“To Serve and Bless”

This chapter reviews epigraphs taken from letters written about a year apart that provide evidence for Virginia Stephen's first foray into political advocacy. It looks at Stephen's short-lived involvement with the People's Suffrage Federation (PSF), which was inaugurated sometime in 1909 and housed at 34 Mecklenburgh Square. It also refers to Virginia Woolf's stance that supports Hermione Lee's claim that she was ambivalent all her life about women philanthropists. The chapter talks about Clara Jones who argues that Woolf remained ambivalent about the value of her own political and social action throughout her career. It demonstrates how Woolf intensified her hostility to what she perceived as the politics of philanthropy among her late-Victorian foremothers.

Save the Womanhood!

Save the Womanhood examines twentieth-century anxieties about promiscuity and prostitution, and the efforts of social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. Offering an historical analysis of concerns about women’s interactions with urban space beyond London, the book notes that the pioneering work of women philanthropists and women police patrollers in Liverpool often ran counter to the ambitions and liberties of other women who travelled through the city in search of work and adventure. National debates about the efficacy of solicitation laws, fears about ‘white slavery’ and concerns about changing sexual practices and new consumer cultures gave women street patrollers in Liverpool greater opportunity to justify their own forms of ‘respectable’ public womanhood. For much of the twentieth century, these women patrollers networked with other agencies to enact a powerful form of moral surveillance on the streets. Yet the book also notes that the post-war decline of social purity organizations did not mean that their ideas about the need to monitor female morality went away. The book argues that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. As such, this is a history that also speaks to contemporary debates about the criminalization of sex workers by showing how laws against solicitation have been historically intertwined with moral judgement of women’s sexual practices.

The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Gaskell's North and South

This essay considers Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel about labor relations in the context of mid-century discussions of the female philanthropic visitor to the poor. By reclaiming the traditional mediating role of women's philanthropy in an environment where relations between the classes are based exclusively on the "cash nexus," Gaskell's novel represents a new social sphere that includes but is more than the domestic sphere of marriage, home, and children. Gaskell's woman visitor, however, has to contend with male professionals, especially clergymen, for access to and control of social space. Rejecting the South's social paternalism as nostalgic, Gaskell substitutes a new but still familial metaphor for class relations: in place of the parent-child metaphor, she offers marriage. Despite the fact that the novel's marriage plot functions as a model for class relations that requires the intervention of women philanthropists, however, the use of the marital metaphor still leaves both women philanthropists and the poor in a dependent and vulnerable position.