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

Abstract

SURVEYING urban scene in 1799, a group of upper-class women reflected on condition of poor widows in New York City: is a word of sorrow, they wrote, 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 Society for Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, an organization intended to assist the silent retiring sufferer.2 It was first private charity organization directed and managed entirely by women. However, by 1850s perceptions of urban poor as pitiful and needy had given way to a much harsher vision. Looking at a new generation of poor women in same city, 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 community, they observed, how much more vile a wicked woman.3 Upon this premise agents of a new charity established in midnineteenth century a network of urban industrial schools which trained poor young girls in rigors of factory work. These contrasting images of urban female poor suggest vast changes that took place in urban benevolence in New York City from turn of nineteenth century to Civil War. Early in these years upper-class women, wives and daughters of city's ruling elite, came to manage and control private benevolence in city, creating a network of urban poor relief directed towards women who, albeit poor, were, they believed, not so different from themselves. By middle of nineteenth century these women had