Book Review

Karen W. Tice's Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women belongs to a growing body of historical writing on the professionalization of social work and the role of gender, race, and class in mediating social workers' quest for legitimation and their interaction with clients. Tice shares with Regina Kunzel, Mary Odem, Peggy Pascoe, Joanne Meyerowitz, Robyn Muncy, Gwendolyn Mink, and other historians an intense interest in the power dynamics that developed between middle-class women caseworkers and their (mostly) female, working-class, and immigrant clients while social work was struggling for professional status in the early twentieth century. Tice stands apart from these authors in making her central concern the textual practices of the emerging profession; she wants to know why social work developed specific case-writing and record-keeping conventions and how these norms affected the face-to-face interactions of caseworkers and clients.	1
Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women is based on a close reading of 150 case records produced by children's aid, child protective, and family welfare agencies in Minneapolis, Boston, and the state of Massachusetts between 1900 and 1930. According to Tice, these records are not transparent accounts of clients' needs, perceptions, and experiences; nor are they simple factual accounts of social work intervention. Rather, they are texts that encoded and truncated the complex individual histories brought by clients to their encounters with caseworkers. As middle-class caseworkers tried to make sense of, and gain some control over, the tangled lives of their poor and working-class clients, they inscribed client accounts and supplementary data with popular middle-class tales of poverty, moral disorder, and social redemption. Caseworkers were authors, though they may not have recognized themselves as such. In composing case records they drew on popular middle-class representations of lower-class women and girls, describing some clients as characters in dramas of moral degradation, others as protagonists in tales of moral uplift and cross-class sororal friendship. In turn, case records became scripts or blueprints for future interactions and interventions; social workers used existing case files to make decisions about the dispensation of aid and to predict the likely futures of their clients.	2
Tice begins her book with an account of antebellum female benevolence and the emergence of "scientific" charity organizations after the Civil War. Charity organizations began to develop scientific practices and professional ambitions while responding to increased rates of urban poverty and immigration and to disconcerting changes in the moral conduct of working-class young women. The new charity workers discredited the faith that women reformers placed in cross-class gender solidarity. Instead, they made class position a "moral condition" and described the middle class as "synonymous with virtue" (19). These new presumptions about class had direct and practical consequences for charitable aid. Charity workers divided prospective clients into the worthy and unworthy poor, casting into the latter category all those who resisted middle-class codes of conduct. Charity workers also developed new procedures, including case record keeping, to reduce waste, duplication, and fraud. Case records became essential instruments of surveillance, allowing charity workers to gather information, evaluate client needs, and control the dispensation of aid.	3
In time, case records "proved to be a main access for entry into the brotherhood of professions" (52). Throughout the early twentieth century social workers struggled against widespread disdain for occupations dominated by women and for hands-on work with the poor. By the 1910s and 1920s the fledgling profession of social work was preoccupied with using case records to prove to public critics and skeptical practitioners in the neighboring fields of sociology and psychiatry that its work was scientific and efficacious. Critics in both camps doubted the capacity of women to respond appropriately to the problems presented by the poor, yet they conceptualized female social workers' shortcomings differently and required different responses. The general public responded appreciatively to published case records that told of clients who had been reformed through the intervention of knowledgeable social workers. Sociologists and psychiatrists were more likely to respond positively to case records that showed a consistent theoretical orientation or that permitted rigorous quantitative analysis.	4
In their quest for legitimation social workers produced case records that experimented with numerous formats and narrative conventions. During the 1910s they tended to write "tales of detection" that highlighted the immorality of clients and the scientific authority of social workers. By the 1920s social workers more often wrote "tales of protection" that featured sympathetic interaction between clients and their caseworkers. Throughout the early twentieth century (female) social workers struggled to fit the endless detail and unstructured face-to-face interactions of casework into (masculine) models of professionalization that privileged theoretical abstraction, interpretive closure, and ritualized interaction between experts and clients.	5
Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women thoughtfully illuminates the capacity of textual practices to shape professional interventions. Tice is at her strongest in showing how social workers who wrote "tales of detection" were compelled to act like prosecutors engaged in a "relentless search for social evidence of wrongdoing" in the lives of their clients (104). She disappoints, however, in neglecting to tell us as much about social workers as the texts they produced. The social workers who wrote case records, struggled for legitimation, and interacted with clients remain rather shadowy figures; it is not altogether clear why they reacted to critics in the way they did or why particular narratives predominated in their case records at particular points in time. Moreover, Tice should have done more to help her readers understand the multiple forces and tensions operating within social work and its discourses. While she is centrally concerned with the ways in which the discursive strategies of professionalization encouraged social workers to amass and misuse power, Tice also wants her readers to understand that the face-to-face interactions of casework tended to counteract this tendency. These open-ended interactions permit Tice to retain respect for social work as a profession, past and present. And yet, she does not tell us enough about these competing tendencies or about the efforts of caseworkers to interpret and juggle them. Despite these deficiencies, Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women provides a valuable textual analysis of case records and will be of interest to historians of social work, the welfare state, and twentieth-century American women.	6
Ruth M. Alexander Colorado State University

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