Women’s Work

Abstract

Beatrice Webb began her apprenticeship for professional life in 1883 as a visitor for the Charity Organization Society under the supervision of Octavia Hill, and continued in 1885 as a rent-collector at Katherine Buildings, an East End working-class dwelling. When Webb began this volunteer work, she was one of a mass of upper middle-class women who spent time ‘slumming’ in the East End, benefiting, in this comparative freedom of activity, from the accepted notion that charity and social service were women’s spheres. The participation of middle-class women in this kind of work, though apparently frivolous and benignly conventional, often led to more serious, more socially radical and incipiently professional involvement. Such was the case for Webb, for whom ‘East-Ending’ marked the beginning of a movement away from the individualist and paternalist ethic of the Charity Organisation Society, and of a commitment, not to professional social work, but to empirical social investigation.