ABSTRACT
Philanthropy was a crucial site of societal reformation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As many scholars such as Janet Todd, Dorice Williams Elliott, and Ann Mellor have already observed, philanthropy and reform gave middling-class women a way to exert some social and political power in a patriarchical society. They offered a unique sense of 'usefulness', as Hannah More would say, to these women. While Elliot claims that middling-class women's 'philanthropy did contribute to British culture a new sense of what women of all classes, cultures, and races desired and were capable of attaining', she also acknowledges that some of their achievements were gained at the expense of the laboring classes. Vocational philanthropy is a historically-specific social practice which helped produce a model of middling-class feminine benevolence and, in turn, helped produce a set of discourses designed to privatize the public problem of poverty and harmonize social relations among all classes.
