Abstract
Speaking to a group of educators in the early 1890s, Wellesley professor, social reformer, and College Settlements Association (CSA) founder Vida Dutton Scudder described the CSA’s work in recruiting college women to social reform:
I think it is almost a true generalization to say that no resident who has entered a settlement has ever left it in the same attitude as that in which she entered. The theorizing about problems that perplex us is one thing; but the active effort to help, and the actual presence of those dark problems—the knowing them face to face through personal experience—is quite another thing. … Our settlements, I am sure, give exactly the highest and best training that a woman could possibly have to enable her to be of the best service to her day and generation.1
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Notes
On universities’ changing mission and debates over purpose, see Steven Diner, A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980)
and Laurence R Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or a Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: James R Osgood, 1873);
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), xv–xvi; 3–12.
On related ideas concerning women, education, and service, see Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23–26.
On Progressive Era student service, see Emily Mieras, “‘A More Perfect Sympathy’: College Students and Social Service 1880–1919” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 1998).
See also Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 113–18.
Martin A. Green, The Mount Vernon Street Warrens, A Boston Story, 1860–1910 (New York: Scribner’s, 1989);
Scudder, On Journey (New York: Dutton, 1937), 109.
John Ruskin, “Ad Valorem,” in The Genius of John Ruskin, Selections from His Writings, ed. John D. Rosenberg (London: Routledge, 1979).
On the education of Scudder and her generation of Wellesley professors, see Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 77–99.
T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” in The Culture of Consumption, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 6, 10.
Works useful in synthesizing the dilemmas of educated women include Joyce Antler, “The Educated Woman and Professionalization: The Struggle for a New Feminine Identity 1890–1920” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1977);
Elizabeth Palmer Hutcheson Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience” (PhD diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1981);
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Palmieri, In Adamless Eden.
Allen Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford, 1967).
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 67–76;
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 155–58, 221–24;
Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11–13.
Robert A. Woods, ed., The City Wilderness (Boston: Rverside Press, 1903; repr., Arno, 1970) is an excellent source of period information about the neighborhood, its history, and its problems—albeit from the settlement workers’ perspectives. Woods was head of South End House.
Dominic Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 70.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and The Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 48–56.
Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies” American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986): 283.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 163.
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Arthur C. Holden, The Settlement Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 54;
Cathy L. James, “‘Not Merely for the Sake of an Evening’s Entertainment’: The Educational Uses of Theater in Toronto’s Settlement Houses, 1910–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (Fall 1998): 292–97.
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 165–84.
Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 53–54.
Scudder, “The Relation of College Women to Social Need” (1890), box 2, folder 14, VDS.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York: Bantam, 1989), 35.
On these concepts, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women. A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7–10, shows how for middle-class Americans in this period excessive luxury or leisure was as morally suspect as poverty.
Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997) describes how female conceptions of identity changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21–37;
David I. MacLeod, The Age of the Child: Childhood in America, 1890–1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998), 22–26.
LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 3;
Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
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© 2008 Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner, eds.
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Mieras, E. (2008). Latter-Day Knights. In: The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890–1960. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610125_6
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