page_title: Julia Stephen
section_title: Social activism and philanthropy
hierarchical_section_title: Julia Stephen / Work / Social activism and philanthropy
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographic portrait of Julia Stephen in the 1880s
context_page_description: Julia Prinsep Stephen was a celebrated Englishwoman, noted for her beauty as a Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
  Julia Jackson was born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian family, and when she was two her mother and her two sisters moved back to England. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made more than 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work. Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a mutual friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.
  After Leslie Stephen's wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878.
context_section_description: In addition to her tireless contributions to running the Stephen household, and attending to the needs of her relatives, she worked to support friends and supplicants. She had a strong sense of social justice, travelling around London by bus, nursing the sick in hospitals and workhouses. She would later write about her nursing experience in her Notes from Sick Rooms (1883). This is a discussion of good nursing practices, demonstrating fine attention to detail. A notable passage is her description of the misery caused by bread crumbs in the bed. In addition to dispensing practical nursing advice, she undertook social advocacy on the part of the sick and poor. She published a letter of protest on behalf of the inmates at St George's Union Workhouse in Fulham "for giving in to the temperance movement and cutting off the half-pint of beer". This ration allocated to the pauper women there had been removed at the insistence of the temperance campaigners (Pall Mall Gazette, 4 October 1879). This was an institution she visited regularly. She also wrote an impassioned defence of  agnostic women (Agnostic Women, 8 September 1880), arguing against claims that agnosticism was incompatible with spirituality and philanthropy (see Quotations). She also drew on her experience of ministering to the sick and dying in making these arguments.
  At home, Virginia Woolf describes how Julia used one side of the drawing room for dispensing advice and consolation, the "angel in the house".
caption: Julia 1880s
exif: {}