This essay deals with the ways in which "Americanization" was carried out on the Lower East Side. It examines the Settlement House movement, in which middle-class "settled" in working-class immigrant neighborhoods in order to help the immigrants to Americanize, through instruction and example. I am especially concerned to show the carious spheres of activitiy and ideology through which both immigrant and non-immigrant women, as well as working- and mddle-class women, move and act, reshaping the contours of American conceptions of charity, social work, protest, and ultimately American-ness itself.