This paper focuses on how two well-known contemporary female reformers described the situation of the time and their proposals for action and education. Ellen Key was the author of “The Century of the Child” which has been translated into many languages. She had a relational perspective on the understanding of a child’s activities. Anna Hierta-Retzius was well-known and active in social and political issues especially in girls’ education and the will of raising them to become benevolent citizens. The paper describes and compares differences between a featureoriented and a relational understanding of a child’s behaviour and the different ways for lifelong learning that are offered by these two theoretical perspectives. The feature-oriented perspective focuses on poor children’s nature/character as the cause of their life situations and behaviours while the relational perspective focuses on the material assets and how they affect a child. Lifelong learning is in the first case a question of saving the children from bad genes and in the other case an opportunity to change the material conditions for poor citizens. The paper also discusses what it means to be a newborn citizen in an old society and have its future in an unknown world.