What’s in a Word? Feminism

By Al Murdach, LCSW (retired)

This column explores words that are significant for social workers today and tries to assess their impact upon, and meaning for, current social work practice. Our word today for this column is: feminism.

For many years social work was viewed as a “woman’s profession” along with nursing, teaching, librarianship and child care work. Although the proportion of males in these job categories is growing today, women still tend to be more strongly represented. Nevertheless, feminism, as a movement, has only recently caught on in these areas.

This situation is curious in the case of social work, which from its inception was guided by strong female role models: Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, Edith Abbott, Julia Lathrop, Bertha Reynolds, etc. Each of these women, and many others as well, served as mentors, educators, exemplars, scholars and guides for social workers over several generations. Yet, though some of these leaders claimed the mantle of feminism, not all did so.

In fact, Robyn Muncy concludes in her 1994 study of historic female reformers in social welfare that many of these leaders harbored conservative ideals that restricted their vision of what women could and would become in the wider world, thus limiting their impact on social work and other female dominated activities.

“Modern” feminism as a movement only began to influence social work and other female dominated activities beginning in the 1960s. Up to that time feminism in this country was viewed as a radical attempt by females to throw off social constraints and democratize social institutions such as marriage, property rights, and the franchise to allow women equal access to voting, economic opportunities and income traditionally reserved for males.

A principal focus for women at that time was the gaining of the vote, which was finally accomplished in 1920 after a century of struggle by women’s groups. Other legal victories for women soon followed. After these early accomplishments feminist social workers, as mentioned above, sought to domesticate their movement by reducing its scope and confining its tasks to more traditional roles, such as those of teacher, nurse and mother. Chief among such proponents were Jane Addams and Mary Richmond, who by their examples exerted a powerful influence upon the field and its activities. Richmond, for example, viewed the ideal social worker as a female nurse-like figure, and drew her inspiration for this idea from the historic example of Florence Nightingale, the famous “lady with the lamp” serving the sick and wounded during the Crimean War.

Modern feminism, however, focuses less on legal and cultural roadblocks than on the current social and psychological “images” of femininity that continue to reinforce the failure to grant women pay equity, equal treatment, and freedom from sexual predation in the workplace. It is this type of feminism, especially following the work of Betty Friedan in the 1960s, that appears to influence social work strongly today. Building on these notions, “Feminist Social Work Practice,” as currently conceived in social work, emphasizes practice themes such as sisterhood, self-help, and the development of “alternative” community based organizations that assist families, couples, children and female homemakers in ways that challenge all forms of cultural and institutionalized oppression as well as offer services.

Ironically, Muncy notes that the ideology of professionalism, also much espoused now by social work, may be itself, in the end, inconsistent with the ideals of feminism that social work strives to embrace. Critics charge that, by its very nature, professionalism promotes hierarchy, not equality, and control of practice, not freedom of choice for practitioners. It also can cause social work practitioners to become elitist, exclusionary, narrowly focused on guild issues and apolitical, all features that modern feminism has consistently opposed. How these conflicting forces will interact and play out as the profession of social work continues to develop remains to be seen.