A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

Feminist social activists in the settlement house movement were intent on constructing communities that placed the power of the individual in the wider realm of social change. The settlement house movement, founded in London, aimed to bring together middle-class and lower-income people in an urban group-living situation. Settlement houses attempted to build community in working-class neighborhoods, providing lodging, meals, adult and child education, exercise, and cultural programs. They also prioritized the sharing of knowledge and skills among their residents and the community. Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House, the first U.S. settlement house, in Chicago in 1889. (Later in her life, Addams would be partnered with Mary Rozet Smith, a major benefactor to Hull House.) Addams, born in 1860, was a product of late Victorian American culture. She believed deeply in some of the traditional ideas about sexuality and gender, even as she herself transgressed them in her own life and work. Addams’s most radical idea, and one that was at the heart of the settlement house movement, was expanding the notion of family to include broader, diverse social groups that needed to “combine” for a common goal. Julie Abraham notes that Addams’s vision of “combining” is a “joining of the personal and the political.” Addams was interested in a project that was at once “a deeply personal enterprise and a release from the personal,” an expansion into what Addams her...