First Track of Manliness: The Role of Manly Qualities in Social Reform

After establishing South End House in Boston in 1892, Woods aimed to revive the middle-class ethics that seemed to have deteriorated with industrialization and expanding immigration. From the late nineteenth century, Boston experienced a surge in immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, although the scale was considerably smaller than that of other industrial cities like Chicago or New York. As new immigrants established ethnic communities in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Boston in search of manufacturing jobs, these areas quickly became congested with tenements, lodging houses, and commercial leisure venues that served immigrants’ needs.Footnote ⁸ Social workers at South End House were keenly aware of the urban problems that accompanied this demographic transformation. The influx of immigrant working-class populations resulted in the segregation of neighborhoods according to class and ethnicity and decreased opportunities for shared activities, while also escalating violent conflicts between different classes. Moreover, Woods’s observation of Boston’s working-class neighborhoods showed that without discipline from social reformers, residents could be vulnerable to the temptations of commercial urban culture. According to Woods, those who prioritized temporary pleasures over responsibility to their families and communities easily engaged in immoral urban entertainments, becoming addicted to the vices of drinking, gambling, and prostitution—and thereby destroying the health and economic stability necessary to fulfill their duties as industrial workers and citizens.Footnote ⁹

Woods, in connecting Boston’s moral degradation to demographic and economic changes, legitimized settlement houses’ role as social laboratories to counter the anonymity and fragmentation accelerated by urbanization. Criticizing earlier philanthropic endeavors as temporary initiatives confined to specific localities, Woods argued that the settlement house movement must strive to lay a foundation for industrial social progress and thus create structural and lasting solutions for modern social problems. These endeavors involved employing an array of social science methodologies: accumulating statistical data on reform, constructing reasonable hypotheses, and observing the effects of certain social phenomena on urban working-class neighborhoods. In this process, individual settlement house research and reform programs could act as microcosms of a broader society, revealing more fundamental and wider structures of industrial society to social workers. In this way, they could find more profound solutions to urban problems.Footnote ¹⁰

According to Woods’s conception, the fundamental social unit upon which settlement houses conducted scientific research and reform work was the “neighborhood.” He defined the neighborhood as a social and geographical concept of the community, serving as the basis for industrial, educational, and recreational reform to realize social ideals, in which coherent cultures developed through communal organization and folkways. The members of the same neighborhood shared common interests and loyalty. For Woods, this solidarity was the main principle of ideal neighborhoods that enabled the members to transform their shared interests into dedication to the public good and democracy.Footnote ¹¹ Using their sociological knowledge of urban neighborhoods, settlement houses could devise education and improvement programs to promote shared activities and communications among working-class people.Footnote ¹² Woods also regarded settlement houses as arbitrators capable of fostering social integrations of the neighborhoods they served. Through the reformers’ efforts to identify a shared public good, different classes and ethnic groups that had previously been in conflict would find mutually beneficial common ground and transform that conflict into civic virtues.Footnote ¹³

By defining the role of the settlement houses as uplifting urban working-class neighborhoods through research and fostering common interests, however, Woods granted social workers the position of disinterested observers of urban society who could objectify and generalize the urban working class as subjects of scientific study and discipline. To emphasize the importance of shared virtues in communal life, Woods brought to bear the concept of “fraternity.” He declared that among the three main principles of modern democracy—liberty, equality, and fraternity—“the greatest of these is fraternity”; and in the history of the world, “there may be too much liberty, too much equality; but of fraternity it is hardly conceivable.” Woods implied that, to fully realize fraternity in society, individuals must acknowledge a set of differentiated public responsibilities assigned according to their abilities and status, contributing to the advancement of a common cause over private interests. From this perspective, the excessive pursuit of liberty and equality could be regarded as a rejection of these distinct responsibilities and a neglect of one’s obligations, thereby undermining social order and hierarchy. Woods clarified that the settlement house should work for “systematic training of the rank and file of the people” and “collective action toward the common good” more than for individual freedom. It opened a path to the reformers’ authoritative position to determine, through their knowledge, what position people should take to achieve the goal.Footnote ¹⁴ Following modern epistemology and political philosophy that regarded moral judges’ ability to dislocate themselves from their subjects’ particular interests and feelings as the hallmark of reason, Woods’s idea of the settlement house assumed the legitimacy to define and measure the usefulness of the urban working classes for the public good, thus making them subjects of discipline and directing them into moral and productive characters.Footnote ¹⁵

By connecting the concept of fraternity with objectivity and discipline, Woods’s view of urban societies diverged notably from that of female settlement reformers. Like Woods, women reformers obviously believed in the effects of scientific methods and moral reform in improving the working-class standard of living. However, in accumulating knowledge about human experience, they employed interpersonal experience and sympathy for those in need of aid, granting themselves the role to protect those most affected by social dislocation and poverty, primarily women and children.Footnote ¹⁶ For instance, Jane Addams maintained that the sympathies of settlement residents could serve as the instrument to accumulate scientific knowledge of urban society and apply it in practice, arguing that settlement houses were “something much more human and spontaneous” than the “sociological laboratory” and that reformers had to be “swallowed and digested” into the livelihood of the people.Footnote ¹⁷ This difference between Woods and Addams illustrates how the gendered views of social workers could shape their goals and methods in designing and implementing reform. Sociologist Dorothy Smith has argued that women, socially endowed with the role of domestic caregivers, could draw direct and particular knowledge about family, neighborhood, and community from their daily experiences. However, male-centric professional systems marginalized this kind of knowledge while at the same time endowing authority to masculinized abstract and objectified knowledge, thereby enhancing the centrality of male clusters in the professional groups.Footnote ¹⁸ Though Woods did not explicitly claim his idea’s superiority, his vision of the settlement house articulated a more top-down, authoritative understanding of society than that of female social workers, characterized by sympathy, nurturing, and affection.

