For students of history and viewers of Jeopardy! alike, the phrase “settlement houses in Chicago” brings to mind the single monumental name of Jane Addams, who presided over Hull House from 1889 until her death in 1935. In More Than Neighbors, Deborah Skok, who teaches history at Hendrix College, shows how expanding our sights to include Catholic settlements in Chicago during roughly the same period enriches and complicates our understanding of the settlement house movement in the city in which it has left its most enduring legacy. Skok's subject matter is far more extensive than most students of American women's history and religious history might credit: in the period under consideration, Chicago Catholic laywomen themselves established nine settlements and day nurseries and worked in eleven other institutions with the same mission. Skok asks: “How can we interpret these institutions when leaders such as Jane Addams … portrayed settlement houses as inherently secular and Catholics as primarily struggling immigrants, corrupt political bosses, or quarrelsome priests?” (4). Through a close analysis of archival sources and local Catholic publications, Skok provides her readers with insight into the variety of Catholic settlements established in Chicago and their origins, functions, workers, clientele, and governance structures.

One of Skok's major contributions is her clarification of the differences between Catholic settlements and their secular counterparts. Skok explains that Catholic settlements have not always been visible to historians specializing in the reforms of the Progressive Era because they were smaller, had leaner budgets, and “did not always fit the classic settlement pattern” (10). She describes three models embraced by the leaders of Catholic settlements: “club settlements” established by Catholic women's clubs, “proprietary settlements” founded by individuals or families, and “parish settlements” formed by interested groups within a parish structure and under the supervision of priests. Using examples gleaned from her meticulous archival research, Skok analyzes the complex dynamics underlying Catholic settlement work, for example, competition with local governments and secular settlements for influence among the recent immigrant populations; simultaneous collaboration and power struggles between sisters and laywomen, or between parish priests and laywomen; an evolving sense of mission in settlements in response to the demands of clients and the pressures of the surrounding secular environment; and the begrudging clerical concessions to the athletic and social development of young women in a parish settlement system that frequently endorsed housework as the proper exercise for young women while building basketball courts and other athletic facilities for young men.

Skok's many mini-biographies, gleaned from archives and Catholic publications, make settlement workers and volunteers—not just the leadership from the upper middle class, but also neighborhood women and working girls living at the YWCA—come alive. She also provides close readings of the “rescue stories” about pious settlement workers published in the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper, the New World, showing that these are not merely inspiring stories and models to follow but also are indicators of some of the inherent tensions within the Chicago Catholic community concerning matters of class, social mobility, ethnic conflict, and the rapidly changing roles and aspirations of women. One of Skok's unifying themes is derived from an African American clubwomen's motto, “Lifting as We Climb” (9). Although Skok is careful not to equate the experiences of working-class Catholic women with black women's encounters with racism, she does find meaningful parallels between the two. Both “struggled to define themselves as they rose in class status and labored to help less fortunate community members” (9). Skok underscores how the upward mobility of both groups was grounded in the voluntary and paid efforts of working-class and lower-middle-class women whose contributions are seldom recognized.

Those who hope to understand more about the history of American Catholicism, and especially the lives of Catholic women, have much to learn from Skok's narrative. While Catholic institutions and rhetoric might have differed from those of other religious groups, Catholic women's experiences often did not. The story of the Boston marriage of Marie Amberg of Madonna Center and her partner, Marie Plamondon, a high-society woman nicknamed “The Duchess,” reminds us that, by the Progressive Era, some educated Catholic women of means inhabited a female world quite similar to the circle in the orbit of Hull House. Meanwhile, Skok's many examples, drawn from the ranks of Catholic working women who used the day nurseries, as well as those who did paid work for the settlements and nurseries, remind us that late-nineteenth-century papal documents and other prescriptive literature denouncing women's work outside the home were addressing a complex reality that could not be controlled by hierarchical authorities. Work in the settlement movement was, for many Chicago Catholic women, a steppingstone in the direction of professional social work and other government employment. Even the Camp Fire Girls troop sponsored by the settlement at Old St. Mary's might be seen as a major achievement in making real girls and their genuine needs and aspirations visible in a parish system that was all too comfortable with idealized discourse about Catholic womanhood.

Skok's narrative makes a major contribution to our evolving understanding of Catholic institutional and social history from the turn of the twentieth century through the Depression. Graduate students seeking dissertation topics would do well to read her book and explore the appendix and footnotes. Much remains to be done.