Women with(out) class: Social workers in the twentieth-century United States

Women's History Review

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 323-344

  Walkowitz, Daniel J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247670561     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020500200425     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (62)

1. C. Wright Mills (1951) White Collar: the American middle classes (New York: Oxford University Press)
2. Alfred D. Chandler (1977) The Visible Hand: the managerial revolution in American business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
3. Paul Starr (1982) The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books)
4. Amitai Etzioni (Ed.) (1969) The Semi-Professions and Their Organization: teachers, nurses, social workers (New York: Free Press)
5. Elliot Friedson (1983) Theory of Professions: state of the art, in R. Dingwall & P. Lewis (Eds) The Sociology of the Professions: lawyers, doctors, and others, pp. 19-37 (New York: St Martin's Press)
6. Barbara Melosh (1982) The Physician's Hand: nurses and nursing in the twentieth century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press)
7. Dee Garrison (1979) Apostles of Culture: the public librarian and American society, 1876-1920 (New York: Free Press)
8. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1973) Census of Population, 1910-1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office)
9. Peter Stallybrass & Allon White (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 24-26, 191-202 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)
10. In a 1948 survey of Puerto Ricans in New York, 63% listed their 'color' as 'white.' Only 5% chose 'black'; the others described themselves as 'mulatto' or in a mixed group known in Puerto Rico as 'grife' or 'indio.' C. Wright Mills to Hon. Jesus Pifiero, Governor of Puerto Rico, 'Puerto Rican Migration Study,' Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research, 15 June 1948, unpublished manuscript, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York
11. Louise Odencrantz (1929) The Social Worker in Family, Medical, and Psychiatric Social Work (New York: Harper)
12. Mary E. Richmond (1917) Social Diagnosis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation)
13. and, Daniel J. Walkowitz (1999) Working with Class: social workers and the politics of middle-class identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press)
14. See: Jeffrey Hornstein (2000) Introduction, in A Nation of Realtors: the professionalization of real estate brokerage and the construction of a new American middle class, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Department of History, University of Maryland; and Walkowitz, Working with Class, pp. 57-62, 80-81, and 110-111
15. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1922) Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken for the Year 1920: Population, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), p. 42 Table 4, and (1933) Fifteenth Census of the United States for 1930: Population, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), p. 1100
16. See also, Abraham Flexner (1915) Is Social Work a Profession? in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1915, pp. 576-590 (Chicago)
17. See: US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1993) 1990 Census of Population and Housing, Equal Employment Opportunity file, United States, welfare service workers (occupational code 465), tape file 3C, United States Summary: Urbanized Areas and their Components (Washington, DC: CD-ROM, Data User Services Division). See also, New York Times, 5 September 1994. Nationally, 83.7% of the welfare service aides were female
18. Shirley Sealy (1986) Social-Work Field Gains Size, Status, New York University Magazine, 1(2), pp. 75-76
19. Daniel Coleman, Social Workers Take Leading Roles in Therapy, New York Times, 30 April 1985; Karen Brothers & Sue Daley (1996) Practice Interests and Client Group Preferences of New York University M.S.W. Students, unpublished paper in author's possession
20. Barry Bluestone (1987) In Support of the Deindustrialization Thesis, in Paul D. Standohar & Holly E. Brown (Eds) Deindustrialization and Plant Closure, p. 51 (Lexington: D.C. Heath)
21. Carrie R. Leana & Daniel C. Feldman (1992) Coping with Job Loss: how individuals, organizations, and communities respond to layoffs, p. 39 (New York: Lexington Books). The human costs of deindustrialization are discussed at greater length in Daniel J. Walkowitz (1995) 'Normal Life': the crisis of identity among Donetsk's miners
22. in Lewis H. Siegelbaum & Daniel J. Walkowitz (Eds) Workers of the Donbass Speak: survival and identity in the new Ukraine, pp. 159-184 (Albany: State University of New York Press)
23. See: Michael B. Fabricant & Steve Burghardt (1992) The Welfare State Crisis and the Transformation of Social Work (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe)
24. Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) Nickel and Dimes: or (not) getting by in America (New York: Metropolitan Books)
25. Frances Fox Piven, Joan Acker, Margaret Hallock & Sandra Morgen (Eds) (2002) Work, Welfare and Politics: confronting poverty in the wake of welfare reform (Eugene: University of Oregon Press)
26. Mary P. Ryan (1981) Cradle of the Middle Class: the family in Oneida County (New York: Oxford University Press)
27. Lori D. Ginzberg (1990) Women and the work of benevolence: morality, politics, and class in the nineteenth-century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press)
28. and Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall (1990) Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
29. On theorizing class, I especially recommend Loi̇c J.D. Waquant (1991) Making Class: the middle class(es) in social theory and social structure, in Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine & Rick Fantasia (Eds) Bringing Class Back In: contemporary and historical perspectives, pp. 39-64 (Boulder: Westview Press)
30. On the language of class in Britain, see: Geoffrey Crossick (1991) From Gentlemen to the Residuum: languages of social description in Victorian Britain, in Penelope J. Corfield (Ed.) Language, History, and Class (London: Basil Blackwell)
