|
|
|
BOOK REVIEWS
| THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: A HISTORY OF RADICAL SOCIAL WORK IN THE UNITED STATES. By Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2002. 276 pp. Hardbound $59.95; Softbound $24.95.
|
|
There's a famous quotation that Dorothy Day, co-founder and grand matriarch of the Catholic Worker Movement, made in the heat of the 1960s. "Our problems," she exclaimed in a typically revolutionary moment, "stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system." It was this rejection of "the system" that defined, in the broadest possible sense, the radicalism of the social workers described in Michael Reisch's and Janice Andrews's book, The Road Not Taken, even as they stumbled and struggled to work within "the system's" confines. Reisch and Andrews tell the story of these radicals and this radicalism by combining a synthesis of existing historical studies with their own original research, including material from the archives as well an impressive grouping of oral history interviews. The result is a detailed and richly documented work that challenges prevailing assumptions about social work in United States history while pointing out alternative directions for the profession's future. |
1
|
|
For Reisch and Andrews, radicalism is in fact key to understanding the history of social work. Beginning in the 1890s, with the settlement house movement begun by Jane Addams and her fellow Progressive Era reformers, The Road Not Taken traces an ongoing strain of service provision to the poor rooted in social action, a critique of capitalism, and an unwavering commitment to equality and social justice for all. Here we learn not only of the radicalism of the settlement house workers, who helped transform the nation's social and political agenda, but of the Rank and File Movement of the 1930s. This movement brought the tactics of consciousness-raising and union organizing to social workers seeking change more revolutionary than that provided by the New Deal. Reisch and Andrews describe how these efforts came under attack during the anti-Communist purges of the Cold War, leaving the profession ill-prepared to take advantage of the surge of radicalism and protest that erupted in the 1960s. Despite such failures, strands of radicalism persisted and emerged in the form of contemporary feminist, anti-racist, and community-oriented work. |
2
|
|
As The Road Not Taken makes clear, social work and social work radicalism evolved dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, key attributes of this history remained constant. The basic assumption that lay at the heart of radical social work—that you ended poverty not by handing out band-aids but by attacking its structural, institutional, and economic roots—has stood remarkably firm, even though activists' understandings of what those roots were have changed over time. The persistence of this belief, however, has not always worked in favor of the radical cause. In fact, according to Reisch and Andrews, radical social workers have almost continuously faced opposition to their work via political repression, professional marginalization, and backlashes and blacklists of all kinds. The cards were almost always stacked against them, even during times of relative strength. |
3
|
|
There was one more serious impediment to the success of true social work radicalism. From the time of the settlement house workers on, activists and reformers grappled with the question of whether social work was about social service or social change. Could one embrace both radicalism and professionalism at the same time? As Reisch and Andrews note, this was not an easy dilemma to resolve. Time and again, the lure of middle-class security and the quest for professional status acted as persistent obstacles to ongoing radicalism within the social work arena. "Like many other movements based in the middle or professional classes," the authors explain, "many social workers simply found it too difficult to invest simultaneously in a career and social action, and too risky to be identified as a radical" (156). While many social workers sought to make the status quo more humane, most were not willing to challenge the very structures of power that made their profession necessary. |
4
|
|
This book's greatest strength is its ability to demonstrate the impact of radicalism on the social work profession as a whole. Such efforts effectively expanded the boundaries of accepted practice and made social workers collectively more receptive to the needs of the poor. Nevertheless, by focusing on the work of professionals, the authors neglected to take account of the radicalism of the range of voluntary efforts also designed to eliminate the causes of poverty while aiding those in need. The Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day in the 1930s and in many ways a more explicitly radical incarnation of the earlier settlement house movement, would provide an interesting counterpoint to the efforts of radical social workers. So, too, would a discussion of the Community for Creative Nonviolence in Washington, D.C., which, through the public persona of activist Mitch Snyder, made the plight of the homeless acutely visible throughout much of the 1980s by embracing radicalism and confrontation over institutional power and respectability. |
5
|
|
The final chapter of The Road Not Taken, "Social Work Radicalism at the End of the Twentieth Century," gives us some sense of how local, national, and global events influenced the personal perspectives of social work radicals. Here the authors make use of an extensive collection of oral history interviews with contemporary social workers of various generations. These voices, which express both idealism and frustration about their efforts to act as forces for social change, are an invaluable resource which I hope the authors will make available to other researchers—even if in an anonymous form. As a reader and reviewer, however, I wish that these interviews had been more fully utilized. It would have helped, for example, to know the ages of the respondents who answered questions about the significance of radical social work practice and what it meant for them to challenge the professional status quo. This generational identification would have made it possible to draw explicit links between when individuals came of age and how their historical experiences shaped their radical beliefs and careers. At the same time, integrating these interviews into the overall narrative of the book would have given this history a more personal and memorable touch. |
6
|
| |
|
| Marian Mollin |
| Virginia Tech |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|