ABSTRACT

The beginning of the twentieth century was greeted as the “threshold of greater changes than have ever taken place in the world’s history”. Many of the more shocking changes concerned the freedom with which women moved in the public sphere and entered the professions. Historians argue that the triumphant entrance of the new woman into the professions followed in the footsteps of her Victorian predecessors. Martha Vicinus and Frank Prochaska credit nineteenth-century philanthropy with providing women with a convenient venue for entering the public world and the professions. Upper-class Victorian women occupied center stage in Victorian philanthropy. Frank K. Prochaska notes the proliferation of women’s branches, or auxiliaries, and of women’s charitable associations in the beginning of the nineteenth century, “an explosion of charities managed exclusively by women”. The end of the nineteenth century in Britain was marked by continuous professionalization of charity work and new scientific methods.