Woods’s disciplinary role in social reform, correcting those who failed to adhere to ideal social norms, became apparent in the categorization of and establishment of a hierarchy within the working class. The tendency to categorize the working classes according to their perceived social utility was common in the discourse of Progressive Era social reform, which posited that a society could identify social and economic defects of industrial workers in advance and discipline their temperaments through scientific correction. By the late nineteenth century, social reform discourses portrayed working-class defect and poverty as antithetical to ideal manliness. These discourses connected workers’ immoral and unproductive behaviors to their failure to comply with bourgeois moral values of thrift, diligence, and family responsibility, all of which indicated their lack of economic-social foundations and potential threats of crime and social disruption to the community.Footnote ¹⁹

Following these ideas, Woods distinguished the members of the working class who had the “capacity and passion to get social mobility” and “loyalties and passions of the proletariat” from “the residuum the bottom,” in which “tramps, pauperism, [and] drunkenness” were prevalent. In this framework, Woods assumed two perspectives on the urban immigrant working class. First, members of the working class could be categorized according to personal ability and economic status, both of which he believed were determined by an individual’s will and moral level. Woods contended that there was an intrinsic gulf “between a talent and incapacity.”Footnote ²⁰ Second, he held that there still existed a lower stratum of working-class men whose efforts and developments could not be expected to develop through the welfare and education programs offered by the settlement house.Footnote ²¹ What social work had to provide to the lowest stratum of the working class—those who deliberately abandoned their labor duty—was not motivational or educational reform, but more compulsory and disciplinary initiatives to correct their degeneracy.

The first sorts of degenerate working-class individuals whom Woods sought to distinguish from the “normal” group were “tramps, chronic loafers, [and] beggars.” To Woods, tramps were individuals who voluntarily renounced jobs and chose a life of wandering, thereby abandoning the manly responsibilities of forming families, sustaining their families’ livelihood, and establishing themselves as members of civic society. Roaming through urban and rural areas without permanent residence, these individuals refused to engage in labor beyond temporary jobs that were only sufficient to meet their basic needs. Woods argued that these vagrant populations, who could be hired at low wages and easily dismissed, served as a disposable labor force for employers and thus imposed “irresponsible competition” upon “steady, faithful workingmen.”Footnote ²² Alvan Sanborn, a resident of South End House, claimed that the impulsiveness, idleness, and criminal tendencies of tramps and vagrants had a detrimental effect on the moral fabric of working-class neighborhoods. These individuals frequented cheap lodging houses and maintained close ties with saloons, indulging in alcohol and sexual immorality. Often, the anonymity afforded by the urban environment enabled tramps to conceal themselves or to make hidden connections among each other, in turn laying the groundwork for organized criminal activity.Footnote ²³

These observations led Woods to actively engage in legal and institutional reforms at the state level to control unemployable workers. As a member of the Massachusetts Civic League’s Committee on Tramps, Woods urged legislation to address the issue. This effort culminated in tangible results when the Massachusetts State Legislature passed the Act on Tramps and Vagrancy in 1905.Footnote ²⁴ This law required lodging houses in Massachusetts to implement a work test for all lodgers, mandate hours of labor in exchange for meals and accommodations, and register information with the district police. Reformers and legislators sought to use the work test to identify tramps unwilling to work and to prevent their entry into urban spaces, thereby stopping their potential criminal tendencies from spreading to the broader working-class population.Footnote ²⁵ In shaping this act, Woods demonstrated his belief that tramps and vagrants were groups unqualified to be the beneficiaries of settlement house-led welfare and education. In spite of his emphasis on applying scientific methodologies to study working-class life conditions, Woods still maintained the moralistic view of the late nineteenth century regarding tramps. He connected tramps’ failure to their work ethic, regarding them as those who internalized indolence and idleness through vagrancy and defied the wage system by refusing the freedom to work.Footnote ²⁶

Another working-class group that Woods identified as a cause of urban disorder was alcoholics. Progressive Era settlement reformers’ interest in alcohol consumption as a social problem was partly inherited from the Gilded Age temperance movement, represented by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. As historian Paul Boyer has argued, however, progressive reformers, consistent with their approach to other social issues, sought to present prohibition as a scientific movement. Relying on the accumulation and investigation of data and statistics, advocates of prohibition distinguished their efforts from the earlier temperance movement, which they characterized as having been driven by sentimental and purely moral appeals. This shift provided Woods with favorable conditions for projecting a masculinized perspective onto his understanding of alcoholics.Footnote ²⁷

Woods addressed the harms of alcoholism from a perspective based in eugenics, employing pathological terminology and emphasizing the seemingly contagious and hereditary nature of alcoholism’s associated vices. He argued that drunkenness should no longer be understood solely in terms of an individual’s morality or mental state but rather as a disease affecting the nervous system. According to this view, alcoholics could transmit the habit of drinking to those around them like a biological contagion. Moreover, an individual’s alcoholism was both heavily influenced by and capable of affecting his genetic environment. Woods believed that drunkenness caused chemical damage to the germ cells involved in reproduction, which, in turn, would result in significant physical and mental degeneration in the next generation.Footnote ²⁸ In that regard, he categorized alcoholics into those who showed the will and potential for improvement and those who did not. The group he defined as the “feeble-minded,” who were incapable of overcoming alcoholism and attaining sobriety on their own, needed to be identified and segregated through cooperation between reformers and state governments “to cut off their strain for the future.”Footnote ²⁹

