Stanton Coit and the Neighborhood Guild: Ethical idealism and social reform in New York City.

摘要

Among the first generation of settlement house workers Stanton Coit occupies a unique position, one whose significance rests upon his contribution to the political idea of organized neighborhoods and the concrete form it assumed during the late nineteenth century.;While serving as an assistant to Felix Adler at the Ethical Cultural Society Coit moved to the Lower East Side where he established the Neighborhood Guild in 1887, "the first social settlement in America," which, four years later, became the University Settlement Society of New York. Dedicated to "the conscious organisation of the intellectual and moral life of the people," Coit gathered around him a number of university graduates and became, as one prominent worker phrased it, "the Father of American university settlements.".;In the Neighborhood Guild one finds the principal ingredients which informed the settlement idea, a new approach to community organization together with residency in the neighborhood, the most distinctive and identifiable aspect of settlement life. Coit's balanced program of activities, distinguished by their organized informality and personal interest, represented a pioneer effort to bridge class barriers, while his approach developed a sense of civic awareness among people unaccustomed to the politics of municipal government. Consequently, the work of the Guild gave new impetus to the neighborhood as an organic force in urban life and shifted the attention of philanthropy away from general relief to specific causes originating within its borders.;One of the prominent aspects of the Neighborhood Guild was the extent to which it benefited from Coit's association with the Ethical Culture Society. Among the original associates of Felix Adler, it was Coit who joined the tenets of ethical idealism to the practical needs of social reform, which, in time, became the guiding philosophy of the settlement house movement.;While the primary emphasis of this study is on Coit's work at the Neighborhood Guild, its organizational plan revolved around several basic objectives: (a) to provide an accurate account of the life and work of Stanton Coit in America and thereby establish an historical record; (b) to examine the supportive relationship between the Neighborhood Guild and the Ethical Culture Society and so reaffirm the fundamental connection between the origins of social settlement work in America and the Ethical Movement, and (c) to make full use of Coit's unpublished autobiographical fragment, together with a collection of letters, within the context of a serious interpretive biography. Directly allied to these aspects of Coit's life and work, and central to it, is his own role in the Ethical Culture Society.