overview of the Historical and Contextual development ● 13radical social work.) The first of the settlements was Toynbee Hall, set up in
London’s impoverished East End in 1884 by Canon Samuel Barnett and his
wife Henrietta Barnett. The settlement movement was based on a concept of
reciprocal learning. Students from nearby universities lived at Toynbee Hall
and interacted with socioeconomically disadvantaged community members,
with a view that this interaction would lead to mutual political consciousness
raising (Leighninger 2008).
At this time, a woman from a wealthy Illinois family, Jane Addams, had
developed an educated interest in social issues but had struggled to identify
a practical project that would enable her to pursue that interest. She was
inspired by what she read about the work taking place at Toynbee Hall,
and she traveled to London to spend time at the settlement. Following her
return to America, Addams, together with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, estab-
lished a settlement in Chicago in 1889: Hull House. They were joined by an
expanding group of academically qualified and like-minded people, mostly
women (Leighninger 2008). Hull House was the second American settlement,
following Stanton Coit’s establishment of the Neighborhood Guild in New
York in 1886. Others followed, and by 1910 the movement included over
400 settlement houses across America (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007).
In 1892, three years after the opening of Hull House, the first department
of sociology at an American university was set up at the University of Chicago
(Calhoun 2007). We now turn to the story of the men and the women of that
department (who were also prominent among the women of Hull House) to
seek explanations for the connections and divisions between the disciplines.
Hull House and Sociology at the University of Chicago
Following the principles of Toynbee Hall, Chicago’s Hull House was set in
the heart of a new immigrant community. The Chicago immigrants lived
surrounded by the sweatshops in which they labored, and the Hull House
activists established childcare facilities, social and educational programs, and
a labor bureau to support the citizenry (Leighninger 2008).
One of the best-known research projects of Hull House involved the
extensive mapping of the sociodemographic features of this impoverished
locality. For their methods, the women of Hull House were informed by
the earlier work of Charles Booth, who had begun recording the lives of
the people of London from 1889, similarly uncovering distressing levels
of poverty (Shaw 2009). The Hull House project was published in 1893 as
Hull-House Maps and Papers. This publication is considered one of the most
important classical works in social mapping, predating by about 20 years any
significant adoption of this methodology by sociologists (Levin 2011).