Under this belief, in 1908, as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Inebriate Hospital in Foxborough, the state-run facility for treating alcoholic patients, Woods devised a new approach for addressing alcoholism that required addicts to work, exercise, and practice civic morality. His goal was to regenerate alcoholics physically and morally and reintegrate them into society as productive workers. This plan granted police and courts the power to classify suspected alcoholics and to conduct the medical investigations that accompanied their arrests and incarceration. It also mandated that these classified addicts should be segregated and isolated from society until their labor efficiency was restored.Footnote ³⁰

Woods’s idea that the problems of individual workers could be attributed to their heredity and temperament—and that the reformers could preemptively find out and exclude them—also hinted at his eugenic view of broader urban immigrant society. Woods did not associate ethnic backgrounds with differing psychological traits; instead, he concluded that all immigrants possessed the potential to make “valuable contributions to the city’s economic and moral welfare.”Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless, one could easily see his categorization of members of the working class into the superior, “higher type of public spirits,” and the inferior, who were “left stranded in odd nooks and corners of the slum,” as sharing the assumption of modern eugenics that human heredity could be scientifically investigated and controlled for social uplift.Footnote ³² Beyond its political implications, eugenics could appeal to the desire of Progressive Era American society to improve human character, rather than leaving it to individuals’ choice. A masculinized, authoritative, and hierarchical view of the working class could further allow reformers to apply Social Darwinist ideas in order to isolate and segregate those who failed to perform their economic duties as citizens—and thus prevent their possible adverse effects on other members of the working class.Footnote ³³

Woods’s eugenic perspective was more apparent in the case of African Americans, in which he did not apply the view of separating individual character and ability from race. Boston’s Black community, although smaller than comparable communities in other northern cities, doubled in population between 1890 and 1920 as freed southern Blacks migrated to the city. Employed in low-skilled occupations as janitors, porters, and laundresses, they experienced tacit discrimination in the labor market and lagged behind European immigrants in both social mobility and economic security.Footnote ³⁴

As the headworker of the settlement serving immigrant populations of the South End, Woods was probably well aware of these prejudices and circumstances. He believed that Boston’s Black population presented more complex challenges regarding social uplift than those posed by European immigrants. Despite the Black community’s self-directed efforts toward economic advancement, “the barriers of almost ineradicable race prejudice” left them with little hope for progress.Footnote ³⁵ However, Woods’s actual understanding of Boston’s African American population was more nuanced and revealed the limits of his perspective on racial issues. Though Woods did not provide specific comments on it, his view can be inferred by examining how his masculinized perspective influenced other male social workers within his personal intellectual network. One of those connections can be found in In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (1914), conducted by John Daniels, a Harvard Fellow at South End House. In a publication resulting from his fellowship year of 1904, Daniels acknowledged that feedback from and discussions with Woods and male social workers at South End House contributed to the study’s completion.Footnote ³⁶

Daniels’s outlook on African Americans’ industrial and civil progress described in In Freedom’s Birthplace was far from optimistic. Daniels implied the inferiority of Black people in relation to immigrants and native whites across various social aspects, including industrial rank, moral standards, collective progress, and hygiene. While acknowledging that white prejudice and discrimination hindered the social mobility of urban Blacks, Daniels argued that Blacks were falling behind in moral and economic ability, and it was the very origin of their inferiority. For Daniels, the most noticeable sign of the Black communities’ deterioration was their lack of manly virtues. Urban Black residents, he argued, exhibited a lack of physical stamina as well as a shortage of reproductive power and resistance to disease. Even in mental aspects, they seemed not to cultivate the virility to stand up to their responsibilities and put their best endeavors before them. Consequently, African Americans failed to acquire initiative and self-reliance; had inadequate political strength; depended on the guidance and support of other races; lacked the accuracy and responsibility necessary for industrial society; and were excessively absorbed in religious emotionalism—all of which implied their absence of manly citizenship virtues.Footnote ³⁷ Woods also shared this perspective in the introduction he wrote for Daniels, evaluating Boston’s Black communities as an “unassimilated social factor” that demonstrated an “incapacity for loyal, continuous, result-getting teamwork.”Footnote ³⁸

Daniels’s analysis of urban African American communities was based on his view of the broader nineteenth-century historical context of emancipation and Black migration to the North. He believed that, having just ascended from slavery to freedom and citizenship, African Americans were in the nascent stage of achieving independent identity, loyalty, and civic virtues. In this view, post-emancipation American society, influenced by abolitionist ideas, had attempted to grant economically and socially unprepared African Americans political rights equal to those of white citizens. However, it only resulted in the failure of Reconstruction policies and the corruption and inefficiency of scalawags in the South. As the mass migration of African Americans to the North began, their pauperism, dullness, and lack of education provoked northern whites’ increasing bias and support for segregation. Ultimately, Daniels concluded that it was the “propaganda of unrestricted interassociation between two races” from abolitionists’ sentimentality that impeded the civic progress of northern Blacks and led to conflicts with white society. He urged urban African Americans to acknowledge their current inferiority to whites and, rather than agitating for immediate possession of all political rights and privileges, prepare themselves through achieving economic self-sufficiency and industrial education to be qualified for future opportunity.Footnote ³⁹

