<Lothrop, Alice Louise Higgins1870╨1920social workerBorn in Boston on March 28, 1870, Alice Higgins was educated in private schools. After periods as a Sunday school superintendent and as a volunteer worker with the Boston Children╒s Aid Society she became an agent for the Associated Charities of Boston in 1898. In 1900 she became a district secretary, and in 1903 she succeeded Zilpha Smith as general secretary of the Associated Charities. Her character, energy, and intellectual gifts fitted her perfectly to the work of organized charity, as her rapid rise in the Associated Charities attested, and in her ten years as general secretary she made a profound and lasting impression on the methods and outlook of social workers. She worked hard to broaden the impact of social work, making the field caseworker also a link to other public agencies and an informed worker for reform through social legislation. In addition to her contributions to the passage of mothers╒ aid laws and her work on the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, the Massachusetts Commission to Investigate Employment Agencies, and the Massachusetts Civic League, Higgins concerned herself deeply with the problems of public health. She was particularly active in the battle against tuberculosis, and after an initial period of skepticism she threw the support of the Associated Charities behind the innovative program of hospital social service begun in 1905 by Dr. Richard C. Cabot at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1904 she helped establish the Boston School for Social Workers, operated jointly by Harvard and Simmons College, and she lectured there regularly until 1920. In 1910╨1911 she helped found the National Association of Societies for Organizing Charity (later the Family Service Association of America). Farther afield, she played a large role in organizing relief services in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the Chelsea, Massachusetts, fire of 1908, the Salem, Massachusetts, fire of 1914, and the Halifax explosion of 1917, in the last instance working closely with the Emergency Relief Unit of the Boston chapter of the Red Cross, which she had planned only the year before. She resigned as general secretary of the Associated Charities upon her marriage in May 1913 to William H. Lothrop, a Boston businessman. She was a director of the Associated Charities for the rest of her life and during World War I served also as director of civilian relief of the New England division of the Red Cross and in other capacities. She died in Newton, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1920. ╓styl `
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