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From Widowhood to Wickedness: The Politics of Class and Gender in New York City Private Charity, 1799–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Amy Gilman
Amy Gilman*
Affiliation:
History Department and Coordinator of Women's Studies Program at Montclair State College
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Extract

Surveying the urban scene in 1799, a group of upper-class women reflected on the condition of poor widows in New York City: “widow is a word of sorrow,” they wrote, “but a widow left poor, destitute, friendless, surrounded with a number of small children shivering with cold, pale with want, … her situation is neither to be described nor conceived.” Determined to do something about this situation, these women, led by Isabella Graham and her daughter Joanna Bethune, established the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, an organization intended to assist “the silent retiring sufferer.” It was the first private charity organization directed and managed entirely by women. However, by the 1850s perceptions of the urban poor as pitiful and needy had given way to a much harsher vision. Looking at a new generation of poor women in the same city, the directors of an industrial school saw their clients as neither suffering nor retiring, but as vile, wicked, and degraded. “A bad man is a curse to the community,” they observed, “but how much more vile a wicked woman.” Upon this premise the agents of a new charity established in the mid-nineteenth century a network of urban industrial schools which trained poor young girls in the rigors of factory work.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 59 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (hereafter referred to as SRPWSC), Constitution of the Ladies Society, Established in New York for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (New York, 1800), p. 16.Google Scholar

2. SRPWSC, The By-Laws and Regulations of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children from November, 1809 to November, 1811 (New York, 1811), p. 6.Google Scholar

3. Fourth Ward Industrial School (hereafter referred to as FWIS), Annual Report (New York, 1858), p. 5.Google Scholar

4. In recent years considerable historical work has focused on the importance of women in urban social benevolence of the nineteenth century. In general this work has emphasized the roles of upper-class women in the management and direction of private charity work, their religious and intellectual connections with the Protestant evangelical movement of the first decades of the 1800s, and the ways in which their participation in such organizations allowed them to exercise power in the public areas of American social life—areas from which they were otherwise excluded. For examples of this approach see Smith-Rosenberg, Carol, Religion and the Rise of the American City (Ithaca U, 1971), as well as her essay on similar material, “Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America,” American Quarterly, 23 (1971): 562–84; and Berg, Barbara, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism (New York, 1978).Google Scholar To a large extent this recent work, products of awakened interest in women's history, has proved a corrective to the traditional treatment of Christian benevolence and moral reform. This work generally regarded these social movements of the nineteenth century either as exercises in moral stewardship or as an attempt to use voluntarism as a means of social control. For discussion of benevolence as moral stewardship see Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill, 1960), and Griffen, Clifford S., Their Brother's Keeper: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1850 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1960). Studies abound on benevolence as social control. See especially Paul Boyer's recent work Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, 1978), and Roth-man, David, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971).Google Scholar

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14. Governors of the Alms House, Ninth Annual Report of the Governors of the Alms House for the Year 1858 (New York, 1859), p. 150.Google Scholar

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22. SRPWSC, Fifty Ninth Report of the Society … (New York, 1856), p. 5.Google Scholar

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26. FPHI, Incorporation, p. 6.Google Scholar

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28. CAS, Second Annual Report, 1855, (New York, 1856), P. 3.Google Scholar

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30. Ibid. Google Scholar

31. CAS, First Annual Report, 1854, p. 4.Google Scholar

32. FWIS, Annual Report, 1858, p. 5.Google Scholar

33. CAS, MS. See especially the Daily Journal kept by Brace (GS), and the notebook of L. P. Atwood, a society worker.Google Scholar

34. CAS, MS.Google Scholar

35. FWIS, Annual Report, 1854, pp. 3, 10–11.Google Scholar

36. Brace, , Address upon the Industrial School Movement (New York, 1857), p. 6.Google Scholar

37. Industrial School Association for German Girls, Annual Report, 1855, pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

38. CAS, Annual Report, 1855, p. 9.Google Scholar

39. Children's Aid Society: Its History, Plan, and Results (n.p., n.d.), p. 19.Google Scholar

40. Ibid. Google Scholar

41. FWIS, Annual Report, 1855, p. 6.Google Scholar

42. Ibid. Google Scholar

43. Ibid. Google Scholar

44. FWIS, Annual Report, 1854, p. 6.Google Scholar

45. Brace, , Journal, entry for February 12, 1853.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., February 23, 1853.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., March 28, 1853.Google Scholar

48. Ibid. Google Scholar