Who put the social in social work?

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2002

MOST OF THE REFORMS proposed by new charity advocates--cleaning up tenements, spending more on public health, providing state-funded supplements to single mothers, establishing a minimum wage and maximum hours--had, as Bremner points out, one common theme: They "involved limitations on private property rights and extension of public authority into areas previously regarded as the exclusive preserve of individual initiative."

A hub of activity for the new charity was the Russell Sage Foundation, founded in 1907, which fell under the control of strong-minded women who became leaders of the movement. Sage himself was an unlikely benefactor of the poor. He was known more for stinginess than charity. According to historian Joseph C. Goulden, Sage once docked an office boy's salary a dime when the boy brought him a fifteen-cent sandwich instead of the five-cent one. Sage also allegedly grabbed a clerk to shield himself when a madman with a bomb stormed into his office. The maimed clerk sued but Sage appealed the $40,000 verdict and ended up paying nothing.

When Sage died in 1906, he left his $65 million fortune to his seventy-eight-year-old widow, Margaret Olivia Sage, who, after consulting with the experts in the philanthropic world, created the Russell Sage Foundation in 1907. The board was made up of advocates of the new charity. The foundation's funds, the board said, would not attempt to relieve individual or family need." Nor would it give money to colleges or universities. The Sage Foundation would also not give "aid to churches for church purposes."

Two women would have a profound influence on the Sage Foundation. Mary van Kleeck, a 1904 Smith graduate, moved from settlement house work to toil for the foundation's Charity Organization Division. A colorful character who indulged in spiritualism and had, according to historian Guy Alchon, "a life-long union with the charismatic Dutch labor reformer Mary 'Mikie' Fledderus," Kleeck would remain at the foundation, with a brief stint running the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, until her retirement in 1948.

Mary Richmond, who ran Kleeck's division, was the other--and even more significant--woman in the formative years of the Russell Sage Foundation. Richmond embodies in her own life the transition from the old to the new charity. Her early book, Friendly Visiting Among the Poor (1899), celebrated the old-fashioned Victorian charity that her later work would undermine.

Under Richmond's direction, the Russell Sage Foundation made charity more complex, bureaucratic, and "scientific." Whereas the Victorian doers of good works routinely conducted interviews (to ensure that charity went to the deserving poor), Richmond developed the "confidential exchange," a formal system that was originally designed to help keep in touch with poor people who moved from one city to another.

These exchanges consisted of card files that showed how many times a recipient had applied for a dole and whether the applicant had made progress in entering the work force.