Hannah Clare, head of Young Greens, writing in Huffington Post on International Women's Day, by fighting for marginalised genders.
Stop trying to change the world and put your own house in perfect order first.
I'm sure those young women would be shocked at their resemblance to Dickens Mrs Jellaby.
Many find their double in the London of Bleak House, where she goes by the name of Mrs Jellaby. Mrs Jellaby, you recall, practises that modern virtue so aptly named by Dickens as 'telescopic philanthropy', a burning, all-consuming, passion to do good at great distance. Oblivious of her children, one of whom has its head firmly lodged in the area railings, Mrs Jellaby is met enthusing on her project for 200 other families to cultivate coffee and educate the natives of Barrieboola-Gha. Source
Additional longer discussion of this character: Mrs. Jellyby and the Domination of Cause
In the book’s postscript, we learn that the Borrioboola-Gha project failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers [impoverished Britons] into slavery in order to buy rum. Far from being deterred by this grim outcome, Mrs. Jellyby quickly finds another cause to occupy her time, “a mission with more correspondence than the old one,” thus providing new vistas for a permanent campaigner.
While few in the peace movement so radically neglect those in their care, unfortunately I cannot think of Mrs. Jellyby merely as a gross caricature. When my wife and I talked about her recently, we could think of several people, of both sexes, resembling her in many details: people with a certain legitimate concerns and noble goals who engage themselves so fully that their fixation wrecks havoc in the lives of those around them, driving many people they intended to influence, even their own sons and daughters, in the opposite direction.