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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Kathleen Waters Sander. The Business of Charity: The Women's Exchange Movement, 18321900. (Women in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 165. Cloth $39.95, paper $16.95.
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Short, crisp, upbeat, and straightforward, this book provides a narrative history of the woman's exchange movement, which began in Philadelphia in 1832 as an effort to provide "genteel" women whose economic fortunes had precipitously declined with some anonymous means of earning a living. Elizabeth Stott and a group of well-to-do women living in a fashionable neighborhood only blocks from Independence Hall opened a depository that received decorative sewing items from women who needed income but did not want to sully themselves by working outside the home. Although Kathleen Waters Sander refers to "isolated Depositories" confined to the Northeast before the Civil War, the chapters on this period focus exclusively on the Philadelphia Women's Depository. |
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