ELSIE Clews Parsons and her new anthropological colleagues were
not alone in seeking to free themselves from the "closed circuit" of
late-nineteenth-century certainties. Her return to New York at the
end of 1911 plunged her into a vibrant intellectual world. She found
to her delight that the conversation between diverse groups that she
tried to stimulate in 1906 had become a reality--at least in the part
of New York that was becoming known as Greenwich Village. In
this tiny area surrounding Washington Square had assembled a
close-knit community of intellectuals who melded American tradi-
tions of dissent with the newer pragmatism and the imported creeds
of socialism and anarchism. Young women and men of Quaker,
Unitarian, and freethinking backgrounds, wealthy young men un-
easy about their privileges, equally wealthy young women full of
rebellion, and sons and daughters of Jewish middle-class immigrants
embraced a range of revolutionary ideas from the conversation of
Tarde to the dynamite of Bukharin. They often called it "socialism"
or "anarchism," but they all shared one basic aim--to jettison con-
ventional ideas and practices and to rebuild the world on a more
tolerant, egalitarian, and flexible basis.

This intellectual community grew out of the work of the settle-
ment houses and the "ethical bohemia" that developed around
them. The concentration of settlements in Greenwich Village and
the Lower East Side, and a fascination with the area's ethnic diver-
sity, brought an array of social workers, socially concerned clergy,
journalists, writers, educators, actors, political activists, and social
investigators to live in the settlements or in houses, apartments, and
rooms nearby. Drawn by the charismatic personality of Lillian Wald
at Henry Street or the gentler, more intellectual Mary Simkhovitch
at Greenwich House, and by the promise of purpose in their lives,
wealthy uptown women flocked to the boards, classrooms, and proj-
ects of the settlements--and some came to stay. The College Settle-

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