Charity Organization Movement

Charity Organization Movement. The charity organization movement was a late nineteenth‐century philanthropic reform that sought to bring rich and poor together even as the forces of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization drove them apart. Beginning in England in 1869, the movement quickly crossed the Atlantic and established a beachhead in numerous American cities with the formation of local charity organization societies. The practitioners of charity organization tackled poverty by making charity more professional, efficient, and “scientific” while retaining the humanitarian basis by recruiting “friendly visitors.” These trained charity workers, usually female, pioneered the case method of social work. The methods of scientific charity—organization, coordination, and investigation—brought private resources to bear upon the lives of the urban poor. With its network of local societies, the charity organization movement soon established influential journals, participated actively in the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and in 1898 established the first professional training school for social work—the New York School of Philanthropy. These elements provided the basis for twentieth‐century approaches to poverty and dependency.

The American charity organization movement drew ideological nourishment from many sources, including English poor‐law reform, Puritan ideology, social Darwinism, and liberal Christian philanthropy as embodied in the Social Gospel. According to the movement's leaders, the aim of charity was not primarily to assuage suffering but rather to uplift and transform the recipients into productive and independent members of society. As the movement progressed, women played an important role as leaders and workers. In the 1880s and 1890s, Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843–1905) of New York and Boston's Annie Adams Fields (1834–1915) moved their organizations from repressive measures to more positive programs stressing environmental conditions. After the devastating depression of 1893–1896, a new generation of leaders such as Edward T. Devine (1867–1948) of New York and Mary Richmond (1861–1928) of Baltimore, Maryland, promoted innovations that ensured the continued influence of charity organization ideas and practices in the twentieth century.

Charity organization had numerous critics, including ministers and settlement house workers who chastised it for being all head and no heart. Historians who view the movement as little more than a handmaiden to industrial capitalism, however, ignore its role in initiating such reforms as tenement house regulation and tuberculosis‐prevention programs. Charity organization's greatest legacy was in facilitating the move from volunteerism to professional social work. The movement outlived its usefulness by the 1920s, as government agencies took over many of its most successful programs. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought a massive federal presence in areas previously dominated by private charities.
See also Depressions, Economic; Gilded Age; Settlement Houses.

Bibliography

Frank Dekker Watson , The Charity Organization Movement in the United States, 1922; reprint, 1971.
Michael Katz , In the Shadow of the Poor House: A Social History of Welfare in America, 1986.
Joan Waugh , Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, 1997.

Joan Waugh