Building on the Romance of Women's Innate Strengths: Social Feminism and Its Influence at the Henry Street Settlement, 1893–1993

Abstract

The Henry Street Settlement, which recently celebrated its centennial year, serves as a microcosmic primer in social feminism’s meaning and influence. The first third of the one-hundred-year history of the Henry Street Settlement serves as detailed testimony to the catalytic force of gender consciousness among Progressive-Era social feminists. Their shared faith in the romance of women’s particular inborn worth inspired them to build enduring institutions of service, reform, and culture against significant odds. The women who founded and shaped Henry Street Settlement had been raised in middle-class households during the decade following the Civil War. Settlement houses, the primary incubators of twentieth-century public health care, community-based social services, and social reform, evolved a highly distinctive ethos of social feminist citizenship. An attribute of citizenship at Henry Street was the staff’s commitment to discovering social scientific knowledge and making it accessible and understandable to their neighbors and key governmental policymakers.