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Chapter XIII
Social Service

Modern philanthropy presents a congenial method of self-support for educated, ambitious, earnest women. The organized uplift movement, generally known as social work, which is found in every industrial center, offers a field in which the intelligent, tactful woman may reap the double harvest of a fair livelihood and the knowledge that the world will be the better for her having worked in it. It is not work for the very young girl.

During recent years philanthropy has been reduced to a science. Charity is dispensed by methods as business-like as those employed by any great corporation. Time was when women who had failed at almost everything else were sent out as missionaries to foreign lands, to the poor whites of the South, to the neglected Indians of the West, and to the slum dwellers of the great cities. "Genteel" women with social backing and family name were given the preference as managers of homes for the dependent or