Explains what a settlement house is, describes its role in the lives of poor children who live near it, and tells how the settlement house movement is still being felt today.

We like to say that our cities have been shaped by creative destruction the vast powers of capitalism to remake cities. But Marta Gutman shows that other forces played roles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as cities responded to industrialization and the onset of modernity. Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings, and most tellingly she reveals the determinative roles of women and charitable institutions. In Oakland, Gutman shows, private houses were often adapted for charity work and the betterment of children, in the process becoming critical sites for public life and for the development of sustainable social environments. Gutman makes a strong argument for the centrality of incremental construction and the power of women-run organizations to our understanding of modern cities. "

The settlement house movement, launched at the end of the nineteenth century by men and women of the upper middle class, began as an attempt to understand and improve the social conditions of the working class. It gradually came to focus on the "new immigrants"—mainly Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Jews—who figured so prominently in this changing working class. Hull House, one of the first and best-known settlement houses in the United States, was founded in September 1889 on Chicago's West Side by Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr. In a major new study of this famous institution and its place in the movement, Rivka Shpak Lissak reassesses the impact of Hull House on the nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in American society.

Jane Addams's early attempt to empower the people with information

A woman being crushed by motherhood is offered a stay at a free vacation house but finds the strict humiliating living conditions worse than her life in poverty. Anzia Yezierska wrote about the struggles of female Jewish immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. She confronted the cost of acculturation and assimilation among immigrants. Her stories provide insight into the meaning of liberation for immigrants—particularly Jewish immigrant women.

Discusses how reformers changed the face of the United States with their work on behalf of the poor and the creation of settlement houses.