The Women's Social Work
Life for women in the early 1880s was difficult. Jobs were scarce, and prostitution was rampant. Girls as young as 13 were selling themselves or being sold for money. When Florence Booth, a pioneer of The Salvation Army’s social work for women, caught wind of this travesty she knew The Salvation Army needed to do something. She and her husband, Bramwell Booth, were moved as they walked the streets of London and saw the desperation and despair. Florence championed the cause and helped bring social reform.
In 1884 Florence inaugurated The Women's Social Work which was run from a small house in Hanbury Street, in Whitechapel, London.
"She was young, delicate, refined; her remarkable powers of grasp and administration had not been developed at this time; she was typical of the well-educated, rather shrinking and self-conscious girl of the English professional classes — perhaps the last person in the world to whom any one would have thought of committing so hazardous and dreadful a business as this rescuing of fallen women. But she was moved by her husband’s appeal, and, in spite of some doubt on William Booth’s part, was appointed to take charge of the Salvation Army’s first Rescue Home."
She continued to lead this pioneering aspect of The Salvation Army's work for the next 28 years, until Bramwell became General.
One of the tangible ways The Salvation Army helped these destitute women was by opening homes for women in the hopes they would not have to turn to prostitution and providing a safe haven for those who were already suffering from the trade. Many of the residents were young, expectant mothers. Realizing the need for additional care for pregnant women, The Salvation Army opened rescue homes across the globe.
Read more about this topic: Florence Eleanor Soper
Famous quotes containing the words social work, women, social and/or work:
“Whether in the field of health, education or welfare, I have put my emphasis on preventive rather than curative programs and tried to influence our elaborate, costly and ill- co-ordinated welfare organizations in that direction. Unfortunately the momentum of social work is still directed toward compensating the victims of our society for its injustices rather than eliminating those injustices.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“The hearts of Afro-American women are too warm and too large for race hatred. Long suffering has so chastened them that they are developing a special sense of sympathy for all who suffer and fail of justice.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.... The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.”
—Janet Malcolm (b. 1934)