In 1913, Woods met with sociologist Robert Ezra Park, who would later lead the effort to masculinize sociology in the 1920s as a faculty member at the University of Chicago. Park had had deep exchanges with Daniels on racial issues during the writing of In Freedom’s Birthplace, and he agreed with Woods’s view that “the era of sentimentalism was now closed,” though there was a class of people, “the old anti-slavery crowd, who had taken up the fight for the Negro as a form of sport.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Park’s strong hostility to abolitionism may have stemmed from the prominent role of women and feminine virtue within the movement, a quality he thought also characterized early twentieth-century social work. Despite his personal commitment to social reform, Park, as a faculty member in the University of Chicago’s sociology department, sought to exclude from the department the curriculum of social work advanced by female sociologists involved with Hull House, dismissing their efforts as “self-righteous meddling” by “Do-Gooders.”Footnote ⁴¹

The hierarchical views of race shared by Daniels, Park, and Woods may have been influenced by their masculinized belief in science and objectivity in social work. To these men, abolitionism was obsolete; its claims regarding the unconditional political and social equality of all races had to be replaced with new and scientific social work principles that measured their different social capacities through seemingly objective valuations. This logic, reflecting the masculinized view promoted by the group of male social reformers, contrasted disinterestedness with sentimentalism, consolidating the professionalism and authority of male, middle-class social workers in the settlement houses.

Second Track of Manliness: Protecting Skilled Workers in Neighborhoods

Woods’s conceptualization and implementation of masculinized reforms went beyond reaffirming the manly virtues of reformers themselves. For the male social workers at South End House, making and maintaining a wholesome neighborhood environment was possible only when the inhabitants fulfilled their duties as democratic citizens. This belief was developed into the idea correlating the accomplishment of urban democracy with the nurturing of middle-class-style manliness in the working class, and it was especially expressed via a series of studies on Boston’s working-class neighborhood that South End House published during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Among these, the final one, The Zone of Emergence (1914), was the culmination of South End House’s two-decades-long observation of the living conditions of the urban working classes. This study presented an analysis of the causes behind the neighborhood’s development and decline.

The study’s title, The Zone of Emergence, was based on a term coined by Woods and South End House reformers to define the outskirts of downtown Boston, including Cambridge Port, Roxbury, and South and East Boston. Located between the old downtown slum and the outer suburbs, these areas were predominantly inhabited by the respectable working class, whose economic status was between the poor working class of the slum and the middle and elite classes of the suburbs located farther out. Since the beginning of Boston’s industrialization in the 1850s, foundries and shipyards became the mainstay industries of the zones, offering stable wages and employment to immigrant workers while also promoting their Americanization. The study evaluated that many of those immigrants successfully ascended to skilled worker status, and in turn an increasing number of their offspring were achieving higher education. Consequently, higher education and stable economic status contributed to the formation of a healthy neighborhood, as they allowed the immigrants to have more interest in local politics and to form social clubs dealing with local affairs.Footnote ⁴²

Nevertheless, unsolved problems persisted within the zone. Woods and fellow researchers found that the reorganization of local industries and the resulting demographic changes played a significant role in the collapse of communities in the zone. The zone was initially filled with “high type of industry” that provided decent livelihood and morality to its workers, transforming them into “a body of forceful, worthy moral people.” However, ultimately “low-grade industries” overtook the zone and attracted undesirable, low-grade working populations.Footnote ⁴³ The Zone of Emergence defined high industry based on its ability to provide stable employment and wages to self-independent, skilled male workers, emphasizing that only when breadwinner status was secured could the working class commit to local community affairs and follow the principles of democracy. Under this standard, traditional manufacturing industries such as metalworks and machine shops, which provided jobs to mainly male workforces, were categorized as higher, while the light manufacturing that hired low-skilled workers was ranked lower. As the restructuring of the industrial landscape pushed heavy manufacturing industries out of the region and instead attracted light industries such as garment or food production, it left the area “behind its early high level” and damaged the inhabitants’ living conditions in “a perilous way.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The study concluded that when industries employed large numbers of low-skilled workers, including children, young women, and unskilled immigrants, unsanitary and exploitative working conditions would degrade the living standards and ethical level of local communities, while also posing a threat to the power of skilled workers.

In this context, The Zone of Emergence intertwined the concept of workingmen’s skills with masculine values. The study even equated masculine virility and sturdiness with qualities that could, to some extent, compensate for a lack of labor skills. For instance, being a boilermaker or a fireman required less skill than being a mechanic or an operative. However, “great physical strength and the power to stand nerve-racking strain” could offset the gap and earn wages comparable to those of more skilled workers. On the other hand, low-grade workers moving into local communities attracted by new low industries included the group of “women and … less forceful and sturdy type of male workers.” This study regarded the industries that employed less skilled and non-male workers as “low-grade” and “semi-parasitic” ones that either “exploit their operatives” or “put a part of the burden of production on the shoulders of parents or other supporters.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The Zone of Emergence’s concern with the growing population of low-skilled workers came from its author’s fear that increasing numbers of unmarried, single workers would threaten urban neighborhoods’ moral level. The shift in the minds of the young members of the working class, who prioritized personal pleasure over economic sacrifice for the family’s betterment, made them less willing to acquire skills or undertake physically demanding jobs and, as a result, less prepared to establish households and assume economic responsibility as breadwinners. A weakened sense of obligation to family ethics among young workers also implied their diminishing sense of belonging to their respective communities. This lowered sense of belonging could lead the urban working class to the weakening of reciprocity and connectedness, which resulted in the breakdown of community life and made them susceptible to the temptations of delinquency and social vice.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the view of South End House reformers, “low-grade industries” were “semi-parasitic” since they hindered the formation of an independent family economy—the basis of civic morality—and lessened the will of workingmen to perform traditional family roles. Such changes would ultimately transform them into weaklings with no ambition for social upward mobility.

