Book Review

Canada and the United States

At first glance, Ken Moffatt's book seems to be a traditional intellectual history of social thought during the interwar period in Canada. Using the established approach of group biography, Moffatt explores the ideas of four prominent people in the emerging field of social work: E. J. Urwick, Dorothy Livesay, Carl Dawson, and Charlotte Whitton. Together, Moffatt claims, these four thinkers represent a broad cross-section of Anglo-Canadian social thought, and, through their academic affiliations, they reflect the influential role played by both McGill University and the University of Toronto in the development of social work during the 1920s and 1930s. As Moffatt points out, the differences among these subjects are at times so pronounced that a comparative analysis could easily slip into rigid categorization—and even create stereotypes—along political or gendered lines. For example, the conservative social policies of Whitton and Dawson contrast sharply with the left-wing activism of Livesay, while the authority of such male university administrators as Dawson and Urwick highlights the gender discrimination that relegated female social workers like Whitton and Livesay to insecure and often marginal careers beyond academia. Yet for Moffatt, it is this myriad of voices, the "richness of interpretation about social life and the nature of social service and social work" (p.6), that gives the interwar period its coherence and, ultimately, its importance in shaping the developing profession.

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