tion, Mrs. Helen Campbell, Mrs. Mary Hinman Abel, Miss Edith F. McDermott, Mrs. Alice P. Norton, and others, in such papers as Household Labor as Exercise, Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, Southern Prize Recipes, and an appeal to girls to learn housework rather than shop or factory work.
The idea of duty and obligation to give to others less fortunate something from the riches of opportunity and training enjoyed by college women so impressed itself upon the mind of a graduate of Smith College, Miss Vida D. Scudder, that she succeeded in imbuing the minds of six other graduates of that institution with her own conviction. Her plan was to establish a home in the midst of a densely populated, ignorant, and wicked district, from which they could reach the homes of their neighbors and add something of pleasure and knowledge to their dull lives full of ignorance and vice.
To these young college girls, the value of a home appeared so great as a nucleus for far-reaching philanthropic work, as the most practical kind of a starting point for anything of value which they could give or receive, that they determined to make one in the worst part of New York city.
Upon maturing their plans, they moved into quarters at 95 Rivington Street in September, 1889, a locality, according to Frances J. Dyer, "said to be more densely populated than any part of London. One half of all arrests for gambling and one tenth of all arrests for crime in New York come within the limits of the election precinct in which they (the residents) live. Five churches vainly try to meet the spiritual needs of fifty thousand people, and there is one saloon for every hundred inhabitants. These facts sufficiently indicate the character of the neighborhood in which these young collegiates, representing the highest type of American womanhood, elect to spend a portion of their time." The steady growing and remarkable results following the efforts of these young college women would furnish material for a volume. From this beginning other college settlements have followed upon the same basis—that one must take to the people what one has for them.
The Alumnæ House Settlement of the New York Normal College opened at 446 East Seventy-second Street, New York city, in 1894; the Philadelphia College Settlement opened at 617 Carver Street in April, 1892; the Boston College Settlement opened at 93 Tyler Street, January, 1893; while many others have followed, fathered by coeducational institutions, such as the University of Chicago Settlement, started in January, 1894, at 4655 Gross Avenue; the Northwestern University Settlement, opened in 1891, at 26 Rice Street, Chicago; and a Log Cabin Settlement, opened in a very small place in the mountains of North Carolina in March, 1895.
