This article focuses on the role of Grace Paterson (1843-1925) in education, health and social welfare in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Glasgow. Integral to her efforts to improve the health of the city's poor was her emphasis on the need to raise the standards of the domestic education of working-class girls and women, both in the Board schools (she was one of the first women elected to the Glasgow School Board in 1885) and through the establishment of the Glasgow School of Cookery a decade earlier. Paterson did not herself teach, instead organizing and directing the work of others, and her contribution to education and health was within the expectations of service expected of middle-class women. Nevertheless, she was a firm believer in women's capacity both for work and for representation on public bodies, and she was determined not only to influence welfare policy but to make it. (Contains 76 footnotes.)