Helen worked closely with the Charity Organisation Society (COS), using her direct experience with living among "the poor".

In 1886, at the age of twenty-six, she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, with an academic ambition to study moral sciences.

Case workers, according to Bosanquet, are to reach a "true" understanding of the perspective of those they are helping [2] She abandoned her paid employment to focus on transcribing her ideas in writing.

In addition to an active public career as a theorist and publicist for the COS, she worked as a translator of German philosophy and sociology, and as a collaborator with her husband.

She was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1905, where she defended the role of private charities over public welfare programs.

She used the COS to relay that one way to do this is to work with the individual and their family to focus on rising above this economic circumstance and establish long-term solutions.

In 1902 Bosanquet had a much publicized exchange of views with Seebohm Rowntree, in which she questioned his findings about the extent and the causes of poverty in York.

[8] In her piece, "The Divorce Laws of England and Wales", she offers the idea that young people should not be forced to take a permanent vow as the longevity of a marriage depends on several conditions.

She takes an economic and philanthropic approach on the basis of what distribution produces the greatest happiness and serves the needs of individuals.

Bosanquet also critiqued Charles Booth's work on the Survey of Life and Labor, arguing that it threatened the basis of moral philanthropy.

“I have always held that poverty and pain, disease and health are evils of greatly less importance than they appear except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character; and that true philanthropy aims at increasing strength more than at the correct and immediate relief of poverty…”[12] "The working-women of England are indeed in a very sorry plight, and that if knights-errant were still to the fore they would find work enough for lance and sword in freeing their sisters from the tyranny by which they are oppressed"[12] "It seems to be almost inevitable that the man who accepts a subordinate economic position in the Family degenerates into a loafer and a tyrant.

"[13] "An attempt to suggest how we may work out some theory of human nature and social life which will be a guide to us when applied to the actual problems which we have to face" "If we look for the factor which gives the power to see things steadily and see them whole and which distinguishes the rational life from these chaotic wrecks, we shall find it in the "interests" of life as distinct from its appetites" "Change in the actual material surroundings of people is not only useless it cannot be made to continue, unless the people can be made to take an interest in them, and deliberately choose them for their circumstances" "In the Residuum these qualities are entirely absent.

In place of foresight we find the happy faith which never fails, that 'something will turn up,' and instead of self-control the impulsive recklessness which may lead indifferently to a prodigal generosity, or an almost inconceivable selfishness.