Interventions: An Evaluative Matrix

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, concerns in the United States about social injustices and inadequate provisions for people’s well-being led social scientists and humanistically oriented citizens to speak out about the need for reforms. In 1903, Du Bois (1940) wrote about “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the twentieth century,” and emphasized that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” (p. 1). Addams, a prominent U.S. social activist, worked in the settlement house movement to provide a better life for urban slum dwellers, especially women. She wrote that a new standard of social morality was needed based on a belief in “the essential dignity and equality of all” (Addams, 1902, p. 6), openness to and involvement in a wide range of social experiences, and “identification with the common lot ... [as] the essential idea of Democracy ... [and] the source and expression of social ethics” (Addams, 1902, p. 11).