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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

“The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”

by Luca Prono, PhD

Date: 1892

Author: Jane Addams

Genre: Speech

Summary Overview

Jane Addams speech on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” has the impressive task of not only explaining the purpose of social settlements, or settlement houses but also of persuading the reader that thy are not only necessary but that they are, in fact, made necessary by the most fundamental realities of American urban and industrial development, explaining that they are “an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city.” She does this by explaining that the growing divide between the middle and working classes in the large industrial cities of the United States require solutions that are beneficial for members of both classes.

Addams’s argument places the settlement house movement squarely in the realm of other Progressive era concerns. In particular, she addresses the rapidly widening gap between rich and poor and, more importantly, the breakdown of social cohesion that accompanies such divisions. Addams discusses the need for social settlements within the context of the ways they have worked well in Britain, providing a model for American urban and social development.

Defining Moment

Jane Addams was part of the Progressive movement, a broad and diverse middle-class coalition that, at the turn of the twentieth century, tried to reform American society and reconcile democracy with capitalism. The steady industrialization and urbanization of the 1880s and 1890s had deeply transformed American society, spurring harsh conflicts between labor and management. The middle class had supported the process of industrialization by espousing the Victorian values of laissez-faire individualism, domesticity, and self-control. Yet by the 1890s it was apparent that these values had trapped the middle class between the warring demands of big business and the working classes. Growing consumerism, a new wave of immigration, and tensions between the sexes further challenged bourgeois existence. In the face of these confrontations, the Progressives tried to reform the American capitalist system and its institutions from within, seeking to strike a compromise between radical demands and the preservation of established interests.

The expression of the Progressive movement’s goals was incredibly varied, as was the range of Addams’s own interests and passions. The settlement house movement, which she discusses here, was a crucial part of the ongoing concern about widening gaps between the richest and poorest Americans, often living in the same cities but in quite different worlds. The settlement movement, although it began in the United Kingdom, is often—at least in the United States—associated with Jane Addams. The main purpose of the movement was to establish “settlement houses” in low-income areas of cities. Volunteers, usually middle class, would live in the houses and provide services such as child care, education, and health services to the permanent residents of these areas. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois. It provided educational and recreational services for women and children recently arrived in the United States.

Author Biography

Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1881 from Rockford Female Seminary, in Illinois. In the 1880s Addams began studying medicine, but she had to suspend her work because of poor health. Despite her poor health, she visited Europe several times. During one of her voyages, Addams and her companion, Ellen Gates Starr, visited London’s original settlement house of Toynbee Hall, established in 1884. The visit led the two women to establish the Chicago settlement house of Hull House in 1889, the second such house to be established in America. Through Hull House, Addams found a vocation for her adult life.

Addams campaigned for every major reform issue of her era, such as fairer workplace conditions for men and women, tenement regulation, juvenile-court law, women’s suffrage, and women’s rights. While in the first part of her life Addams was mainly involved in social work in Hull House, in the twentieth century she used her notoriety to advance political causes and became a well-known public figure. In 1910 she was the first woman president of the National Conference of Social Work, and in 1912 she actively campaigned for the Progressive presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, becoming the first woman to give a nominating speech at a party convention. Addams was also a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In the 1920s, Addams concentrated many of her efforts on antiwar efforts, she became the president of the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915 and chaired the International Women’s Congress for Peace and Freedom at The Hague, Netherlands. Americans were not unanimous in their praise for Addams’s campaigning for peace. Despite her unpopular views in the US, Addams’s antiwar efforts won her the Nobel Peace Prize, which she shared with Nicholas Murray Butler. Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935, three days after being diagnosed with cancer.

Historical Document

This paper is an attempt to analyze the motives which underlie a movement based, not only upon conviction, but upon genuine emotion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for that sentiment for universal brotherhood, which the best spirit of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive. These young people accomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of coördination between thought and action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.…

“It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want of a proper outlet for active faculties.” I have seen young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl pleasure and freedom from care we succeed, for the most part, in making her pitifully miserable.…There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to right wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself.…

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily.…These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction.…They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in business or politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent.…

This young life, so sincere in its emotion and good phrases and yet so undirected, seems to me as pitiful as the other great mass of destitute lives. One is supplementary to the other, and some method of communication can surely be devised. Mr. Barnett, who urged the first Settlement—Toynbee Hall, in East London,—recognized this need of outlet for the young men of Oxford and Cambridge, and hoped that the Settlement would supply the communication. It is easy to see why the Settlement movement originated in England, where the years of education are more constrained and definite than they are here, where class distinctions are more rigid.…We are fast feeling the pressure of the need and meeting the necessity for Settlements in America. Our young people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.…

The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other; but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to social and educational privileges.…The only thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand. It must be open to conviction and must have a deep and abiding sense of tolerance. It must be hospitable and ready for experiment.…Its residents must be emptied of all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion, and ready to arouse and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must be content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors, until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests.…In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given over to industrialism. They are bound to regard the entire life of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to protest against its over-differentiation

It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.