31. Gareth Stedman Jones (1983) Languages of Class: studies in English working class history, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). My regular reading of British newspapers like the Guardian or Independent in the last decade found journalists and editorial writers generally using the term 'middle class' as a broad, almost universal consumer group, in ways that differed little from American usage. For the US case, see 'Most Agree on Tax Break for the Middle Class but Who's a Member is Taxing in Itself,' Baltimore Sun, 28 January 1992; George Pataki, quoted in 'Another Kind of Middle-Class Squeeze,' New York Times, 18 May 1997. During this period, the Federal Census defined high incomes as twice the median income, low incomes as half, where the median approximated $35-38,000
32. See: Walkowitz, Working with Class
33. Halle, in his study of male chemical workers at a New Jersey plant in the 1980s, discovers the men have a double identity, thinking of themselves as working class on the job and middle class at home. While he focuses on these men, Halle provides numerous points of departure for our consideration of women's work culture as well and the politics of representation. The men do not think of the women in the plant office - or of their wives at home - as workers. 'Pink collar' secretarial work is too clean and marginal for the men; housework as unpaid labor is beyond their ken. Nonetheless, in interviews, the office women and wives have no trouble understanding what they do as real work. Finally, Halle notes that black workers are absent from the plant and thus not a part of his story, an omission he (correctly) projects would complicate his findings. Wacquant (1991) 'Making Class,' and David Halle (1984) America's Working Man: work, home, and politics among blue collar property owners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
34. I recommend as well, Robert Zussman (1985) Mechanics of the Middle Class: work and politics among American engineers (Berkeley: University of California)
35. Judith Stacey (1990) Brave New Families: stories of domestic upheaval in late twentieth century America (New York: Basic Books)
36. and Barbara Ehrenreich (1990) Fear of Falling: the inner life of the middle class (New York: HarperCollins)
37. See: Harry Braverman (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century (New York: Monthly Review Press)
38. Stephen Meyer III (1981) The Five Dollar Day: labor management and social control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921, pp. 123-147 (Albany: State University of New York Press)
39. Richard C. Cabot (1919) Social Work: essays on the meeting-ground of doctor and social worker (Boston: Houghton Mifflin)
40. and among the much good work on settlement house workers, see two of the more recent studies, Ruth Hutchinson Crocker (1992) Social Work and Social Order: the settlement movement in two industrial cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press)
41. and Mina Carson (1990) Settlement Folk: social thought and the American settlement movement, 1885-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
42. On the consolidation of agencies, see Michael B. Katz (1986) In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: a social history of welfare in America (New York: Basic Books)
43. Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd (1956 reprint edition) Middletown: a study in modern American culture, pp. 464-465 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; first published 1929, New York: Harcourt, Brace); and Walkowitz, Working with Class, ch. 2
44. On the image of the 'Lady Bountiful,' see Kathleen D. McCarthy (1982) Noblesse Oblige: charity and cultural philanthropy in Chicago, 1849-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
45. Richmond, Social Diagnosis; US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1914) Thirteenth Census of the United States: Population, 1910, vol. 4, Occupation Statistics, p. 93, table 1, p. 497, table 7, and p. 573, table 8 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office); US Census Bureau (1933) Fifteenth Census: Population; and Walkowitz, Working with Class, ch. 1
46. Survey, 15 March 1927, p. 813
47. Esther S. Dunham, Scatter-Brained Sally, Survey, 15 July 1930, pp. 362-363
48. Elizabeth Healy, Get Your Man, Survey, 15 May 1930, pp. 202-203, and 207
49. See Rick Spano (1982) The Rank and File Movement in Social Work (Washington, DC: University Press of America)
50. Jacob Fisher (1980) The Response of Social Work to the Depression (Boston: G.K Hall); and Walkowitz, Working with Class, chs 4-5
51. See the illustrations in Elizabeth Faue (1991) Community of Suffering & Struggle: women, men and the labor movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press)
52. Barbara Melosh (1991) Engendering Culture: manhood and womanhood in New Deal public art and theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press); and Walkowitz, Working with Class, pp. 163-167
53. For example, see, Dorothy I. Haight oral history (1974), Black Women's Oral History Project, vol. 10, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Haight was deployed in Harlem following the 1935 riot there as the Department of Welfare's first black personnel supervisor. More generally, see Kevin K. Gaines (1996) Uplifting the Race: black leadership, politics, and culture in the twentieth century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press)
54. Mimi Abramovitz (1991) Regulating the Lives of Women: social welfare policy from colonial times to the present, pp. 313-380 (Boston: South End Press)
55. Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward (1971) Regulating the Poor: the functions of public welfare (New York: Random House); and Walkowitz, Working with Class, chs 7-8
56. 'New working class' theory developed after the publication of Serge Mallet (1963) Nouvelle Class Ouvrière (Paris: Editions de Seuil)
57. and André Gorz (1964) Stratégie Ouvrière et Neocapitalisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil)
58. Piven & Cloward, Regulating the Poor; Mark H. Maier (1987) City Unions: managing discontent in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press)
59. Jewel Bellush & Bernard Bellush (1984) Union Power and New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37 (New York: Praeger); and Walkowitz, Working with Class, ch. 8
60. Minutes, Executive Committee, Board of Trustees, 10 October 1968, box 2222, Federation of Jewish Philanthropies Archive (FJPA); minutes, Board of Trustees, 18 October 1971, FJPA; Executive Office records, 17 June, 1977, box 2433, FJPA; Jamie Wood Wetzel (1976) Interaction of feminism and social work in America, Social Casework, 57(4) (April 1976), pp. 227-236
61. and Mary C. Schwartz (1974) The Importance of Sex of Workers and Clients, Social Service Review, 57(4) (April), pp. 227-236
62. See the journal of the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society, Catalyst: A Socialist Journal of Social Service, 1978-90, and its successor, Journal of Progressive Human services, 1990-