Throughout the nineteenth century poor relief in Quebec was private and sectarian. In Montreal bourgeois Protestant women responded by establishing institutional charities for destitute women and children.

Their Benevolent Design delves into the inner workings of two of these charities (the Protestant Orphan Asylum and the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society), sheds light on little-known aspects of the community’s response to social inequality, and examines the impact of liberalism on changing attitudes to poverty and charity. Seeing charity as a class duty, elite women structured their benevolent design around the protection, religious salvation, and social regulation of poor children. Janice Harvey explores how these philanthropists overcame the constraints of social conventions for women in polite society, how charity directors devised and implemented institutional aid, and how that aid was used by families and experienced by children. Following the development of the charities through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the book explores the conflict that arose between these institutions and other social services, including those that advocated for foster care and so-called scientific charity. The 1920s marked a major social shift in how child poverty was understood and managed in Protestant Montreal.

Despite the gendered obstacles facing women in charity organization, Their Benevolent Design celebrates the remarkable ingenuity and independence of a group of Canadian women in shaping social aid and improving the grim realities of child poverty.

Janice Harvey is a retired professor, now scholar in residence at Dawson College and a member of the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales in Montreal.

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"The subject of institutionalized 'care' for children is not only historically important: it is an issue of our times. Their Benevolent Design is excellent social history that documents the activities and institutional apparatus of poverty relief at a key moment in Montreal's history. Harvey examines two important private charities founded and led by women, convincingly arguing that they provided essential (but not unproblematic) services for the city's desperate women and children, that they were sites of gender and class identity formation, and that they were a means by which elite conservative women shaped Montreal history." Tamara Myers, University of British Columbia and author of Youth Squad: Policing Children in the Twentieth Century