Glossary

emptied of all conceit of opinion: forced to give up one’s own beliefs and preferences

Mr. Barnett: Samuel Barnett (1844–1919), who with his wife, Henrietta, founded the world’s first settlement house in 1884

social settlements: settlement houses, or community centers that offer a variety of services in an economically disadvantaged area

Document Analysis

Like many other young, middle-class Progressives, Addams felt an urge to be useful and to find a vocation to occupy her adult life. For eight years following her father’s death, Addams was unable to act and find such a purpose in her life: “During most of that time,” she recalls in her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, “I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned.” This period of personal and professional insecurity ended when she found a way to couple her idealism with concrete action through the establishment of Hull House in Chicago’s slum neighborhood around Halsted Street. The settlement house was one of the most ambitious aspects of urban reform movements. Settlement houses were located in slum neighborhoods densely populated by immigrants and were mainly directed by women. Young middle-class people worked in settlements to improve the living conditions of slum dwellers, encouraging them to improve their education, jobs, and housing as well as their understanding of American society and culture. Settlement workers soon became the leading personalities of the movement for social reform, progressively broadening their focus to campaign for school nurses, public playgrounds, and better working conditions.

As with other Progressive causes, the political relevance of the settlement movement should not obscure its middle-class basis. Such a basis clearly emerges in Addams’s 1892 speech “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” delivered at the summer school of the Ethical Culture Societies at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and later reprinted as the sixth chapter of Twenty Years at Hull-House. Addams makes clear that the settlement serves as a political solution to the personal malaise of young middle-class professionals who needed to find “an outlet for that sentiment of universal brotherhood” and must “give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.” Settlements like Hull House, Addams indicates, thus benefit both the slum dwellers they aim to serve and the middle-class people, particularly women, who work in them, allowing them to find an outlet for their talents and compassions. Without the settlement houses, such talents would largely remain untapped by society, and those unable to work in such houses would feel a sense of aimlessness.

Building directly on her own experience, Addams indicts the domestic values of American Victorian culture for their negative impact on the lives of many women. Society restrains the desire to act to alleviate suffering that is part of the social obligation that human beings feel. While the aim of this culture may be to give women a life full of pleasure and free of worries, the corresponding social attitudes only make them unhappy. Addams claims that in America “a fast-growing number of cultivated young people…have no recognized outlet for their active faculties.” To Addams, the fate of these young people who lack purpose is as pitiful as that of the destitute masses who occupy America’s urban slums. Settlement houses can provide a medium of communication between the two groups and benefit both. Settlements are based on solidarity and the Christian impulse to better the lives of the poor.

The last part of the speech defines Hull House also as an experiment in urban sociology, designed to “relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.” According to Addams, this stark imbalance in the distribution of wealth is typical of the modern conditions of life in a great city. The activities of the settlement should be shaped by the conviction that solutions to urban problems can be achieved through cooperative efforts and reform. Settlement workers should have “a scientific patience in the accumulation of facts” about human life and should be tolerant, flexible, and keen to experiment with approaches. The goal of Hull House is not to highlight differences; on the contrary, the settlement should be built upon what workers and slum dwellers share. In Addams’s conception, Hull House offers common ground where the working class and the middle class can meet and learn from one another.

Essential Themes

America, and the entire western world, was changing at a remarkable pace in the 1890s. The “social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city” would only increase. Within a year of Addams delivering this speech, the panic of 1893, one of the worst financial crises in American history, would increase the ranks of America’s poor. The middle class, however, would continue to grow and continue to move further away—both geographically and culturally—from the working poor of American cities. Addams seeks, through the settlement movement, to “relieve” the increasing tension between over accumulation and destitution. The solution, provided through the settlement movement is to improve peoples’ sense of citizenship, building “a sense of relationship and mutual interests.” Like so much of the work of the progressive movement, this was about increasing social cohesion—bringing together different elements of society in order to improve the city (and nation) as a whole. Another crucial theme brought out in Addams’s speech that is an echo of wider Progressive concerns is the reliance on the collection of data and the importance of approaching social issues with a scientific scrutiny.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Brown Victoria Bissell, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

2 

Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

3 

——Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).

4 

McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Prono, Luca. "“The Subjective Necessity For Social Settlements”." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0087.
APA 7th
Prono, L. (2017). “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Prono, Luca. "“The Subjective Necessity For Social Settlements”." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.