Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2001 by Rhonda Y. Williams

Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity. By Daniel J. Walkowitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xxi plus 4l3pp. $59.50/cloth. $22.50/paperback).

What does it mean to be middle-class? Is it based on economics, social status, or both? Does it denote the same position or experience for people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds? If not, how do people's varied perceptions of what it means to be middle-class affect their politics, and subsequently social policy and social struggle?

In Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity, Daniel J. Walkowitz examines the complexity and "persisting ambiguities" of middle-class identity in the 20th-century United States. Embarking on a detailed historical and theoretical journey and using the social work profession as a lens, Walkowitz primarily argues that social context, gender, race, and ethnicity, and people's views about themselves, specifically in relationship to others, shaped and reshaped the meaning of middle-class over time.

According to Walkowitz, social workers' "liminal status"--or their straddling of borderlines between "feminized and proletarianized or professionalized" work, or "between independency and dependency"--provided rich terrain for exposing how people constituted their personal and work identities. His focus on social workers primarily in New York City, while seemingly narrow, does help to unveil the complex linkages between class formation and identity politics, as well as show how the term "middle-class" is used to encompass variations in social and economic status. These variations, by extension, help the reader to understand broader social relationships, the formation of social policy, and the igniting of social struggles.(7) Moreover, the issues of middle-class identity and politics, presented in a historical framework, have contemporary relevance and potentially diagnostic power as the United States' populace increasingly faces global economic transformations, corporate downsizing, a growing income divide, and increasing racial inequality, as well as the general lack of concerted social and economic justice struggles.

Walkowitz's chronological and multi-layered approach provides a logical and orderly entree into a clearly complicated and potentially unwieldy subject. In Part One, Walkowitz examines the historical precedents and invention of social work as an occupation and explores the "professionalizing project" between 1900 and 1930 during the Progressive Era--a period marked by the rise of scientific management and claims to expertise. He argues that professionalization emerged as an ideology used by women and men social workers to overcome their marginal status and gain respectability in a new and increasingly feminized job market in the 20th century. This early 20th-century struggle for status reveals a consistent core preoccupation of workers, even today: how does one achieve success, in fact, define success, in American society? And clearly, then as now, the answers to those questions have repercussions for how people conceptualize themselves, relate to others, structure their politics, and sway policy.

The existence of competing types of social work in settlement houses, industrial unions, and hospitals between 1890 and 1920, the contested definitions of "professional," and the attempts to recast social workers' public images revealed the politics of identity and middle-class formation at work. Walkowitz argues, for instance, that debates raged around whether social workers should serve as advocates for the poor or neutral observers attempting to solve a problem. By the end of the 1920s, casework and psychiatry emerged as tools to distinguish "professional," "good," or "formal" social work from volunteerism; to distance the activities of what was "generally a white person's job" from similar ones connected to religious institutions in racial and ethnic communities; and to exalt objectivity in a white secularized space. These tools not only marked off social workers' status from "others" above and below them, but also fostered competing ideologies within the middle-class.

Just as religion, race, and ethnicity shaped the meaning of "professional" and the notion of the "good" social worker, so did gender. By the end of the 1920s, the elite "Lady Bountiful" image gave way to "Miss Case Worker"--a feminized professional identity that drew on the male-inflected discourse of objectivity, rationality, and efficiency, while simultaneously preserving a "manly" identity by engendering men in the field as managers of the bureaucracy.

The category "middle-class" was neither static nor stable. Part Two, "The Middle Class Worker," explores the constant challenges social workers faced in the 1930s and 1940s as they attempted to hold onto their newly established identities and status. With the onset of the Depression, social workers had a greater degree of autonomy than common laborers, but were also dependent wage earners on the job. The ambiguity of the class status of the field was clearest in the difference between public welfare workers and private sector workers. In particular, public welfare workers increasingly saw themselves as dependent and unemployed workers. Ultimately, a rank-and-file movement emerged, and calls for social activism resurfaced with vigor. Finally, some social workers began to recognize their liminal position and their vested interest in aligning themselves with a broader working-class, despite their desire for higher status. Unfortunately, as has often been the case, social workers' association with proletarian wor k culture, according to Walkowitz, "helped to subordinate the multiple identities of femininity, race, and ethnicity to that of the worker." (119) Unlike public welfare workers, however, private sector workers kept their professional distance. They downplayed their linkages to the working class, including public social workers, by claiming their work was "less degraded" and "higher quality," because they possessed therapeutic expertise.