Settlement movement

The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, English classes, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas.

This science of the social movement is neglected in the history of sociology in favor of a teaching-, theory- and research university–based model.

Victorian Britain, increasingly concerned with poverty, gave rise to the movement whereby those connected to universities settled students in slum areas to live and work alongside local people.

Such institutions were often praised by religious representatives concerned with the lives of the poor, and criticised as normative or moralistic by radical social movements.

The movement was oriented toward a more collectivist approach and was seen as a response to socialist challenges that confronted the British political economy and philanthropy.

Other early examples include Browning Hall, formed in Walworth in 1895 by Francis Herbert Stead, and Mansfield House Settlement, also in east London (see Percy Alden).

After his early death, his widow founded Bishop Creighton House Settlement in Lillie Road, Fulham, in his memory.

[8] The movement gave rise to many social policy initiatives and innovative ways of working to improve the conditions of the most excluded members of society.

The mission involved university students in charitable works and educating poorer people in the area in the settlement movement tradition.

[19] The settlement movement model was introduced in the United States by Jane Addams[20] after travelling to Europe and learning about the system in England.

[21] The settlement movement became popular due to the socio-economic situation in the United States between 1890 and 1910, when more than 12 million European people immigrated to the country.

The American settlement movement sprang out of the-then fashionable philosophy of "scientific philanthropy", a model of social reform that touted the transmission of "proper" [i.e.WASP) values, behavior, and morals to the working classes through charitable but also rigorously didactic programs as a cure to the cycle of poverty.

The movement also spread to late imperial Russia, as Stanislav Shatsky and Alexander Zelenko set up a network of educational and social institutions in northern Moscow in 1905, naming it "Settlement" ("Сетлемент", the English word transliterated to Russian).