During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the settlement movement that extended a helping hand to impoverished urban residents, in particular immigrants, was at the vanguard of the Progressive reform movements in the United States. Significantly, the majority of the movement participants, including its prime movers, were women. These women, many of whom were single, made settlement houses their “home” and actively took part in a variety of social activism through their female networks.

These settlement workers have in the past been treated as “secular humanitarians,” since they often avoided expressing their religious positions in order to create a more inclusive and diverse society. Contrary to this view, however, this article shows that the religious beliefs of settlement workers were instrumental in shaping their activism. In order to show this, the paper takes up the lives and activities of members of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross (the SCHC). The SCHC, an Episcopal women’s religious association, was founded in the late nineteenth century under the influence of Anglo-Catholicism in the Episcopal Church. In contrast to liberal Protestantism, which had a particular affinity for the view of progress as driven by human efforts with the aid of modern scientific knowledge, Anglo-Catholicism had a tendency toward anti-modernism. It idealized medieval society—an organic egalitarian society—as an antidote to utilitarian, individualistic, modern capitalist society. By exploring the lives and activism of three members of the SCHC, who were also the founders of the leading settlement houses in northeastern US cities, the article argues that their activism was significantly influenced by their religious beliefs, based on an inclusive communitarianism. This idea differed from the notion of liberal pluralism advocated by settlement leaders like Jane Adams, whose activism was influenced by liberal Protestantism.