ABSTRACT
Here we see how, as urbanisation increased, responsibility for meeting the needs of a growing population was subject to on-going negotiation between church, voluntary bodies and the state which expanded and thus complicated local government in our period Participating in the administration and distribution of a growing variety of social services across different locations in Europe offered urban inhabitants of both sexes the opportunity to present themselves as active citizens involved in the political life of their towns. Åsa Karlsson Sjögren shows how at the turn of the nineteenth century during the transition from an estate society to a class society in Sweden, male urban inhabitants from the middle class who were without burghership and formal political rights, used poor relief of different kinds to show and prove themselves as responsible citizens. Krista Cowman on her side shows how women used their philanthropic work in late nineteenth-century Liverpool to become involved in public political life, and discusses how philanthropic work became an act of citizenship, allowing women to constitute themselves as active and responsible citizens. Both authors thus point to a dynamic connection between social and political citizenship, where the use of responsible actions within the fields of philanthropy and different kinds of poor relief are used by both men and women, at different stages of time, to demand and prove political citizenship. The connection between political citizenship and political action within the field of poor relief is further underlined by Nina Koefoed in her study of how and why male political citizens participated in both public and private poor relief in Denmark at the end of the Nineteenth century. Philanthropy is thus shown to have been an important part of developing citizenship in connection with local policy.