To South End House reformers, the breakdown of traditional family norms and the social disorder of unmarried working-class residents were also evident in the increasing number of lodging houses in Boston. Lodging houses rapidly expanded in the city starting in the 1870s as a way to accommodate the growing number of industrial workers. They served as remarkably affordable residences for unmarried working-class people, regardless of ethnicity, who left their hometowns in pursuit of more job opportunities and the commercialized amusement and excitement of the cities.Footnote ⁴⁷ For Woods, however, the living conditions in lodging houses disrupted the development of a healthy community from which “normal personal morale and responsible citizenship could conceivably be nurtured.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Separated from the companionship and family influences of their hometown neighborhoods, lodgers formed only fragmented and short-term human bonds, which, in the social workers’ view, left them vulnerable to the lure of crime. The reformers pointed out that the environment of the lodging house—where anonymity and mobility were too easily guaranteed and deep socialization among neighbors was absent—attracted criminals seeking to hide their identities. Consequently, lodging houses became a “manifestation of the underworld,” promoting “gambling, theft, counterfeiting, suicide, and murder.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The young, unmarried working-class people who were beyond family supervision and living alone in urban areas also had ready access to a more sexually liberated and commercialized urban dating culture, which South End House reformers regarded as evidence of a promiscuous sexuality.Footnote ⁵⁰ Transient love and commercialized dating, far from middle-class-style ethics, led young working-class men to a pseudo-bohemian lifestyle and sensational excitement, which in turn resulted in them perceiving the moral responsibility of marriage and child-rearing as unnecessary obstacles and expenses. Social workers regarded the postponing of marriage and the refusal to have children as particularly perilous, since such choices threatened not only established gender norms within the family but also the overall vitality of the population.Footnote ⁵¹

Likewise, the young women workers immersed in commercialized amusements became increasingly drawn into expensive modes of urban leisure and rejected the caretaking roles necessary for the formation of ethical families. They were content with the life of the unmarried “pin-money worker,” or sought to sustain a self-centered consumer lifestyle by marrying wealthier, upper-class men, a pattern that reformers viewed as rendering them especially vulnerable to solicitation by “strange men.” To Woods, this moral laxity was also partially attributable to families that failed to respond to young people’s aspirations for self-culture and self-advancement. These young people were easily drawn to urban commercial culture when parents—whether native-born or immigrant, who failed to understand the modern experiences their children were undergoing—suppressed their desires for economic independence and recreation. Woods believed that the settlement house could address this problem by assuming a supervisory role over working-class morality and by regulating and directing the amusements of the local community through vocational education and wholesome leisure activities.Footnote ⁵²

Reformers’ fear that women workers could break social obligation to protect working-class families and breadwinner authority implied another fear: that when these less-privileged women express their desires and grievances without intervention from outside, they might form connections to violent radicalism and thus disrupt the reform ideals of the settlement house. This worry solidified when immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, organized a mass strike in January 1912 to protest wages reduced by a law that set maximum working hours for women. For immigrant women workers, who comprised nearly half of Lawrence’s working population and were already struggling with inflation and poor infrastructure, this wage cut meant severe damage to their ability to maintain a livelihood. Things were desperate “enough to turn Lawrence topsy-turvy.”Footnote ⁵³

Woods was one reformer who consistently and staunchly doubted the motives of Lawrence’s strikers, especially as they affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the anarchist trade union that advocated for the unity of the working class across occupations and races, the abolition of the capitalist production system, and workers’ control of the means of production. Woods criticized IWW organizers for their “inflammatory utterances,” which apparently agitated strikers to violently disturb peaceful negotiations and disapprove of political authorities. In contrasting the “agreement-keeping trade unions” that established mutually profitable relationships with a “riotous and an anarchistic phase” of the IWW that caused industrial unrest, Woods declared that South End House had cooperated with the former to prevent disorder and anarchy.Footnote ⁵⁴

Woods did more than simply voice his opposition; he actively suppressed the activities of the IWW. On March 11, 1912, Woods, along with the attorney James M. Prendergast and the Rev. Herbert S. Johnson, petitioned the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, seeking an investigation and a prohibition of the strike committee’s access to public relief funds, accusing the committee of misuse of such funds.Footnote ⁵⁵ The petitioners alleged that the strike committee allotted a considerable portion of funds for members’ salaries, boarding expenses, and legal fees for arrested IWW organizers, which violated the fund’s original purpose of providing urgent relief to strikers and their families. Woods also criticized the use of funds for the expense of “the children’s exodus”: the striker committee’s decision to send strikers’ children to sympathetic socialists in other cities in order to ease the hardships of living during the strike. He viewed the exodus as “needless, demoralizing, and financially wasteful exploitation of the children by making them a national spectacle” for public sympathy. In his view, the event symbolized a socialist plot to disrupt industrial order and agitate the women workers of Lawrence to abandon their gendered duty to protect children from outside influence.Footnote ⁵⁶

At the root of Woods’s hostility toward the Lawrence strikers and the IWW was his firm belief in maintaining a balance between the skilled trade unions, employers, and the settlement house. Though Woods agreed on the necessity of trade unions as the legitimate method of working-class struggle to fight for better working conditions, he regarded their role in terms of reform, not of revolution.Footnote ⁵⁷ For him, unions should not initiate revolution to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and introduce an alternative system, but rather employ diplomatic strategies to bring capitalists into the field of negotiation to discuss improvements in specific workplaces. His point of view also assumed that, as an impartial arbitrator of industrial relationships, the settlement house had to intervene only in cooperative relationships in which workers and capitalists were prepared to understand and negotiate with each other to achieve the public good. If unionization were promoted by radical socialists plotting the destruction of social balance and order between the classes, reformers should not sympathize with or encourage the chaos but rather observe the situation from a neutral standpoint and maintain balance. As Woods stated, “the settlement is not intended to become the agency for the view of any class.”Footnote ⁵⁸

