My first impressions of Sigrid Wilkinson are: charming, self-effacing, smart and ambitious, and in love with her work. She talks passionately about a project that brings together residents and an artist to create a cool-sounding 3-D soundscape. She talks, without a trace of boastfulness, about the part she played in getting Zoo, the satellite of the Frieze art fair, off the ground. She is an interesting woman. We make a date to meet again. This time, I find out that Wilkinson is married to a wine dealer, that they have two homes, kids and nice cars, that they travel and they have money. But at a certain point, something about her work becomes clear: although she works hard and is constantly thinking about it, and although she loves her job, she works for no money. Wilkinson is one of the new breed of charity wife.

No, she doesn’t lunch at Le Caprice, fit in a daily blow-dry around a bit of gardening and shopping, or appear in the back pages of Tatler magazine. She works hard with a passion, not for the social status or glory, but because she believes intensely in her work, enjoys it and can fit it in around her family life.

In a city awash with money, plenty of other highly intelligent and capable women have chosen similar paths. Jamie Cooper-Hohn, a Harvard graduate and the wife of the hedge-fund founder Christopher Hohn, runs his £500m Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, for no pay. “I was eager that if we did this, we would do it very much in the way Chris invests: making long-term, well-researched investments, bringing business rigour and a private-sector approach into development,” she says. Like Wilkinson, she takes her charity work seriously.

I’m not a lady who lunches

Currently, Wilkinson has a strategic role at the arts forum Future of Sound, is on the arts council of the hip Gallery @ Adventure Ecology, curates a space at Sketch and has roles on a variety of other arts organisations. Giving back is woven into her life; it is not something she does occasionally to salve her conscience or to fill the hours. It is possible she works harder than you or me.

Yet the old charity-wife label still seems to stick. “I have not been taken seriously at times,” says Wilkinson, recounting how one woman, because she felt Wilkinson didn’t “work” as such, froze her out of an event that Wilkinson herself had brought to fruition. “I have started to charge people, admittedly nominal fees, because they can’t handle the fact that you are happy working for nothing.”

Gina Symmons used to work at Arthur Andersen; now she spends her time fundraising on behalf of Cancer Research UK. She has created the hugely successful Pink Ice Ball, which this year aims to raise £250,000 and in 2005 received the endorsement of Kylie Minogue, who sent a rare message of support from the depths of her own illness. “The perception of women like me is that you’ve got too much money and nothing better to do,” says Symmons. “But I’m not a lady who lunches. I haven’t had my hair done for two months. Nobody could describe me as your usual charity wife. I’m not a society person or a social climber. Still, people treat you like dirt.”

Yana Peel and Candida Gertler, formerly a Goldman Sachs banker and a journalist, respectively, raise money through Outset, their contemporary art fund, to enable museums to buy new art; again, neither draws a salary. I had arranged to speak to them for this feature, but both pulled out after a newspaper piece appeared that focused a little too much on their wealthy husbands and the two women’s increasing social status, rather than the work Outset does.

It takes stability and self-confidence

The new charity wife is not inspired by Manhattan or Texan social x-rays, or by a combat-fatigued Madonna in Malawi, or the permanently dressed-down, globe-hopping, child-adopting Angelina Jolie. In fact, it is doubtful whether she has a role model at all, having reached a point in her life and career where she is more than capable of making decisions for herself. Case in point: Sarah Brown – clever, well connected and independently successful – has chosen charity work over continued career climb, unlike Cherie Blair. While neither is wrong, it takes a certain sort of inner stability and self-confidence to abandon the self-endorsement of traditional work.

“I’ve struggled with the fact that, in this day and age, we women define ourselves by our jobs,” says Wilkinson. “But why would I want a job in advertising when I can get involved in amazing things, give valuable help and get a lot out of it? My husband and I don’t need two incomes. How could I miss a boat or a third house when the work I do enriches our lives on a more sophisticated level?”

Gina Symmons’s husband, Guy, says: “She does a brilliant job and has created a strong brand. We’d all like more money, and I am sure Gina could increase the family income. But we know multimillionaires who are miserable. It is having a life that enhances family life that counts, not paying off the mortgage.”

You’ve got to get over your career ego

Fiona Jordan and Laura Corbidge have dedicated two years to setting up a fundraising project for the NSPCC called Party in the Grove. Without any assistance, they aim to raise £250,000 a year, as well as boosting the public profile of the charity. Corbidge says: “As a family, we talk a lot about my work. We folded 1,000 invites this weekend. My children said, ‘Mummy, we are doing this for the NSPCC, aren’t we?’ I tell them about these kids’ lives [those in the NSPCC’s project], and in turn, they talk about it at school.”

Jordan was an interest-rate derivatives trader and Corbidge a retail executive with Escada before they decided to work for the NSPCC. Both would have you look down your nose at them at your peril. Jordan says: “We both got to a point in life where we could have continued our career paths to great success. But in many ways, this is a far bigger challenge. We’re not urban princesses; we’ve got to this point in life on our own. All four of us – our husbands and us – have got where we are from nothing. Our husbands are proud of us and interested.”

Corbidge chimes in: “I enjoy taking my kids to school. And if you want that, then you’ve got to get over your enjoyment of career kudos and ego.”

Kate Spicer

Symmons has had cancer three times in eight years, and even a brief version of her story is enough to send the admiration levels rocketing through the roof of her beautiful, but not ostentatious, terraced home in Fulham. After she fell ill for the first time, she wanted to do something, so she threw a ball. Two days after the event in 2002, she went for a double mastectomy. She organises the entire thing pretty much alone from her kitchen table: she disciplines herself to 50 cold calls a day, and admits the ball takes a hard-working six months to organise. “In real terms, I’m worth more than £250,000 to Cancer Research, and then there’s all the press, if you can put a value on that.”

She may not work for money, but what she gains personally is something else. “I want to do good things. I like to help people. I want to do more in life. When you have a scare like I’ve had, you realise you have only one go at life. And to make a slight difference at something, anything, and to give something back, is an essential part of a life well lived.”

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