Abstract
Reviewed by Anthony J Blasi , University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
History needs always to be rewritten because it represents an intersection of the past with a present that is ever in motion. In the post-World War I years of the last century, the history of American sociology was that of an academic science shedding itself of its social reformist origins. The separation of sociology from social work was an important parallel to the writing of that history. In the post-World War II era, the history of the field embodied a quest for theoretical depth found largely in the European intellectual tradition. This theoretical depth established the field’s disciplinary identity in the academy as one distinct from those of psychology, economics, political science, and anthropology. Later in the century, a cohort of former student activists re-inserted the moral imperative for social justice into the field. One result of that imperative was the emergence of feminist sociology and the rediscovery of the active female researchers of the progressive era. This volume places those female researchers in their social context, finds that there were some male researchers in the settlement houses with them, and demonstrates that the reformist impetus was central to what was going on.
The predecessor of organized sociology was the American Social Science Association, an umbrella under which a diverse lot of post-abolitionist movements congregated. If everything was “sociology” or “social science,” nothing was. The Association dissolved in 1909, four years after the American Sociological Society formed. The new professional association concerned itself with the scientific study of society. However, as Williams and MacLean document, the scientific study of society was already in place, and it was in the settlement houses that it had emerged. Financially comfortable but occupationally disqualified educated women and a few social gospel-oriented men settled in low-income urban areas and both conducted research and organized movements for social reform. For their research, they familiarized themselves with the lifeways and perspectives of the inner city immigrant and African American neighborhoods and collected facts that would be useful in presentations to municipal, state, and federal commissions, usable in legal briefs, and directed toward raising the consciousness of the reading public. The ever present theme in the many reports, articles, books, and legal briefs was the bridging of the growing class divide.
The best-known settlement was Hull-House in Chicago (the focus of chapter three), and its guiding inspiration was Jane Addams. Other published researchers at Hull-House, sometimes writing under the auspices of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, were Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, Sophronisba Breckenridge, Edith Abbott, and Grace Abbott. The 1895 collective volume of the Hull-House residents, Hull-House Maps and Papers, represents the methodologies that were adopted by settlement sociologists and later by academic urban sociologists.
Interestingly, because of interference from meat company owners who sat on the boards of the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Settlement (the focus of chapter four), that settlement was less free than others to conduct surveys and publish findings. Nevertheless, Ernest Talbot, Louise Montgomery, and John Kennedy managed to publish some 1910–11 data. An unpublished heath survey from that settlement reached President Theodore Roosevelt and led to a federal meat inspection act.
Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons (chapter five) began as a personal social gospel ministry. Taylor was a professor of Christian Sociology at Chicago Theological Seminary who staffed the Commons partly with his students. He also founded and taught at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, founded and wrote for a publication that was later named Survey, and wrote a column for a Chicago newspaper. When the University of Chicago and Northwestern University sociology departments developed their research programs, he turned to writing social ethics.
Boston’s South End House (chapter six) was founded by a social gospel lay advocate, Robert Woods, whose intent was to open an urban research laboratory. Much of the data collection at South End was done by Albert Kennedy, and the resultant reports were co-authored by Woods and Kennedy. Their focus was on housing conditions. An unfinished manuscript, delayed by World War I and a larger national charities study, dating from the time Robert E. Park resided in the Boston area, anticipated the later Park/Burgess concentric zone model of urban ecology.
Alumnae of women’s colleges, led by Vida Scudder, independently formed College Settlements in New York (1889), Philadelphia (1892), Boston (1892), and Baltimore (merged into the College Settlement Association in 1910). The CSA (chapter seven) placed less emphasis on research than did the other settlements, but it provided fellowships for those who wanted to conduct research using the settlements as a base. After 1917, their programs gravitated toward social work. Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, volunteered at the New York house. Isabel Eaton conducted a study of garment workers there, and Frances Kellor, after receiving no financial support from the University of Chicago, went to the New York College Settlement to study female unemployment and employment agency corruption. A one-time resident at the Denison House in Boston, Emily Greene Balch, wrote Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, which resembled but predated the famous Thomas and Znaniecki Polish Peasant volumes. Isabel Eaton, formerly of Hull-House, went to the Philadelphia CSA house and worked with W.E.B. DuBois on The Philadelphia Negro, which CSA co-sponsored with the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, DuBois and his wife lived at the settlement.
In 1893, Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster established a nursing station on Henry Street in New York, which Wald subsequently reorganized as the Henry Street Settlement (chapter eight) in 1903. Florence Kelley, formerly of Hull-House, joined the Henry Street Settlement and conducted studies of child welfare and industrial conditions, while Wald and Kelley lobbied successfully for the establishment of the federal Children’s Bureau. Henry Street research, for which Josephine Goldmark was largely responsible, was used by Louis Brandeis in his precedent-setting brief on working hours in Oregon (Muller v Oregon); social data comprised the larger portion of the brief.
Greenwich House in New York (chapter nine), established in 1902, was headed by Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch. It was formally affiliated with Columba University in 1929, albeit with no university funding. Simkhovitch did some graduate course work at Harvard but learned the field largely in Berlin from Gustav Schmoller, Georg Simmel, and Adolf Wagner. A professor at the New York School of Philanthropy, she authored three sociological books. Residents produced numerous reports for public and private agencies. Two of the most important works were Mary Ovington’s Half a Man (1911) on African Americans and Louise Hyman’s Industrial Survey (1912). Because of the residents’ network links to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, many of their studies informed the new deal legislative agenda.
Williams and MacLean clearly make the case that settlement house sociology merits a place in the history of the field and that American sociology as we know it today originated in the settlement houses, which were linked to reformism and even the social gospel. They could have but did not further explain why sociological research emerged in the settlement houses and not in the universities: It might be recalled that the idea of a research university reached the U.S. only as late as 1876 with the founding of Johns Hopkins, and that it was not until the 1890s that Johns Hopkins alumni, usually with history degrees, began to establish sociology departments. It was not until the 1920s that one could speak of a system of graduate sociology in America. The authors make the case that women researchers were largely erased from the discipline’s history in part because they were not accepted as professors in the academy and in part because they were controversial figures during the post-World War I red scare.
This volume does a remarkable job establishing the facts about sociology in the progressive era. In fact, it provides a 17-page appendix listing publications of just the Chicago women’s network of settlement sociologists. The volume belongs in every university library. The inevitable flaws are few: It claims several times that the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago was the first in the U.S.; the one at the University of Kansas actually was. And it needed some more proofreading to correct wrong word usages such as illicit for elicit and antidotal for anecdotal.