First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In Mothers of a New World historians of Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States provide a sweeping view of the scope of women's work and make comparisons across societies and over time. The essays analyze tensions between reformers and clients arising from differences of class, race, ethnicity and religion. This collection will compel readers to revise their accounts of welfare state development by moving issues of gender and the work of female reformers from the margins to the centre.

Nellie Dowell was a match-factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soul mates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. "The Match Girl and the Heiress" paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism.

In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe--Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall--Gandhi's London home in 1931 and Britain's first "people's house" founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliation--and sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship.

"The Match Girl and the Heiress" probes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal.

"Arresting. Koven's scholarship is excellent, and this book will appeal across a wide range of disciplines."--James Epstein, Vanderbilt University

"New, fresh and original. Koven is an indefatigable and energetic researcher, and he looks at cross-class benevolence and the settlement house movement from a new perspective."--Susan Pedersen, Columbia University

"This is a brilliantly crafted, deeply researched, and provocative cultural history. Seth Koven paints a vivid picture of Victorian and Edwardian slummers and the social and sexual politics that impelled their urban journeys. This book is essential reading for cultural critics, historians, urbanists, and scholars of gender and sexuality. It is interdisciplinary history of the highest order."--Judith R. Walkowitz, author of "City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London"

""Slumming" adds a new and vital dimension to the modern history of London. Historians have spent much time examining the changing condition of outcast London but little on those whose investigations and explorations revealed that condition. As Seth Koven reveals, 'slumming' was more than a matter of religious or political concern. It was exciting, transgressive, and a way of discovering or releasing another person within the self."--Gareth Stedman Jones, author of "Outcast London"

"Seth Koven's much awaited "Slumming" gives us a vivid, authoritative, and astute new history of the Victorian phenomenon that took hundreds of middle-class men and women into urban 'nether worlds' of poverty and deprivation. More than any other previous chronicler of this cultural trend, Koven makes clear that motives for slumming were complexand morally ambiguous. He also reminds us that Victorian renderings of children and the poor inaugurated a tradition of representation in which compassion and voyeurism coexist uncomfortably and, perhaps, inevitably."--Deborah Epstein Nord, author of "Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City"

"The stories Seth Koven tells in "Slumming" and his insights and analyses of them are intriguing and convincing. The reader will be fascinated by his intertwining of sexuality, particularly in its homoerotic dimension, with activities designed to help the poor. This brilliant book helps us better to understand both the past and the present."--Peter Stansky, author of "Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil"

"Subtle, elegant, and insightful, Koven's book explores the remote, difficult world of Victorian philanthropy. It brings to life the wealthy men and women and their relations with poor, and far from deferential, slum-dwellers in all their complexity and confusion. Superbly written and wonderfully readable."--Pat Thane, author of "Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues"

""Slumming" is a brilliant exploration of urban class and gender relations as seen through the lens of philanthropy. Koven writes cultural history at its best."--Lynn Hollen Lees, author of "The Solidarities of Strangers: The Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948"

"This is a wonderful book, replete with fresh insights about the complex relations between educated Victorians and the urban poor. A rich, compelling addition to our understanding of the past."--Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan, author of "Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928"