Women with(out) class: social workers in the twentieth-century United States

Abstract

This article examines women's work culture in professionalmanagerial labor in the twentieth-century United States through a history of social workers, an occupation particularly well suited to examine how race and gender shape work cultures. It suggests a chronology for understanding the changing ways in which social workers adopted middle-class identities that draw upon both professionalism and unionism. Imaging themselves variously as workers and 'middle-class' professionals, each identity had implications for their ability to understand and respond to the changing working conditions at both the beginning and end of the twentieth century that threatened to undermine them. Middle-Class Worker and Professional Worker identities in the 1930s and 1960s armed male and female social workers to defend their unions and fight for their clients against economizing bosses, and miserly state politicians. At the end of the century, however, the rush of social workers into the role of therapists gave them a work identity that relatively disempowered them to deal with the welfare cutbacks or the new work of deindustrialization with 'jobless recovery'.

Class‐competent social work: a preliminary definition

“…Under neo‐liberal premises in an era of pro‐work and anti‐welfare reform, social work practices are being viewed increasingly as embedded in middle‐class values. Walkowitz (2005) pointed out that social workers’ identities in the 1930s and 1960s helped them to defend their unions and fight for their clients. However, the current rush of social workers into the role of therapists has disempowered them to deal with welfare cutbacks and global changes.…”

‘Rags to Riches?’ New Histories of Social Mobility in Modern Britain - Introduction

“…Daniel Walkowitz's research into the history of social workers in America supports the argument that downward mobility can be experienced as a slow drift in the status of your livelihood rather than a sudden shock such as redundancy. 31 Both upward and downward mobility are relational categories that are affected by the occupational structure changing over time. Scholars need to pay more attention to how different occupations are valued in the economy at particular moments in history.…”