‘The great and weighty business of life’, preached the Rev. John Gregg in 1856, ‘devolves on men, but important business belongs to women.’ ‘Women’, he proclaimed, ‘have the honourable employments of instructing childhood … [their] labours may be in the sickroom, the chambers of affliction, in the haunts of misery [and] amongst the struggling poor.’ Few individuals, either Catholic or Protestant, would have disagreed with him. In fact, by mid-century it was widely agreed that women had played a major role in providing charity to the poor and outcast. The tradition of benevolence which middle and upper-class women had developed by mid-century became even more pervasive as the century progressed. Asserting their moral and spiritual right to engage in charitable work, women's social activism was to have a profound influence on Irish life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although limited by society's expectations to the home in the early years of the century, middle-class Irish women increasingly made use of their given spiritual and moral influence to justify their entrance into society, especially through philanthropic work. They developed institutions and societies on a local and national scale, to deal with the problems of the poor, the outcast and deviant, and neglected and orphaned children. Their philanthropic work took many forms, from mere almsgiving, to the provision of employment for women and girls, the building of institutions to house the homeless and outcast, the initiation of schemes to make the poor less dependent on charity, the development of programmes to facilitate moral reform, work in public institutions such as workhouses, hospitals and prisons, and the provision of orphanages.