This thoughtful study challenges a number of widespread assumptions about the role of Catholicism in Mexican history by examining two related Catholic charities: the male Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the Ladies of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. With thousands of volunteers, these lay groups not only survived the liberal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century but thrived, offering educational, medical, and other services to hundreds of thousands of poor people. Arrom stresses the prominence of women among the volunteers, showing the many ways that Catholicism promoted Mexican modernization rather than being an obstacle to it. Moreover, by reinserting religion into public life, these organizations defied the secularizing policies of the Mexican government. By comparing the male and female organizations collectively, the work shows that the relationship between gender, faith, and charity was much more complicated than is usually believed, with devout men and women supporting the Catholic project in complementary ways.

Concepción Arenal Ponte (1820-1893) fue una importante escritora española realista vinculada al pionero movimiento feminista de finales del siglo XIX.
En 1859 funda el grupo femenino de las Conferencias de San Vicente de Paúl para ayuda de los pobres. Para ellas escribe en 1860 La beneficencia, la filantropía y la caridad, que presentó al concurso convocado por la Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas, bajo el nombre de su hijo Fernando, que tenía entonces 10 años. Después de una serie de conflictos sobre la forma incorrecta de introducir su escrito en el concurso, se le concedió el premio (1861) y fue la primera mujer premiada por la Academia.
La beneficencia, la filantropía y la caridad está dividida en dos partes, en la primera de ellas expone de forma general la historia de la beneficencia en España que abarca desde la dominación romana hasta sus días. En la segunda parte de la obra trata sobre los principios que deben regir la estrecha y conveniente relación entre la caridad privada y la beneficencia pública.

A timely study of women's social advancement in Uruguay during a period of unprecented political reform early in the twentieth century.

What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of an uprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urban surge of the working-class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency, he or she devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking on himself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual hero invested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. Intellectual Philanthropy examines cultural practices used by philanthropists in modern Iberia. It explains the meaning and role of intellectual philanthropy by focusing on the devices and apparatuses philanthropists devised to realize their projects. Intellectual philanthropists considered themselves activists in that they aimed to impact social structures and deployed a rhetoric of the affect to convince the workers to join their philanthropic enterprise. Philanthropy, in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily linked to money. Motivations could be moral or political; they could arise from a desire to enhance social status or to acquire influence. To explicitly designate this conceptualization of the philanthropic act, the author proposes its own name: intellectual philanthropy. Intellectual philanthropy is the use of philanthropic platforms by intellectuals to deploy cultural and educational structures in which workers could acquire a cultural capital constructed and organized by the philanthropists. Vialette argues that intellectual philanthropy appeared as a reaction to the feared political and cultural organization of the working class, rather than as a process of worker emancipation. These philanthropic processes aimed at organizing the workers emotionally and rationally into what she calls micro-societies. Philanthropists used the technique of seduction and expressed love to and for a targeted class. However, this seduction prevented real communication, and created a moral and symbolic indebtedness. This process was perverse in that, through its cultural and educational structures, philanthropy would give workers cultural capital that was not just emancipatory, but also a way to restrict their agency.

Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere. The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.