Nineteenth-century philanthropy enabled women and men to fulfil the expectations of a new gender order in distinct ways. For men of the middle class, it provided the opportunity to demonstrate respectability in a developing market economy that demanded a reputation for honourable business practice. Women's relationship with philanthropy was perhaps more complex. While philanthropy allowed women to exercise the compassion that had long been assumed natural to them, it also became a way in which they could reinforce the authority of a new model of useful and serious domestic femininity, which came to replace an older one associated with frivolity, decadence and decoration. While men comprised the committees of most public charities, from the early nineteenth century governors' wives took active roles in various institutions.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, although some women became benefactors, most women in organised charity worked in auxiliaries, which sometimes came to exercise power beyond their prescribed status. Between 1870 and 1900, there was an 'explosion' of charities run by women.