Progress of Women

Progress of Women by artists Cesar Viveros and Larissa Preston Danowitz is located in Center City Philadelphia. The mural illustrates the work of the New Century Guild. The Guild’s mission is the social, industrial and educational cultivation and improvement of working girls and women. At the top of the Mural is Eliza Turner, who founded the New Century Guild in the late 1800s to promote women in the workforce. The New Century Trust was founded in 1893 by a group of women led by Eliza Sproat Turner (1826-1903), a progressive thinker and an activist of means who lived in Philadelphia. It emerged as the incorporated body of the New Century Guild, founded by Turner in 1882. Activities in the Trust’s early history included a wide range of classes and lectures for working girls and women; “Noon Rest,” a dining room where hundreds of working women came to eat a hot meal for reduced cost and rest for an hour during the work day; a private bath at a time when a bathtub was considered a luxury; temporary lodging; and emergency financial support. One of the earliest, largest and most successful of many organizations created in the nineteenth century to provide assistance to the increasing numbers of women who were entering the labor force, the New Century Trust is also one of the most long-lived. Today, the New Century Trust continues its founders’ philanthropic mission, by making grants to non-profit organizations which enhance the economic and social development of women and girls. Its mission also includes preservation and interpretation of the historical significance of its landmark building, and its place in the women’s movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.