ABSTRACT
Maude Stanley’s volume Clubs for Working Girls, published in 1890, contains a mixture of handy hints and ideological resonance which characterises much writing about youth work. She wrote for ladies who were interested in the rapid spread of girls’ clubs – ‘this most modern of schemes’:
However lady-like her approach, Maude Stanley – founder of the Soho Club and recorder of the work of the Girls’ Club Union – clearly knew her business. Anyone who has tried in the face of lack of support and understanding to establish provision for girls in a youth club or other youth project will recognise her account of disruption and near anarchy. One hundred years later, we can still hear the boys banging at the windows and barging through the doors:
The ladies who began with a feeling of sympathy for the girls and who had themselves a set of high moral values they were concerned to share, found themselves threatening to call the police. In this way, care, concern and control have run hand-in-hand along the path of charity for more than a century.
