Progressives attacked the problems of the city on many fronts. The settlement house movement, which began in England, came to the United States in 1886 with the opening of the University Settlement House in New York City. Other settlement houses soon followed. In the summer of 1889, reformer Jane Addams leased two floors of a dilapidated mansion on Chicago’s West Side. For Addams, personal action marked the first step in her search for solutions to the social problems created by urban industrialism. She wanted to help her immigrant neighbors, and she wanted to offer meaningful work to educated women like herself. Addams’s emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between the social classes made Hull House different from other philanthropic enterprises. She wished to do things with, not just for, Chicago’s poor.

In the next decade, Hull House expanded from two rented floors in the old brick mansion to some thirteen buildings housing a remarkable variety of activities. Addams provided public baths, opened a restaurant for working women too tired to cook after their long shifts, and sponsored a nursery and kindergarten. Hull House offered classes, lectures, art exhibits, musical instruction, and college extension courses. It boasted a gymnasium, a theater, a manual training workshop, a labor museum, and the first public playground in Chicago.

In 1893, the needs of poor urban neighborhoods that had motivated Jane Addams led Lillian Wald, a nurse, to recruit several other nurses to move to New York City’s Lower East Side “to live in the neighborhood as nurses, identify ourselves with it socially, and … contribute to it our citizenship.” Wald’s Henry Street settlement pioneered public health nursing.

Women, particularly college-educated women like Addams and Wald, formed the backbone of the settlement house movement and stood in the vanguard of the progressive movement. Settlement houses gave college-educated women eager to use their knowledge a place to put their talents to work in the service of society and to champion progressive reform. Settlements grew in number from six in 1891 to more than four hundred in 1911. In the process, settlement house women created a new profession — social work.

For their part, churches confronted urban social problems by enunciating a new social gospel, one that saw its mission as not simply to reform individuals but to reform society. Charles M. Sheldon’s popular book In His Steps (1898) called on men and women to Christianize capitalism by asking the question “What would Jesus do?” Ministers also played an active role in the social purity movement, the campaign to attack vice.

Attacks on alcohol went hand in hand with the push for social purity. The Anti-Saloon League, formed in 1895 under the leadership of Protestant clergy, added to the efforts of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in campaigning to end the sale of liquor. Reformers pointed to links between drinking and a variety of other problems, including prostitution, wife and child abuse, unemployment, and industrial accidents. The powerful liquor lobby fought back, spending liberally in election campaigns, fueling the charge that liquor corrupted the political process.

An element of nativism (dislike of foreigners) ran through the movement for prohibition, as it did in a number of progressive reforms. The Irish, the Italians, and the Germans were among the groups stigmatized by temperance reformers for their drinking. Progressives campaigned to enforce the Sunday closing of taverns, stores, and other commercial establishments and pushed for state legislation to outlaw the sale of liquor. By 1912, seven states were “dry.”