From this perspective, the radicalism of the IWW and the Lawrence strikers was contrary to the ideal norms of trade unionism. Woods’s suspicions regarding the IWW’s cooperation reflected his view that unorganized immigrants and female workers were being manipulated by external agitators with ulterior purposes, leading them to struggles lacking “trained capacity for disciplines and united action.” While Woods acknowledged the necessity of unions for female workers, he contended that they must be led and guided by the male workers in skilled trade unions or else by “women of culture” closely associated with settlement houses. Otherwise, they would fall into “the spread of syndicalism, with a propaganda traversing practically all the efforts of the settlement.” Concluding that female workers’ organizations required guidance from more civilized and ethical groups, Woods defined women’s trade unions not as a strategy to fight for urgent and direct needs but as a kind of education program like that of the settlement house, which helped women workers protect their morality and health against the possible danger of industrial labor.Footnote ⁵⁹

His self-assumed disinterestedness, nevertheless, faced intense criticism from women reformers who opposed the reluctance of social workers to deal with the desperate living conditions of Lawrence’s workers. Vida Scudder, the director of Boston’s Denison House who was well-known for her deep involvement with the women’s trade union movement, attended the strikers’ meeting at Lawrence on March 9, 1912, and gave a speech of support. In the speech, Scudder argued that the strike was based on a sense of law and justice to ensure a more humane living environment for workers, and that “right-minded and disinterested” citizens would provide firm support for workers’ justice and causes. Her emphasis on disinterestedness urged understanding and consideration of the marginalized life of unskilled workers, implying totally different things from Woods’s notion of disinterestedness.Footnote ⁶⁰

Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, the secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL) and Scudder’s Denison House fellow, also joined in support of the strike. She argued that only the IWW listened to the strikers’ rage on rising cost of living and injustices of the mill boss, while the trade unions for skilled male workers, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), ignored and neglected them. O’Sullivan also specifically pointed out and criticized Woods’s petition for the investigation into the strike committee’s funding, saying that the suspicion was based not on fairness but on a strong bias against the strike committee. She denied Woods’s self-claimed disinterestedness, stating that he formed a negative view of the strike based solely on biased information provided by the AFL and police, without visiting Lawrence or the strike committee in person.Footnote ⁶¹ In fact, John Golden, the leader of AFL-affiliated United Textile Workers of America (UTW), referred to the IWW as “a violent bunch of anarchists” and sought to make separate negotiations exclusively for the craft unions under the AFL’s umbrella. In an attempt to sow division among the strikers, the AFL established a separate relief station apart from that of the strike committee, offering assistance only to strikers who agreed to withdraw from IWW-led strikes and return to work.Footnote ⁶²

Support from the IWW, Scudder, and O’Sullivan demonstrated that the Lawrence strike was not only the struggle of the working class but also that of working-class women. It addressed their specific gendered interests. The IWW enrolled women workers on an equal footing with male workers, regardless of skill level, ethnicity, or gender. It acknowledged that women faced oppression specific to their gender, distinctive from but intertwined with class oppression, and argued that both forms of subjugation could be addressed collectively through the abolition of wage slavery and the dismantling of the class system.Footnote ⁶³

On the other hand, the AFL’s preference for the interests of native-born craftsmen led it to worry that low-wage female workers would displace skilled workers and deteriorate their working conditions. The AFL’s president, Samuel Gompers, stated that “competition of the unorganized, defenseless women worker … often tends to reduce the wages of the father and husband.” In that regard, Gompers shared a similar belief with Woods that families centered on the wage of skilled patriarch workers constituted the foundation of social order and morality in American society. Within this framework, Gompers and others defined women’s labor as temporary and unskilled work undertaken before taking the “natural” role of housewife, and they expected female workers to fulfill their duties as homemakers. They regarded the “holiness” and “honor, glory, happiness” associated with motherhood as indispensable to the “support and future welfare of the family.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The AFL’s suspicion toward the Lawrence strike also derived from the strikers’ status as immigrants who were perceived as being unassimilated into American culture. The AFL leaders regarded the large body of unskilled workers, who “do not speak our language,” as susceptible to having their “suspicions and prejudices aroused by so-called radical socialists,” thus making it difficult for the AFL to assert control over them.Footnote ⁶⁵ This distrusting perspective on unorganized immigrant workers aligned with Woods’s belief that the objective of trade unionism should be to establish equilibrium between classes and preserve the order of industrial society, rather than to pursue a revolutionary transformation of the mode of production.

The perspectives of Woods and the AFL on the Lawrence strike were intertwined with their conceptions of manliness, in terms of safeguarding the privileges of male workers as well as reflecting a masculinized worldview on labor policies. When Woods was suspicious of the IWW’s radicalism and claimed reformers’ duty to preserve order and balance in industrial society, he positioned himself as an objective male observer unaffected by sentimentality. However, this suspicion, as social reformers like O’Sullivan vehemently criticized, failed to recognize or understand that cooperation with the IWW was the only available option to immigrant women workers in Lawrence, who could seek help from neither capitalists, governmental power, nor trade unionists. For the strikers facing daily survival threats from exploitation, the direct action and radicalism that male trade unions and social reformers neglected to address was “a weapon ready to any hand … even to the hand of an alien.”Footnote ⁶⁶

International Duty of the Settlement House in the Post-World War Global Society

With the end of World War I, Woods began to set social work’s international expansion as his new ideal. Woodrow Wilson’s postwar vision of permanent world peace assumed the cooperation of nation-states with sovereignty and democratic political systems, and he tasked the United States with exercising its influence to foster cooperation in moral aspects, as well as political and economic ones. Wilson’s notion that Americans could contribute to the making of this system by transplanting modernizing and civilizing programs to new nation-states worldwide coincided with Woods’s attempt to utilize social reform to guide them toward progress, which became more visible through his postwar vision for internationalizing the settlement house movement. Expanding the global influence of American social reform ideas and their practitioners was Woods’s last agenda before he died in 1925.

