From Tabitha to Fem-Philanthropy: Development of Women's Charity Movement
This article continues the approbation of the author's concept of fem-philanthropy: feminism and its influence on the practice of charity. It analyzes the genesis of the women's charitable movement. The researched nominations in this article were historical and modern women's communities involved in helping woman for woman and general charity. The tasks included the search and analysis of women's communities; revealed their common features. The study shows that the women's charitable movement begins in religious women's communities, and only later acquires the status of a mental-social movement. In the future, it may again return to the concept of self-help, which is contained in the initial stage of the development of the women's charitable movement, but from which it later moved away to traditional activities, helping those in need, who were not divided into their own and not theirs. The concept of self-help, from which women's communities began their activities and later expanded their activities to other people in need, comes to the fore in femphilanthropy, while feminism itself can consider charity as one of the tools to achieve its goals. Gender charity or fem-philanthropy may be a new stage in the development of the women's philanthropy movement, which began with the activities of Tabitha of Joppa in the community of widows to the influence of modern feminist theory on the traditional public institution of charity.