Henry Seager. Seager, who directly supervised the investigation, made clear that Nassau’s research approach involved conducting in-depth interviews and close observations of elderly residents’ apartments or households. He wrote in the introduction to Nassau’s preliminary report that Nassau would focus on the personal histories of older interviewees, as well as on their current living conditions. One hundred informants over the age of 60 were identified and interviewed. In the sample, the majority of informants were found to be Irish in ancestry, and elderly individuals and couples from 10 countries of origin were represented. The researchers recorded each elderly person’s amount of savings. All elders interviewed were categorized as “self-supporting,” “somewhat self-supporting,” or “dependent upon families or charities”. Nassau’s early findings, reported in the preliminary report, suggested that few elderly people on the west side of Greenwich Village had the means to support themselves independently and were, consequently, vulnerable to rising rents, other increasing costs of living, and medical crises. Additionally, the elders reported significant economic dislocation when wage earner(s) in their families lost a job or faced cutbacks in their hours per week on the job. The anecdotal and qualitative data that Nassau’s interviews gleaned signaled the urgent need for old-age pensions and social insurance for retired elderly people. Economist Seager praised Nassau’s study, noting that it “supplies convincing proof of the need of some broad, constructive policy” (Nassau, 1915) Mabel Nassau published Old Age Poverty in Greenwich Village in 1915 (Nassau, 1915).

Another sign of the investigative momentum and depth of Greenwich House’s research mission during its first two decades was the fact that John Dewey, the renowned professor of education, philosophy, and psychology at New York City’s Teachers College and Columbia University, headed Greenwich House’s Committee on Social Education. He and Greenwich House residential staff whom he supervised conducted social experiments that we now would consider both pilot projects and action research in public schools. Action research has been defined as:

a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview … It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and their communities. (Reason and Bradbury, 2001)

Dewey and his supervisees at Greenwich House were particularly interested in expanding the capacities and roles of New York City public schools in nurturing the development of students as engaged citizens, humanists, and critical thinkers. As a leading university and public intellectual of the Progressive era, Dewey, in combination with Greenwich House researchers, investigated such topics as the possible developmental benefits of early childhood education and the effects of free school breakfasts and lunch programs on the health status of children and adolescents in low-income neighborhoods.²⁴

Conclusion

Inspired by the same Progressive spirit that John Dewey’s investigations and collaboration with community-based researchers exemplified, Simkhovitch, her staff and financial backers from the very start of the organization’s existence made social research a top priority, which they considered every bit as urgent as social service provision and urban institutional reform. Indeed, from the point of view of leading Progressive reformers, there could be no legitimate settlement-house programs, reform initiatives, or lobbying campaigns that were not anchored in up-to-date research on neighborhoods, workplaces, and households.

Greenwich House resident staff members took part in research interviews, case studies, social surveys, and participant-observer investigations on a daily basis, as did staff people in other major settlement houses in New York City, Pittsburgh, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Richmond, and Philadelphia, to name just a few of many city sites. In so doing, they broke new epistemological ground in US social inquiry. Indeed, a leading historian of poverty and poverty policy in the United States, Alice O’Connor, claims that the settlement house movement’s “holistic approach to community surveys, combining quantitative data-gathering with case studies and personal observation, were precursors to the anthropological community studies of a later generation” (O’Connor, 2002).

Relying on a powerful combination of sense and sensibility, settlement-house researchers at Greenwich House responded to the stated and felt needs of immigrant, refugee, and migrant New Yorkers. To do so effectively, the resident staff had to call upon a wide array of competencies. Among these capacities were listening; reasoning: building rapport and trust with neighbors; recording faithfully interviews and conversations; appreciating the facts and contextualized meanings shared by neighbors; tapping census data and other governmental inventories, designing social surveys and tabulating the data collected; making sense of the observations, surveys, and interviews they had conducted; and, most importantly, advocating for legislative and regulatory reforms in the light of their research findings.

The settlement-based researchers, in sum, depended upon an all-inclusive approach to capture the facts, webs of meaning, and experiences of their neighbors and neighborhood, a set of methods that involved their heads and hearts, clear-eyed analyses and authentic relationships. In sum, Greenwich House workers and researchers were responsible for creating thick descriptions and local knowledge of the West Village and its inhabitants (Geertz, 1973, 1983). They could only do so if they deployed acute sensibilities in combination with astute sense that shaped empirical inquiry. The long-term effect of Greenwich-House forerunners is that their precedent helped cement the foundation for mixed-method studies conducted by contemporary social workers. Early settlement researchers also forged the invaluable pathway now embraced by qualitative social work researchers and postcolonial and postmodern social work scholars.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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Sense and sensibility: Dual knowledge bases of Greenwich House,NYC,1902–1920

Abstract

Keywords

Sense and sensibility

Internal epistemological tensions within social work in the United States

Accounts of the epistemological stances of early settlement-house researchers

Simkhovitch’s ideas about settlement-house research

Greenwich House’s Committee on Social Investigation

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

References