Woods began to shape his international progressive reform agenda in September 1919, when he embarked on a six-month world tour to East Asia and the Middle East at the request of the Russell Sage Foundation to observe and report on the achievements of the American staff of YMCA China.Footnote ⁶⁷ Given his keen interest in the possibility that postwar social work agencies could exercise their power over broader social units beyond urban local communities, this journey provided a valuable opportunity to learn about the status and vision of Western social relief works in Asian countries. Woods also believed that American-style settlement houses could be the most effective means of solving the social chaos and poor quality of life that modernizing Asian societies were then experiencing. Once the neighborhood settlements were established in Asian cities, they presumably would improve morality, alleviate poverty and distress, and promote vocational education, much like what they had accomplished in urbanizing and industrializing American society.Footnote ⁶⁸

Woods’s observation of American social work in Asia was optimistic, given that pioneering social programs of missionary organizations across Asian nations embodied the reform spirit akin to that of settlement houses. American missionaries in China, especially the YMCA and its American secretaries, actively participated in establishing public institutions and urban community services for dependent and delinquent groups. The growing Chinese enthusiasm for modernization and nationalism, which became more visible following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, marked the decisive moment when Woods turned his attention to China. The young Chinese students and merchants, influenced by Western-style higher education since the 1890s and 1900s, emphasized China’s need to cultivate a new national consciousness as a modern republic. They demonstrated a strong commitment to developing an elementary education system and leisure programs aimed at modernizing children, which closely resembled the services offered by the settlement house. Observing these developments, Woods regarded the YMCA as the most effective partner for Chinese reform initiatives. The organization had already expanded its presence in both Chinese treaty ports and inland cities between the 1890s and 1900s, offering young Chinese intellectuals access to community services and Western knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁹ He idealized YMCA secretaries as “the best type of our university men, thoroughly alert to all ways of community progress,” capable of transmitting American social reform agendas abroad as part of a broader civilizing mission.Footnote ⁷⁰

Based on his observations, Woods argued that the National Federation of Settlements should establish a bureau to stay informed about international situations and promote the spirit of settlement throughout other countries via active cooperation with missionaries.Footnote ⁷¹ Inspired by the accomplishments of missionary social workers in Asian societies, Woods also proposed establishing a new welfare department in the federal government, to be called the World Bureau, that would support the social reform of other nations. The World Bureau would collect and publish information about “weaker nations” and their peoples’ special needs, working as a mediator connecting different American social work agencies with nations asking for help. Woods believed that when a national bureaucracy intervened in social work it could more effectively represent the interests and purposes of its participants than when led by a private organization or an international cooperative body like the League of Nations. He regarded the active cooperation of bureaucrats with missionary and social reform agencies as essential to the global success of settlement houses, much like the international cooperation achieved during World War I.Footnote ⁷² According to this idea, in response to the “all-pervading stimulus of the new internationalism” that intensified after the war, social workers needed to answer the distant calls for modernized education and welfare beyond the borders of the United States. In doing so, they were to offer the “human promise of Christian civilization,” the same transformative force through which they had reshaped American society.Footnote ⁷³

In this concept of internationalized social work, however, connecting the civilizing power of Christianity with the global expansion of social reform shared a worldview with Progressive Era politicians whose masculine approach equated the spreading of American morality with the extension of U.S. imperial power. One of the proponents of this connection was Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who greatly inspired the strengthening of American naval power in the late nineteenth century. Mahan regarded the colonial expansion of the Western powers as a competition between different civilizations and religions. In this competition, Christianity worked as a “political system, force, the sword if necessary,” which helped Western imperialist powers and their human agencies aggressively advance into non-Western societies, contributing to the cause of bringing them “external conditions favorable to their welfare and the general good.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For Mahan in particular, Asia—politically unstable and divided as a “debatable and debated ground”—was the region where “land power” of the Russian Empire and “sea power” of Japan, Britain, and the United States might clash in a contest concerning hegemonic control of the global order. In order to maintain a balance between these forces and, more broadly, to foster the “progress” of Asian nations, Mahan believed the United States needed to assert influence by supporting the “gradual evolution of their inhabitants” and advancing their “material progress and civilization.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Theodore Roosevelt, a staunch supporter of Mahan’s expansionist ideas and the most prominent symbol of Progressive Era masculinity, linked the aggressive expansion of Christianity not only to the realization of virile masculinity but also to the spirit of social reform. For Roosevelt, the pioneers who greatly contributed to acquiring the frontier and overseas colonies could carry out their ambitions through aggressive Christianity and virile masculinity. He argued that the history of Western expansion was “filled by the heroic, self-denying, militant characters who constituted the pioneer Christian ministry, who laid deep the foundations for the Christian commonwealth.” The passion of these virile and religious men also created progress in industrialized cities. Reform-minded clergy and laymen suffered and fought to eliminate the evils of urban society “with infinite self-devotion, with love for mankind, but with a wisdom which prevents this love from becoming hysterical or sentimental,” having the qualities of fortitude, daring, and iron will. In Roosevelt’s understanding, successful social uplift resulted from the strong and heroic “men of marked personality” who were ready to undertake adventure and self-sacrifice. When the United States exerted military and cultural influence abroad, this masculinized Christianity would contribute to expanding this influence, just as it had in the U.S. West and in urban society. It would assume the responsibility for the moral uplift and social betterment of non-Western regions.Footnote ⁷⁶

