The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Was nineteenth-century British philanthropy the "truest and noblest woman's work" and praiseworthy for having raised the nation's moral tone, or was it a dangerous mission likely to cause the defeminization of its practitioners as they became "public persons"? In Victorian England, women's participation in volunteer work seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role, but like many other assumptions about gender roles, the connection between charitable and domestic work is the resu...