How Did Social Work Become a Profession?

How did social work become a profession?

Social work emerged as a profession out of the early efforts of churches and philanthropic groups to relieve the effects of poverty, to bring the comforts of religion to the poor, to promote temperance and encourage thrift, to care for children, the sick, and the aged, and to correct the delinquent.

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