Book Review

Canada and the United States

There is no better way to burrow into the consciousness of social workers than through their inner and outer struggles with issues of social class and race. Daniel J. Walkowitz has gone straight to the heart of the matter in this mischievously titled study of the struggle of social workers as a group to locate themselves vis-à-vis their clients and their society over the last hundred years. Significantly, Walkowitz weaves gender into his narrative as a thread that cannot be untangled without destroying the entire analytic fabric.	1
Walkowitz begins at the turn of the century, when social workers defined themselves by setting up training programs and credentialing pathways. In his meaty treatment of the settlement house movement, a critical locus of the social work profession's infancy, he could mine the documents and monographs to even greater effect in recording the settlement workers' own ambivalence about their professional status, particularly in relation to their "neighbors" (the consumers of their services). Should they remain the amateurs of their nineteenth-century roots, or should they pursue the increasingly attractive route of specialized training in specific skills, both administrative and analytical?	2
Progressive-era debates over the professional status and political stance of social workers were both enhanced and deflected by the pressures of the Great War, which created more opportunities for politically "neutral" and medically oriented social work and strengthened the credibility of business-minded patrons of social work who desired a more compliant, efficient, and utilitarian approach than they had observed among prewar social workers based in the settlements and other agencies. Walkowitz locates the hardening of the trend toward professionalization in the 1920s, when, as he writes, "social workers endeavored to wrap themselves in the mantle of the professional middle class by embracing the ideology and trappings of professionalism" (p. 57). Casework offered the fundamental structure for the social worker's daily labor. Although its roots lay many decades earlier, most historians agree that the primacy of casework by the 1920s reflected social work's political circumstances, characterized by social workers' dependence on salaries paid by public and private agencies shaped by conservative ideologies. Walkowitz refines and extends his observations in an ambitious interwoven analysis of race, ethnicity, and class as they unsettled the worlds of the social workers.	3
While he studies examples from several cities up through the 1920s, from the 1930s on he focuses most of his attention on social work politics and the social work profession in New York City. Of course, New York City is not typical of the national social work environment in several important ways, including New York's position as a world center of Jewish population and culture, particularly after the Holocaust, and New York's primacy (with Chicago) as a northern center of African-American society and culture. New York's radical movements in social work unionization and welfare rights were outstanding in their scope and particular in the ethnic profile of their participants. Still, Walkowitz documents social work Rank-and-File movements, dominated by Jewish social workers, in a number of cities, suggesting that New York was special but not isolated or different. And his analysis of the racial culture of post-World War II social work is sound across United States cities.	. . .