SOURCE: "Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and Female Philanthropy," in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 35, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 535–54.

In the essay below, Elliott suggests that in Millenium Hall, Scott is trying to reclaim for women a public role that had been eclipsed by eighteenth-century reforms making charity work primarily the province of men. Elliott suggests that Scott was especially concerned with finding roles for unmarried women in a culture that valued marriage and motherhood more highly.

In 1766 Newton Ogle, Deputy Clerk of the Closet to His Majesty George III, summarized the achievements of mid-eighteenth-century English philanthropists in a charity sermon delivered before the assembled governors of the Magdalen Charity: "Houses of Charity have been opened for every Malady incident to Man. The Aged, the Maimed, the Sick, the Foundling, the Woman Labouring of Child, even those polluted by the foul Effects of their own Vices, have justly been admitted...