Josephine Shaw Lowell

• Josephine Lowell
• Born: December 16, 1843
• Died: October 12, 1905

Charitable worker and reformer, was born in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, the third daughter and fourth of the five children of Francis George Shaw and Sarah (Sturgis) Shaw. Her parents, both from wealthy Boston mercantile families, were members of Theodore Parker’s Unitarian church, friends of many intellectuals and reformers, staunch abolitionists, and supporters of the utopian colony at Brook Farm. When Josephine Shaw was three the family moved to New York to be near her mother’s eye specialist and settled on Staten Island, her home for the next thirty years. After studying in Paris and Rome on a family sojourn abroad she spent a year each in New York City and Boston schools, ending her formal education at the age of fifteen. Perhaps the strongest formative influence on her was the constant presence in her home of many prominent literary and political figures. Many of them were introduced by George William Curtis, the editor and civil service reformer who joined the household on his marriage to Josephine Shaw’s oldest sister.

Her first experience with organized charity was during the Civil War, in which her family were ardent and active supporters of the Union cause. Her father organized relief for blacks and worked for the establishment of a Freedman’s Bureau, and Josephine Shaw, along with her sister Anna, joined the Women’s Central Organization of Relief, an auxiliary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. In the same year that her brother, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed while commanding the first black regiment sent into action, Josephine Shaw married Colonel Charles Russell Lowell of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry on October 31, 1863. A year later he was killed in action, six weeks before she gave birth to a daughter, Carlotta Russell Lowell.

The twenty-year-old widow, determined to match her family’s devotion to the public good, became the principal fund-raiser of the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, for which she made an inspection tour of black schools in Virginia in 1866. As concern with the freedmen’s welfare declined among northern reformers in the 1870s, Josephine Shaw Lowell transferred her energies to the New York Charities Aid Association, founded by a group of women veterans of wartime relief work to make periodic inspections of state charitable institutions. Her reports as head of the visiting committee for the Borough of Richmond (Staten Island) combined vivid descriptions of squalid conditions in the jail and almshouse with deepening distress at the lack of any attempts at rehabilitation. The competence of her report on poor law administration in Westchester County, with special attention to the problem of able-bodied paupers, attracted the attention of Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who in 1876 named her the first woman member of the New York State Board of Charities, on which she served for thirteen years.

Lowell’s first hand reports on conditions in hospitals, orphanages, asylums, poorhouses, and prisons sharply pointed out the effects of political corruption, and some of the consequent reforms bore her personal stamp: the Women’s House of Refuge (later the State Training School for Girls) at Hudson, which provided constructive activities; the first custodial asylum for feeble-minded women; and the law requiring the presence of matrons in all police stations. Her investigations of waste and duplicated efforts in a multiplicity of private charitable organizations led to the formation in 1882 of the New York Charity Organization Society, a coordinating agency she served for twenty-five years.

Josephine Shaw Lowell’s intellectual bent led her to develop theoretical foundations for her practical work. In Public Relief and Private Charity (1884) she asserted that the main purpose of charity was not to relieve suffering but to turn the recipients into productive members of society through rehabilitation programs, and therefore the community should provide support only to those it could control. But her keen powers of observation also demonstrated that in countless cases it was not unemployment but inadequate wages that caused the breakup of families and perpetuated a cycle of pauperism and delinquency. Therefore when the election of a Tammany-supported governor in 1889 created a climate unfavorable to reform Lowell was ready to turn her attention to the issues of improving industrial conditions and readjusting the relations between capital and labor. The purpose of the Consumers League of New York, which she founded in 1890 and served as president until 1896, was to achieve these objectives through widespread boycotts. But she also supported the efforts of labor unions, and in 1893 published a compilation of documents on Industrial Arbitration and Conciliation. Becoming convinced that industrial and social reform could only take place within a political framework, she founded the Women’s Municipal League in 1894, which continued to be an effective instrument of urban reform throughout the progressive era. In 1895 she formed a women’s auxiliary of the Civil Service Reform League and was a member of its executive committee. An outspoken opponent of the Spanish-American War, she helped to bring prominent speakers to anti-imperialist rallies in New York from the movement’s New England stronghold.

Although she cooperated with many leading feminists in her various campaigns, Josephine Shaw Lowell did not view her work in feminist terms. In appearance and bearing she was the antithesis of the stereotyped feminist. To her cultivated and gracious manner were added both a keen sense of humor and a certain ethereal quality attributed to her early bereavement and heightened by her invariably black garments. After living quietly with her daughter in a modest New York brownstone since 1874, she died of cancer at the age of sixty-one, just as the progressive movement to which she had contributed so much was beginning to rise toward its peak. After a Unitarian service she was buried beside her husband in Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Representative articles include “Criminal Reform,” reprinted in F. A. Goodale, ed., The Literature of Philanthropy (1893); “Methods of Relief for the Unemployed,” Forum, February 1894; and “The True Aim of Charity Organizations,” ibid, 1896. A memorial issue of Charity and the Commons, December 2, 1905, includes excerpts from her reports. W. R. Stewart, The Philanthropic Work of Josephine Shaw Lowell (1911) contains a complete list of her writings. See also L. C. Taylor, Jr., “Josephine Shaw Lowell and American Philanthropy,” New York History, October, 1963. and the article by R. H. Bremner in Notable American Women.