Who put the social in social work?

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2002

WHEN MARY HARRIMAN, daughter of the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, was ready to be formally presented to New York society in 1901, she was so appalled at the cost of her coming out ball that she gathered together some of her fellow debutantes to atone by raising money for the poor. These reluctant debutantes soon created the Junior League of New York, the first of the Junior League's many chapters.

The Junior League quickly attracted scores of young women from affluent families. None was more prominent than Eleanor Roosevelt, niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. In the fall of 1903, Eleanor Roosevelt spent some time at the College Settlement House in New York's Lower East Side, where she taught "fancy dancing" and calisthenics to young women. On at least one occasion, she brought her fiance, Franklin, to the settlement. She later recalled that "all the little girls were tremendously interested" in her "feller."

Though much influenced by the settlement house movement, which, as historian Robert Bremner observed, attracted well-to-do young bohemians "born too late for Brook Farm and, in most cases, a little too early for Greenwich Village," the Junior League remained a mainstay of old-fashioned charity imbued with the notion of noblesse oblige.

Mary Harriman was a socialite, not a social worker. Other women who could have been socialites but instead created a new field of endeavor--social work--soon came along. They were well-heeled women from prestige colleges, and they were active between 1900 and 1920. They were strong, independent, and imaginative women who had wrongheaded ideas about aiding the indigent. They transformed aid for the poor from locally controlled private agencies largely staffed by volunteers to government agencies staffed by professional social workers armed with graduate degrees. Their legacy can be seen in nearly every welfare office in the country.

They often started out with "advanced" ideas and became further radicalized by working among the poor in settlement houses of the sort that so impressed (but did not radicalize) Mary Harriman. These settlement houses first appeared in England between 1875 and 1890. They were places where the poor could see a doctor, obtain food, look for work, take a class, or join a social club. Quite a few, most notably the Henry Street Settlement of New York, were entirely staffed by women in their twenties and thirties. For the most part, according to Bremner, these idealistic young women were "the children of middle- and upper-class households, well born and well educated."

The settlement houses were magnets for smart young leftists who came to network. Scores of revolution-minded visitors, including Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Prince Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist, stopped in at Hull-House, turn-of-the-century progressive Jane Addams' famous settlement house in Chicago. The English Fabians and Liberals also paid calls to Hull-House--among them Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells, and John Morley. Alas, the English leftists tended to look down their noses at their American counterparts. Alice Hamilton, M.D., who spent nearly a decade worklng at Hull-House, noted that "we had some painful experiences" because "what was supposed to be a joyful meeting of kindred souls proved to be a meeting of the snubbers and the snubbed."

But the settlement houses made an enormous impression on those who saw their good works. Hamilton, who lived to be 101 and became an occupational health expert--and an implacable foe of the Equal Rights Amendment!--wrote that people left a settlement house with two ideas. First, they realized that the poor were not a faceless class, but rather individuals with unique desires and dreams. Second, they believed that political action was necessary to give the poor a fair chance in life. "In settlement life," Hamilton wrote, "it is impossible not to see how deep and fundamental are the inequalities of our democratic country."

With the second notion, the transformation of charity work to a government project had begun. This "new charity" movement is the precursor of welfare. When the movement started, most aid to the poor was provided privately and on a local level. In 1900, Frank Fetter, the Cornell University economist, surveyed the forty-five states and five territories and calculated that the entire state and local government aid to the poor that year was $11 million. Four states and two territories--Nebraska, Nevada, Washington, Wyoming, the Arizona Territory and Indian Territory (Oklahoma)--spent no public money on the poor.

The great Victorian poverty-fighters aided the poor directly, by helping the jobless find work and providing temporary assistance to needy families. Advocates of the new charity saw things differently. They chose to fight what they saw as the causes of poverty. If tenements could be cleaned up, diseases could be cured, and if enough jobs were available, poverty would be eradicated.

Edward T. Devine, editor of The Survey, the leading journal for the nascent profession of social work in the early 1900s, provided the best summary of the ideals of proponents of the new charity. The old charity, he argued, was simply the rich giving to the poor. It was "the mendicant's alms, the pauper's maintenance, the impostor's largess, gifts even to a worthy cause wrung from an uneasy conscience." These notions were to be replaced by "the new view, which makes of charity a type of anticipatory justice, which deals not only with individuals who suffer but with social conditions that tend to perpetuate crime, pauperism, and degeneracy. The home, the factory, the school, the church, and the playground are all within its range.