Angela Burdett Coutts and Josephine Butler may not be household names, unlike their contemporaries, Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, but they were all in the same business of good works. This was the era that saw the founding of organisations like ‘The Society for the Employment of Necessitous Gentlewomen’ and the books of George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell are full of middle-class women helping the poor and less-fortunate.
So why did Victorian women’s lives became so bound up with philanthropy and how representative are Josephine Butler and Angela Burdett Coutts of that trend? Dr Jane Jordan, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Kingston University and the author of a biography of Josephine Butler, Edna Healey, author of ‘Lady Unknown: The Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts’ and Dr Anne Summers from the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University discuss the issues with Jenni.
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