The forgotten example of 'settlement sociology': Gender, research, communities, universities and policymaking in Britain and the USA, 1880–1920

Ann Oakley

doi:10.18546/rfa.01.1.03

Abstract

Many of the social investigations carried out in social settlements established in Britain and the USA in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s are early examples of participatory research based on a theory of knowledge with 'citizen experience' at its centre. This research, much of it done by women, was often methodologically innovative and enormously influential in shaping public policy. Its history is bound up with that of disciplinary specialization, in which women's research and reform work have been classified, and thus hidden, as 'social work'.

Highlights

The period from the early 1880s until about 1920 saw the worldwide growth of a movement designed to combine community solidarity, social investigation and public policy reform
While scholarship since the 1980s has returned some of settlement sociology’s history to the light, with respect to the American story, much work still remains to be done excavating the achievements of women ‘settlers’ and researchers in Britain and elsewhere in Europe
A central challenge is to document the web of connections that existed between the practitioners of settlement sociology in different countries; another is to assess the extent of its impact on policy, and the conditions that favoured or inhibited this impact

Summary

Introduction

The period from the early 1880s until about 1920 saw the worldwide growth of a movement designed to combine community solidarity, social investigation and public policy reform. The social reformer and politician Eleanor Rathbone began working at the Victoria Women’s Settlement in Liverpool in 1903, where she became de facto head of the social investigation department, carrying out careful and in-depth research into social and economic life Her 1909 report How the Casual Labourer Lives, ‘an early analysis of the credit arrangements of the poor’ (Pedersen, 2004: 106), was one of the first systematic studies of family budgets. The records of Denison House show that, social reform and research were high on the agenda at the start, residents learnt to conceal and to curb these activities, afraid that they would lose university support This applied to their work in labour reform and with local women trade union organizers, about which they were less than honest in settlement reports (Capitanio, 2010).

Conclusion

Notes on the contributor