Many of the social investigations carried out in social settlements established in Britain and the USA in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s are early examples of participatory research based on a theory of knowledge with 'citizen experience' at its centre. This research, much of it done by women, was often methodologically innovative and enormously influential in shaping public policy. Its history is bound up with that of disciplinary specialization, in which women's research and reform work have been classified, and thus hidden, as 'social work'.