In the beginning of humanitarianism, various agents –businessmen, military physicians, political representatives of the European Empires, as well as some active women in social reform movements- contributed to shaping compassion as an emotion of transnational scope. In this way, compassion is able to connect geographically distant people in order to mobilize the necessary resources to provide effective assistance in the field. In particular, this paper focuses on demonstrating how women participated in the construction of modern humanitarianism by producing a gendered conception of compassion. They achieved this, by identifying this ability to feel other's suffering and to relieve it with the implementation of a set of caring practices, whose exclusively female competences, justified their action in emergency relief operations. Thus, compassion provided them with an agency when creating networks aimed at assisting different types of victims, which are here represented by means of the wounded soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the disabled prisoners during the First World War (1914-9) as well as the refugees resulting from the Republican exile throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) and the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War (1939-1945). This research seeks to retrace those networks, as they promoted the development of a know-how strongly rooted in emotions, notably in love, sympathy and compassion, which women would have cultivated for centuries in the domestic sphere. This know-how will be interpreted here as a situated knowledge that these women humanitarians – ambulance women, nurses, but also other volunteers involved in the protection of victims- have produced throughout the main armed conflicts of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.