This was the first generation of women to have the experience of university education, and no one knew quite what to do with them. So they had to invent their own project. For many, this was the Social Science Movement, a heroic determination to combine an understanding of how society works with efforts to make it work better. From a seamless joining of science, imagination and radical reform, they proposed a world that dissolved the traditional bifurcation of the public and the private, the domestic and the social, which has always handicapped attempts to establish effective welfare services. Because the women’s project seemed so different, it has been eclipsed by the way in which the histories of social science and reform have been written. These have shone the spotlight instead on men’s efforts to build a theory-based social science, removed from practical realities and safely ensconced in the detached haven of universities.

This chapter is about the development of social science and voluntary welfare services outside universities in social settlements which were established in Europe and the US in the late 19th century. Although Settlements weren’t uniquely female innovations, the women who set many of them up and worked in them did help to generate a particular kind of knowledge about social conditions. ‘Settlement sociology’ describes a mix of empirical research, pioneering methodology, social theory and socio-political activism that typified the work of reformers living in these places. Women organizing as women wasn’t itself a new idea. Before the First World War, it was the rule rather than the exception in many countries for women to organize separately from men; they weren’t, on the whole, welcome in the men’s organizations. In Britain, for example, membership conditions for the Labour Party kept most women out (members had to be male heads of household or belong to a trade union).

Women’s education had also, of course, mostly been on special terms: women’s colleges, women teachers, women’s subjects, a blanket prohibition on admission to the spaces of masculine academia. In London, the British Museum Reading Room furnished a physical and metaphorical illustration of the problem. ‘The swing doors swung open,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in A room of one’s own in 1929, ‘and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names.