The history of these organizations belongs, however, to a history of philanthropic work rather than to that of economics. The first Woman’s Exchange, the “Ladies’ Depository Association” of Philadelphia, established in 1833, was founded by persons “who labored earnestly to arouse in the community an interest in the hard and often bitter struggle to which educated, refined women are so frequently exposed when financial reverses compel them to rely upon their own exertions for a support.”[15] In its foundation and its management it was controlled entirely by philanthropic motives; it was to enable women “who had seen better days,” and suffered more from the prejudices of society in regard to woman’s work than from actual poverty, “to dispose of their work without being exposed to the often rough handling of shopkeepers, or to the then mortifying admission of their fancied humiliating condition.” The second exchange, the “New Brunswick, New Jersey, Ladies’ Depository,” founded in 1856, also was purely charitable in its motives, and it restricted its privileges to those who had been in affluent circumstances but were suddenly forced to become self-supporting. The first two exchanges were the product of a generation in which charities of every kind were largely regulated by sympathy alone, and it was twenty years before similar organizations were formed elsewhere. In 1878 the “New York Woman’s Exchange” was begun, and it added a new idea. Its aim was “beneficence, rather than charity,” and it undertook “to train women unaccustomed to work to compete with skilled laborers and those already trained, and to sell the result of their industries.”[16] It came at a time when the organization of charities was first being attempted, and the principle was being slowly evolved that the best way to help an individual is to help him to help himself. Its aim and its management show the influence of the present generation in its study of philanthropy as a social and economic question. Since 1878, the year which may be taken as the beginning of the period of the Woman’s Exchange, nearly one hundred exchanges have been organized, all, with scarcely an exception, growing out of philanthropic motives, but philanthropy governed by the principles of the present day. The statement of the object of the exchange presented in their constitutions and annual reports will make this clear: “The object of this Association shall be to aid women by helping them to help themselves; and in furtherance of this design, to maintain a depot for a reception and sale of woman’s work, or of articles in her possession, of which she may wish to dispose, subject to the approval of an examining committee.” Cincinnati, Ohio.