She was the daughter of Claas Lulofs, a grain and tobacco merchant, and Bregtje Posthuma, who lived on Keizersgracht in central Amsterdam.

When she was ten, she had seen a poor girl of her age looking longingly at the food laid out on the table at the summer residence of the Lulofs family in the Haarlemmerhout, a public park.

Initially, Lulofs joined the Dutch Protestant Association, but she did not feel at home there and came to abhor Christian charities, which she saw as only wanting to win souls.

She also did not agree with the views of the Social Democrats as she felt they placed too much emphasis on class struggle, although she did support strikes by railway workers in 1903.

She eventually joined a circle of social-liberals associated with the Social Weekblad, a weekly magazine, that included the feminist and publicist Helena Mercier, who she had met while working at an Amsterdam soup kitchen.

Muller-Lulofs wanted to turn it into a boarding school, to remove the girls from the comfort of their family surroundings, but that proposal was not adopted by the other founders.

In addition, she wanted to provide scholarships for poorer students, but the other founders disagreed, which meant that the training was only accessible to people who could afford it.

In 1921 she established a Commission for Assistance in Difficult Circumstances, which aimed to alleviate the distress among the so-called 'quiet poor' in the bourgeois class.

On 28 November 1940, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Association for the Improvement of Poor Care in Utrecht, she was presented with the silver medal of the city.

[2] Lulofs sought to professionalise social work, moving it away from the fragmented and dilettante approach that preceded her, when each institution had its own rules, funds and target audience.