Woods’s understanding of postwar international society aligned with politicians’ masculinized perspectives during the Progressive Era. While women social reformers like Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Mary McDowell recognized the necessity of international cooperation as a service to pacifism and the anti-war movement, Woods found the legitimacy for the global expansion of social reform in the need to prevail in the international competition for postwar world hegemony—a perspective grounded in the masculine worldview he shared with Roosevelt and Mahan.Footnote ⁷⁷ In his view, democratic powers were undergoing an urgent test after World War I. With the rise of “revolutionary socialism” that became evident with the establishment of the Soviet Union, Woods emphasized that “Christian Civilization” needed to be extended to the “Orient” to strengthen its global influence. Through World War I, Woods came to understand the decisive power of propaganda in advancing civilization on a global scale. In this framework, Christianity was fundamentally a form of positive propaganda, driven by “the intention of conquering the world.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Just as Mahan justified the U.S. advance into Asia in terms of the competition between sea and land power, Woods advocated for the global expansion of the settlement house spirit as a means of guiding “the enterprise of Christianity … directing its appeal … to all the higher instincts of men” over the world to triumph against “insidious and destructive propaganda.” Social reform could function, as it had in domestic urban slums, as “propaganda” to persuade people in other parts of the world of the value and utility of American virtues and ideals.Footnote ⁷⁹

Assuming middle-class, Christian morality as the basis of education and guidance for less civilized and privileged people, both Wilson’s postwar conception of international peace and Woods’s vision of establishing international networks of settlement houses resembled the hierarchical, even Social Darwinist, ideas of Mahan and Roosevelt, as well as their authoritative and masculine view of international society. Wilson’s internationalism posited that all nation-states had equal values, as they could all contribute equally to the public good. However, the concept of equal values did not imply full equality among individual nations. Instead, having equal value meant that the hierarchy between superior great nations and inferior small ones was inevitable, and they should play the different roles assigned to them for the common good of international society. The primary concern of both plans for global peace and international cooperation was not guaranteeing equality of all nations and ideologies but rather ensuring the triumph of Christian civilization over radical ideas that could threaten its hegemonic position in global society. As a result, Wilsonian internationalism favored the privilege of white male Protestants who could guarantee the hegemonic power of American Christian morality and deliver modernization and social justice to less-civilized regions.Footnote ⁸⁰

Likewise, although Woods claimed that the services of missionaries and philanthropic agencies derived from their disinterestedness and commitment to world progress, he could not fully conceal his intention to expand U.S. economic and cultural hegemony in Asia in his proposal for internationalized social programs. Arguing for the necessity of governmental cooperation in expanding international humanitarian service, Woods suggested as an example the Boxer Protocol, which Western allied armies signed with the Qing Empire in 1901 after occupying Beijing. Though the Boxer Protocol had forced the Qing Empire to pay enormous indemnity and allow the presence of foreign troops in its territory, Woods believed it had fostered favorable conditions for both American initiatives in humanitarian programs and commercial enterprises to advance into China.Footnote ⁸¹ This idea shared assumptions with Roosevelt’s view of China that its inertia could be remedied by opening itself to more civilized countries and reforming its system in line with those countries’ advanced ideas, thereby legitimizing the United States’ pursuit of commercial interests and missionary activities. In this view, China had failed in establishing a strong and enduring civilization due to its lack of virility and its incapacity to protect itself against external threats.Footnote ⁸² The vision of the settlement house movement’s expansion into Asian society was inextricably linked to the aggressive and expansive goal of establishing American sociocultural and economic interests in Asia, a goal already expressed in the imperial military intervention.

Woods’s belief in the legitimacy of Western Christianity as the hegemonic power to lead global moral progress and civilization also led him to express biases toward non-Westernized ethnicities and nations. He especially revealed this view in his trip to Palestine in 1920, the year the British Empire took the territory from the Ottoman Empire and assumed its control. During his trip, Woods praised the British administration, stating that it was “making an excellent start” in Palestine with its efforts in sanitary and civic education. Although he sensed dissatisfaction among the Arabs due to the British Empire’s ignorance of their demands for nation-state building, he still argued that local ethnic groups desiring independence as nation-states should undergo “the concrete educational process” under the British administration to achieve this status. The political claims of Arabs seemed premature to Woods since “the least fitted for self-government are … the ones that demand the most.” If early assurance of self-sovereignty was applied to civilized people—like an Anglo-Saxon civilization “with 1000 years of democratic evolution behind it”—that could be a “tolerable policy,” but for “the dark races … it can only mean disaster.” This hierarchical worldview and belief in the masculine leadership of Western power in Asia implied that Woods’s plan for internationalized settlement was also a means to embody the aggressive expansion of American hegemonic Christianity worldwide.Footnote ⁸³

Woods’s postwar vision, which applied the principle of domestic urban reform to international aid and identified urban neighborhoods with less-civilized nations as reform subjects, showed how he could objectify and marginalize the subjectivity of non-white nations, as he did with urban immigrant workers. By presupposing the hierarchy of civilization between the reformers and the recipients, Woods justified the intervention of seemingly more civilized Westerners in the modernizing programs. Upon Christian middle-class ethics, he extended the standard of the double tracks of manliness he applied in domestic urban reform to the postwar international sphere.