| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews. The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. 2001. Pp. xiv, 276. $59.95.

Recent international debates over terrorism highlight the problem of trying to define "radicalism." One person's radical is another's champion. Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews face the same dilemma in their book. They circumvent the problem by refusing to apply a universal meaning to the term, instead simply saying that radicalism represents challenges to the status quo. Confusion over the term's definition, according to the authors, has obscured social work's radical roots. "It should not be surprising [that in] an environment in which young workers question the importance of labor unions, young women take abortion rights for granted, and even some African Americans challenge the necessity of maintaining civil rights laws . . . contemporary social workers show little cognizance of the battles fought by their social work ancestors" (p. 7). Reisch and Andrews successfully meet their goal to offer "an alternative history of social work, to describe and analyze the diverse forms that radical social work took and the different ways it influenced the profession and society" (p. 10). 1

This is a readable contribution to the already rich historiography examining social welfare policy in the United States. Works by Bruce S. Jansson, Michael B. Katz, and Walter Trattner have outlined the mainstream ideas shaping U.S. social welfare policy. Theda Skocpol finds policy origins in some of the society's most conservative values. Leslie Leighninger and A. J. Matusow offer more radical views, but their work centers on specific moments in social welfare history. Linda Gordon and Robin Muncy point to the significance of gender in the development of U.S. social welfare policy. This book is the first single volume to use "radicalism" as a theme linking the history of U.S. social welfare during the past 100 years. . . .

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