Who put the social in social work?

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2002

Richmond's 1917 book, Social Diagnosis, shows that she developed what we today would recognize as a social worker's mentality. Indeed, she had even promoted the new terminology--"friendly visitors" were replaced with "social workers" who handled "cases" involving "clients." Social work, Richmond proclaimed, was "an adjunct to the fields of medicine, education, jurisprudence, and industry." No longer a volunteer, the social worker was now a professional.

Most of Social Diagnosis consists of detailed questionnaires for interviews, written by Ada Eliot Sheffield, sister of T.S. Eliot, one of Richmond's assistants. An unmarried mother, for example, was asked whether she was herself legitimate, if her parents were fond of children and were "self-supporting, self-sustaining people," and the "size, race, religion, general moral standards, faithfulness to church, predominating occupation, if any, recreations, and social life" of her hometown. By 1920, most aid to the poor was given, not by volunteers using their own judgment, but by professional workers armed with a master's degree in social work and relying on the sorts of interviews designed by Sheffield.

IT WAS LARGELY thanks to the Russell Sage Foundation that social work became a profession. "In the thirty years since the Russell Sage Foundation was created," investigative journalist Horace Coon wrote in 1938, "charitable activities have grown from a part-time avocation to a full-time profession, the whole approach to relief has become revolutionized, and what was once an 'interest' of a few has become a lifetime occupation to thousands."

Many of these new social workers had begun their careers as settlement house employees. When in the 1930s the government assumed a larger role in helping the poor, many simply shifted employers. Julia Lathrop, a HullHouse alumna, was the first head of the Department of Labor's Children's Bureau, which was created in 1912. The bureau was the result of a nine-year campaign to establish a federal agency for children by Lillian Wald, daughter of a rich Rochester, New York, family and creator of the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Association, two nonprofits that flourish today.

"If the government can have a department to look after the nation's cotton crop," Wald wrote in a letter to Florence Kelley of the National Consumers' League, "why can't it have a bureau to look after the nation's child crop?" Social workers celebrated the establishment of the Children's Bureau as a great triumph; it is now part of the Department of Health and Human Services and has an annual budget of $4 billion.

Part of the legacy of Mary Richmond and Lillian Wald is the triumph of the notion that government must do what charity once did. But what about Alice Hamilton's idea that the poor are "nor a faceless class"? With the rise of social work as a profession, the poor once again became faceless, mere statistics rather than individual human beings. These women had rebelled against the tough-minded traditional charity of the Victorians and in so doing helped to create the bureaucratic welfare stare.