Social Work

Social Work. In antebellum America, before the term “social work” was coined, men and women of the urban elite, acting from religious and humanitarian motives, donated time and resources to helping the poor and distressed, founding orphanages, alms houses, and other charitable institutions. For leisured women, excluded from higher education and the professions, such activity provided a vehicle for benevolent work in the public arena. The Civil War U.S. Sanitary Commission accelerated the organization of private philanthropic efforts, enlisting thousands of volunteers, especially women.

Gilded Age reformers lobbied against institutionalized, government‐funded poor relief (called “outdoor relief”) in favor of volunteer assistance to the poor in their own homes. Modern social work thus took shape mainly in the private sector. Beginning in the 1870s, charity‐organization societies (COS) in New York City, Boston, and other cities sought to coordinate private charities and to curb indiscriminate giving to professional beggars and the “unworthy” poor. Embued with the dogmas of social Darwinism, leaders of the charity organization movement saw a close connection between success and virtue, failure and vice. The COS recruited voluntary female “friendly visitors” to investigate the poor in their homes and encourage habits of thrift and sobriety. Eventually some of these became paid district agents or caseworkers, the first social workers. In its casework approach, the COS anticipated later social‐work practice. By the 1890s, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections had emerged as a forum for these early social workers.

The social worker entered the twentieth century as part social scientist, part city missionary, and part detective; the 1910 census lumped “social workers” with “religious and charity workers.” The Progressive Era settlement‐house movement embodied new hopes for social betterment in the immigrant city. Living among the poor, settlement workers, often women, encouraged community development, interpreted the poor to middle‐class America, and lobbied legislatures on their behalf. They also generated statistics (“social knowledge”) about housing, health, and labor conditions, supplying the data for a social work that increasingly saw itself as applied social science. Also influential in shaping the emerging field were Social Gospel theologians and the mostly male social scientists at the new research universities such as Johns Hopkins.

Struggles over identity and purpose marked the evolution of social work. Sometimes the conflict was expressed in gendered language, as the advocates of professionalization represented themselves as champions of a masculinized, scientific objectivity and their opponents as feminized, sentimental do‐gooders. But the stereotypes bore little relation to reality. In such a vital figure as Mary Van Kleeck, a social‐work leader, industrial investigator, foundation executive, and Christian socialist, for example, scientific ambition coexisted with evangelical purpose. World War I offered such social experts unprecedented opportunities to put theory into practice in government agencies and private organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).

Crucially important in social‐work history was a semipublic institution, the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), established in 1907 “for the improvement of the social and living conditions in the United States.” Its trustees were drawn from the COS, academic social science, women's associations, and private philanthropy. Effectively underwriting social work's development as a profession, the RSF funded schools of philanthropy in Boston, St. Louis, New York, and Chicago; gave over a million dollars to the New York COS between 1907 and 1947; financed the social‐work journal The Survey (1911); and funded such projects as tuberculosis prevention, housing reform, and a pathbreaking survey of social conditions in Pittsburgh. Mary Richmond (1861–1928) of the RSF supplied a handbook of professional practice with her Social Diagnosis (1917). In their continuing campaign for professional recognition, social workers compared their diagnostic and prescriptive role to that of the physician. Full professional status proved elusive, however, as such emerging subfields as medical social work, probation work, social work in the schools, and psychiatric social work remained auxiliary to other professions.

As academic social science turned from describing deviance to defining normality, social work redefined its task as one of promoting social adjustment. Therapeutic goals replaced reform and research. At the local level, following a model pioneered by the COS, private social‐welfare agencies formed umbrella organizations called Community Chests (later the United Way) for fund‐raising purposes. These links to the established order further discouraged social workers from advocating social change. Social workers increasingly found employment in federal, state, and local government agencies; think tanks; and private (including religious) welfare organizations. The quest for professional recognition continued through academic credentialing, notably the Master of Social Work (MSW) degree, and membership in the American Association of Social Work, founded in 1921. Successors to the nineteenth‐century genteel volunteers and the Progressive Era activist/investigators, late twentieth‐century social workers typically “patrol[ed the borders of [social class” (as historian Daniel Walkowitz has put it) as middle‐class professionals in hierarchical public or private bureaucracies serving a poor, predominantly nonwhite clientele.
See also Immigration; Poverty; Social Class; Urbanization; Welfare, Federal; YMCA and YWCA.

Bibliography

Frank J. Bruno , Trends in Social Work, 1874–1956, 1957.
Roy Lubove , The Profesional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1965.
Walter I. Trattner , From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States 1978.
Ruth Crocker , Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1992.
Regina G. Kunzel , Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945, 1993.
Nancy Fraser and and Linda Gordon , A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the Welfare State, Signs 19, 2 (1994): 308–63.
Dawn Greeley , Beyond Benevolence: Gender, Class, and the Development of Scientific Charity in New York City, 1882–1935, Ph.D. diss., SUNY Stony Brook, 1995.
Helene Silverberg, ed., Gender and American Social Science (1998).
Daniel Walkowitz , Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle‐Class Identity, 1999.

Ruth Crocker