Born on August 5, 1861, in Belleville, Illinois, Mary Richmond grew up in Baltimore largely under the care of her maternal grandmother and two aunts. After graduating from high school in 1878 she worked for two years in a New York publishing house and then returned to Baltimore, where she worked as a bookkeeper in a stationery store and later in a hotel. In 1889 she secured a job as assistant treasurer of the Baltimore Charity Organization Society. Social work quickly proved to be her destined field. To the training she received in visiting Zilpha Smith of the Boston Associated Charities she added her own reading and the practical experience of field work as a volunteer ╥friendly visitor.╙ In 1891 she was named general secretary of the society, a post that had until then always been held by a man with advanced academic training.
Over the next nine years she gradually developed a coherent philosophy of social work involving professional training in case work for field workers and broad research into social conditions and problems. In 1899 she published her ideas in Friendly Visiting Among the Poor. From 1900 to 1909 she was general secretary of the Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity, which she succeeded in thoroughly reorganizing and revitalizing. In The Good Neighbor in the Modern City, 1907, in numerous articles and speeches, and in a department she edited for the Charities and the Commons journal in 1905╨1909, she continued to advocate the development of professional social work through scientific research, careful testing of methods, exchange of data and experience among agencies, and rational organization. In 1909 she was named director of the Charity Organization Department of the new Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, a post she held for the rest of her life. There she directed a broad program of social research and worked to develop further the methodology of professional social work.
Richmond╒s championship and elaboration of the case work approach were the subject of her major written work, Social Diagnosis, 1917. What Is Social Case Work? appeared in 1922. For a number of years before and after her move to New York she taught summer courses at the New York School of Philanthropy (later the New York School of Social Work). From 1910 to 1922 she conducted an annual Charity Organization Institute for advanced case work training and from 1915 an annual supervisors╒ conference. As a schism slowly developed between those in social work who favored tax-based governmental programs of relief for various classes of the needy and those who favored more traditional private efforts aimed at families, Richmond emerged as a leading spokesman for the latter view. In her late years she was deeply interested in the reform of marriage laws, a topic that she discussed in Child Marriages, 1925, and the posthumous Marriage and the State, 1929, both written with F. S. Hall. She died in New York City on September 12, 1928.
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