Alice Louise Higgins Lothrop

Background

Alice Louise Higgins Lothrop was born on May 28, 1870, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. She was descended from Richard Higgins of Plymouth, a founder of Eastham, Massachusetts.

Education

Alice Louise was educated in local private schools. Later she attended a summer course at the New York School of Philanthropy.

Career

At twenty-eight Alice Higgins entered the service of the Associated Charities as a worker in training. Her rare qualifications for social service were at once manifest, and when in 1900 she was entrusted with the secretaryship of a Charities district, she showed such qualities of leadership, such grasp of community problems that after but two years' experience, she was called to headquarters as general secretary. In 1913 she resigned the secretaryship and was made a director of the society for life.

Her influence went far beyond the society; for in practice as in her sixteen years (1904 - 1920) of teaching in the Boston School of Social Work, she upheld her belief that interrelated social agencies should strengthen one another. Her support meant much to the medical-social group which began work in 1905 at the Massachusetts General Hospital under the leadership of Dr. Richard C. Cabot, and she did much to spread the modern medicalsocial viewpoint among Boston workers. She served on the Massachusetts Child Labor Commission, on tuberculosis boards, and in the Civic League. She remained chairman of the executive and administration committees of the American Association from 1914 to her death.

In 1906, while the ruins of San Francisco still smoked, she entered on her first signal service in disaster relief. She spent some nine weeks in San Francisco, where, in cooperation with Lee Frankel and Oscar K. Cushing she organized rehabilitation practice which served as a model in later disasters. After the fires at Chelsea (1908) and Salem (1914), and the explosion at Halifax (1917), she showed herself an expert. It was she who after the Halifax explosion dispatched with the Red Cross contingent eyesurgeons whose prompt aid saved the sight of many gashed by flying glass. Her connection with the Red Cross began in 1916. When America entered the war, she was the first division director of civilian relief to be appointed. She had to break new ground, and much that was vital in the success of Home Service to soldiers' families was due to her initiative.

Achievements

• Alice Higgins helped to shape important social legislation, including the provision for state inspection of charitable corporations and the Massachusetts mothers' aid law. She was active in founding the American Association for Organizing Family Social Work. She also developed plans for the Emergency Relief Unit of the Boston chapter of Red Cross.

Personality

Alice Higgins was a breathing refutation of the old charge that organized charity is necessarily mechanized, formal, heartless. She was, as Dr. Samuel M. Crothers said, "not only a clear intelligence, but a great soul". She interpreted family cases in terms of community needs, yet never lost sight of the individual. To the efficiency and sound judgment of the born executive and the swift-moving, original mind that pierced beyond conditions to underlying causes she added quick sympathies, perennial freshness of interest, buoyancy, and a stimulating faith in other people. For ten years she may be said to have animated the Associated Charities.

Quotes from others about the person

• "We always knew where to find Mrs. Lothrop. It was where the need was greatest, the issue most vital. "- Dr. Crothers

Connections

Alice Louise Higgins married Boston business man, William H. Lothrop, in 1913.

Father:

Albert H. Higgins

Mother:

Adelaide A. (Everson) Higgins

Spouse:

William H. Lothrop

References

• Supplement to Richard Higgins and his descendants