Their Benevolent Design: Conservative Women and Protestant Child Charities in Montreal

Throughout the nineteenth century poor relief in Quebec was private and sectarian. In Montreal bourgeois Protestant women responded by establishing institutional charities for destitute women and children.
Their Benevolent Design delves into the inner workings of two of these charities (the Protestant Orphan Asylum and the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society), sheds light on little-known aspects of the community’s response to social inequality, and examines the impact of liberalism on changi...