Progressivism and Settlement Houses

Jane Addams' Chicago Hull House:
- Most well-known settlement house.
- Staffed by college-educated women seeking to apply their education.
- Offered limited career options due to social expectations.
- Located in a poorer area of Chicago.
- Provided services such as:
  - Day nursery.
  - Pharmacy distributing medications and medical advice.
  - Boarding house.
  - Art gallery.
  - Music school.
  - Generally promoted the arts.
Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement House (New York):
- Established by nurse Lillian Wald.
- Collaborated with local public schools.
- Ensured each school had a nurse assigned.
- Helped set up the first school lunch program.
- Advocated for playgrounds.
- Pushed for improved street cleaning and stricter building codes.
- Wald later helped found the National Organization for Public Health Nursing.
Development of New Female-Dominated Occupations:
- Social work, public health nursing, and home economics.
- Offered women with professional aspirations a path into social reform.
- Aligned with women's traditional roles of caregiving.
- Shift in thinking: viewing "home" as the larger community.
- Woman's role expanded from personal home to promoting a safe and developmental larger community.

Progressive Goals in the Political Realm:
- Eliminate corruption in government.
- Rein in corporate power (big business).
- Promote more active local and state governments.
Response to Urban Corruption:
- Addressing the corruption of urban politics and poor social conditions.
Urban Government Reforms:
- Upgrading city services (particularly in the industrial Northeast and Midwest).
  - Installing better water purifiers to reduce waterborne diseases (typhoid, dysentery, cholera).
  - Increasing street cleaning.
  - Building more parks.
Reforming Urban Political Systems:
- Good government movement promoting nonpartisan city managers.
- Adopting business-like techniques over political interests.
- Hiring more career civil servants.
- Imposing civil servant tests to ensure training and experience.
- Developing model city charters, ordinances, and zoning circulated via municipal organizations.
- City governments becoming increasingly rationalized and professionalized.
- Some cities adopted commission forms of government instead of strong mayor systems.
- Commission districts representing the entire city, increasing democratic representation.

Direct Election of Representatives:
- Citizens voting for representatives, replacing party boss selection.
- 1913: Seventeenth Amendment allowed for the direct election of senators.
Other Democratic Shifts:
- Initiative: Citizens initiating statutes and legislation through signatures and ballot voting.
- Referendum: Citizens expressing views through popular vote on proposed legislation.
- Secret ballot: Common mode of elections, replacing partisan ballots.
Examples of Progressive Reforms at State and Regional Levels:
- Greater regulation of railroads.
- Greater taxation of big businesses.
- Stronger civil service codes (training and requirements).
- Wage and hour standards for government employees.
- Imposed conservation measures for government-held lands.

Jim Crow Laws:
- White Southerners saw Jim Crow laws as creating a more orderly, rational society.
Poll Taxes and Literacy Tests:
- Seen as improving the voting process by white Southerners.

Decreased Political Engagement:
- Rationalizing politics led to decreased voting participation.
- Loss of direct benefits for political support (jobs, services).
Moral Reform Movements: Prohibition/Temperance Movement:
- Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU):
  - Focused on ending the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol.
  - Situated work in women's traditional roles as caretakers.
  - Concerned about the role of alcohol in destroying families and encouraging domestic abuse.
  - Saw a link between alcohol and domestic abuse.
- WCTU and Anti-Saloon League:
  - Linked alcohol to prostitution and gambling.
- Success of Prohibition:
  - Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1919.
  - Volstead Act banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquors (1920).
  - Repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment, allowing prohibition at state/local levels.