How Women Settlement Reformers Leveraged Their Power To Create Spaces For Immigrant and Migrant Women During The Late 19th Century
Between the years of 1880 and 1920 more than 20 million immigrants arrived on American shores. Many of them migrated from Eastern and Western Europe fleeing job shortages, crop failures, rising taxes, and poor economic conditions in their native countries with hopes to find economic improvement in the United States. This was the time of the second industrial revolution moving rural farm workers into factories as mass production, assembly lines and steel became some of the nation’s prime methods of economic growth. Even though there was opportunity there never enough jobs which left many people impoverished and fighting for opportunities.
In the 1880s African Americans were also migrating from the south in droves. Technically, they’d been given their freedom from slavery, but the definition of “freedom” was still evolving in the southern states and seemingly in name only. True slavery was illegal from a federal standpoint, but within the borders of the southern states, African Americans were still treated as foreigners in their native land. With emancipation came lots of limitations for example being arrested for being idle or not signing a labor contract with an employer. These oppressive laws, called Black Codes, which were laws enacted to keep African Americans in their “place.”
The settlement movement was a social reform movement that took place in the late 19th century in the United Kingdom and the United States. The goal was to bring poor and rich society within close physical proximity of each other to provide social benefit to the poorer class. The idea was to establish settlemnet houses in poor urban areas and middle class workers would live in the houses and share culture with the low income neighbors. There was an idea that education and culture could alleviate poverty. The houses provided a variety of services such as healthcare, daycare, and English classes.
The idea behind this shared cultural exchange can be found in desegregation bussing and in affordable housing preservation, the latter being more reminiscent of the settlement movement’s core values.
September 6, 1860, Lauren Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois. Addams was a settlement activist, suffragist, reformer, social worker and co-founder of one of Chicago’s most well known settlement houses, The Hull House.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; partial gift of Mrs. Nancy Pierce York and Mrs. Grace Pierce Forbes
The Hull House provided welfare and help to families in need. According to the Library of Congress’ website, the Hull House. “eventually expanded its services to include providing boarding rooms for female workers, a daycare center, English literacy classes, academic courses, social clubs, and meeting space for union activities.” It became a meeting place to organize around labor issues and women’s suffrage.
Addams felt her duty was to care for those most in need based on the need and what was going on. In 1931 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and she continued to work at the Hull House until she died in 1935.
Victoria Earle Matthews was born into slavery on May 27, 1861, in Fort Valley, Georgia. She was an author, essayist, newspaperwoman, settlement worker, and activist. After Emancipation, Matthews moved with her family to New York City. Like Addams, Matthews was active in the settlement movement. However, she felt that a city like New York City was full of opportunity — but not for Black women. Before opening The White Rose Mission, she noticed that many of the Black women arriving in New York City post Emancipation were from the West Indies and the south. They were susceptible to con artists and men working as employment agents to sex-traffic naive women.
Matthews felt she had no choice but to open up her own settlement house. Stating that for “the young and unfriended [women] of other races, there are all sorts of institutions,” but for black girls and women, “there is nothing,” according to an article in Curbed NY.
The White Rose Mission was a haven for Black women. It provided financial classes, child-rearing instruction, enrichment courses, and a library of books regarding African American achievement.
The White Rose Mission kept its doors open from 1897–1984, helping build the lives and character of hundreds of thousands of women.
You can read more about the White Rose Mission here.
