This project examines U.S. womens diverse literary contributions to the social settlement movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with Jane Addamss Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and examining other fictional and non-fictional considerations of the settlement project, I explore the ways in which the authors in my study individually and collectively confront a Progressive-Era ideal of societal regeneration. Working with well-known authors such as Addams and Anna Julia Cooper, as well as with rare and archival texts by writers such as African American activist Fannie Barrier Williams, Social Gospel writers like Vida Scudder, and regional novelists such as Elia Peattie, I analyze the writers use of social, scientific, and religious arguments in service of urban reform work. I consider the interrelationships between text, activism, and identity for these women writers, and I argue that in writing about the settlement movement, each middle-class author in this study offers her own vision of what a Woman Reformer is and should be. Though Addamss memoir identifies the female activist as a singular, individualistic, and somewhat masculine figure along the lines of Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy, other writers challenge this identity even as they refer and defer to Addams and her dominance. Most of the writers emphasize the importance of factors such as community, partnership, and religion through their texts, but ultimately, the literature as a whole largely relies on an image of a (usually white) middle-class heroine who will help save industrial America, and the final text I examine, Peatties The Precipice, extends that idea to a eugenics-based reform program. The People in the Neighborhood shows thatfor its pervasiveness, its position at the nexus of Progressive-Era culture, and its discourse over gender, race, and classthe settlement movement and its literature is a crucial area of study that provides an avenue for scholars to examine the long and sometimes subtle history of prejudice in radical movements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-10152008-181145 |
| Date | 15 October 2008 |
| Creators | Lock, Sarah J. |
| Contributors | Daniel Williams |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-10152008-181145/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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