PhD thesis,
"Neither a personal nor a private enterprise": The college settlements association, 1887-1917
Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, PhD Thesis, (1995)
Abstract
Women presided over the North American settlement-house movement since its inception in the late 1880s. They served as a majority of its workers and emerged as some of its most celebrated leaders. Despite women's success within the movement, historians have traditionally grounded American settlement initiative within a framework of British social thought. Most studies of American settlement work begin with the Christian Socialist rhetoric of John Ruskin and Frederick Denison Maurice. Such an analysis ignores a history of American women's relevant reform work that antedated and foreshadowed English settlement work. This thesis, a study of the College Settlements Association, argues that the American settlement movement rooted itself in a culture of female association building that pervaded the latter half of the nineteenth century. This culture provided early settlement leaders with an already-present infrastructure and social vision on which to build a movement.
