Working with Class

Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity

Daniel J. Walkowitz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807847589, 9780807824542
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Polls tell us that most Americans--whether they earn $20,000 or $200,000 a year--think of themselves as middle class. As this phenomenon suggests, "middle class" is a category whose definition is not necessarily self-evident. In this book, historian Daniel Walkowitz approaches the question of what it means to be middle class from an innovative angle. Focusing on the history of social workers--who daily patrol the boundaries of class--he examines the changed and contested meaning of the term over the last one hundred years.

Walkowitz uses the study of social workers to explore the interplay of race, ethnicity, and gender with class. He examines the trade union movement within the mostly female field of social work and looks at how a paradigmatic conflict between blacks and Jews in New York City during the 1960s shaped late-twentieth-century social policy concerning work, opportunity, and entitlements. In all, this is a story about the ways race and gender divisions in American society have underlain the confusion about the identity and role of the middle class.

Part One
The Professionalizing Project

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, a new occupation emerged calling itself “social work.” It developed in a range of arenas, including schools, hospitals, courts, and Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (YMCAS and YWCAS). Part 1 focuses on the struggles of this new paid labor force, most of whom worked in private philanthropic agencies, to secure a middle-class identity in a new, low-paid, and feminized field. Professionalization became the core strategy of this social and political project.

Each subfield that developed between 1890 and 1920 claimed to be the legitimate heir to this new job title, but three distinct areas—industrial social work, medical or hospital social work, and group work in settlement houses—illustrate their different agendas. Chapter 1 examines how three sets of competing claims were used by different social workers (and by agency board members) to negotiate what constituted respectability or “good” social work: social perspective, loyalty to one’s employer, and objectivity.

Chapters 2 and 3 bring the story up to the 1920s: chapter 2 examines the class and religious/racial/ethnic dimensions of the social workers’ professionalizing project; chapter 3 looks at the gendering of professionalism. The FJP, which organized in 1917 as part of the effort to consolidate social services across the nation, serves as a window into the overlapping religious, ethnic, and racial aspects of middle-class identity formation. What it means to be a Jew—as an ethnic, religious, or twin identity—has long been a hotly debated question within the Jewish community. In the 1920s, being Jewish had acquired a class meaning that was embedded in winning professional acceptance. Jewish agency workers sought to professionalize specifically as Jewish social workers in New York City, while at the national level social workers fought efforts by the U.S. Census to link their occupation with that of religious workers. At the same time, German Jewish philanthropists denigrated their eastern European brethren as racial “others,” but others apart from the separate but influential black social worker community. Chapter 2 concludes by examining the flip side of the would-be middle-class social workers’ problem: how to distinguish themselves from elite volunteers and agency board members.

The professional model also had a gendered message for the new female generation of workers who came of age in the 1920s. Whereas the earlier generation of settlement house workers chose career over family, the new one, increasingly made up of granddaughters of immigrants, often wanted to have both work and family, albeit not necessarily at the same time. Focusing on the gendered meaning of social work identity in the 1920s, chapter 3 looks at the heterosexual workplace and examines how the professional “objectivity” and “passionlessness” traditionally associated with male behavior conflicted with attitudes about the nurturing woman and conventions of femininity. Accordingly, female social workers in the 1920s modified the professional model they inherited from the Progressive Era to create an alternative feminine middle-class type: the professional woman.

Chapter One
The Invention of the Social Worker

The term “social work” entered the national vocabulary around the turn of the century. Mary E. Richmond was one of the first to use the term in her address as the general secretary of the Baltimore Charity Organization Society (COS) at the 1897 meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (NCCC). Urging the development of training schools, Richmond referred to both “professional social workers” and “professional charity workers.” By the turn of the century, the term “philanthropy,” seen as the science of giving aid, increasingly replaced the term “charity,” although the name of the occupation’s national association still retained the words “Charities and Correction.” Organized in 1873, it changed its name to the American Association of Social Workers in 1917. In response to Richmond’s appeal, the New York COS organized the first school of social work in 1898, and it began to function full-time in 1904 as the New York School of Philanthropy.¹ The names of the next three training programs that opened across the country reflected the confusion over terminology and the initial preference for “philanthropy”: the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy began in 1904; Simmons College (with Harvard University’s support) opened its School of Social Work in 1904; and the St. Louis School of Philanthropy offered its first course in 1907. Even after “social work” began to insinuate itself into discussions of the field in the succeeding decade, it had to compete with “social service” and “welfare work.”²

Many different constituencies may have contributed to the development of the term, but social workers embraced it as a source of higher status. In choosing the title “social worker,” the emerging twentieth-century cadre of full-time paid workers who provided social welfare services sought to distinguish their work from personal and religious charity work and organized philanthropy. Reflecting the prejudice of the day that “real” work was paid labor, they wanted to be thought of as “workers.” Moreover, they believed that the heart of their enterprise was not moral beneficence but a “social” problem—poverty—to be resolved through formal “social science” expertise. But although the term was intended to distinguish their labor as professional work, it had contradictory connotations. The designation “worker,” for example, confused or possibly even undermined their claims to middle-class status. “Social” could be equally compromising. At the end of the nineteenth century, in contrast to political economy and politics, the “social” was imagined as woman’s domain. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first reference to social work, from the Girl’s Own Paper in 1890, was typical: “ ‘Stump Oratory’ may safely be regarded as quite beyond the limit of a woman’s social work.”³ Indeed, the use of the term to connote women’s work in society reflects the ways in which the realm of the “social” is a doubly feminine space. As the feminist historian Denise Riley, writing about social service work, notes, “ ‘Women’ both come under and direct the public gaze … as sociological subjects.” Although this gendered connotation was not always explicit in discussions of social work, it was always implicit. As such, it also confounded the efforts of many male social work leaders to claim their professional middle-class status.⁴

The publication of the 1910 federal census seemed to justify social workers’ anxiety over their status as middle class. As federal enumerators traveled around the country interviewing people about their occupations, they realized they had difficulty categorizing new kinds of social service work. The occupational classification system used by enumerators had not changed substantially since 1870, and the special agent in charge of occupational statistics from 1910 until World War II, Alba M. Edwards, found it “entirely inadequate … either to meet the marked changes that had taken place since 1870 in the occupational activities of the people or to meet the increased demands for more accurate and detailed information about these activities.” In the 1910 census, directors tried to rectify these problems by reclassifying occupations and adding new categories. To reflect the shift from production to service, for example, Edwards endeavored to reshape the census of occupations along narrow empirical lines. This resulted in a new classification system based not on the product or the place of work but on the relationship of different kinds of work to production—for instance, whether one was a “maker,” manager, or salesperson; provided a service; or performed clerical tasks.⁵

The 1910 census classifications brought social workers both good and bad news. Although the census classified nearly half a million teachers as “professionals,” it placed 24,461 other individuals with similar demographic profiles into two new groups of “semiprofessionals”: religious, charity, and welfare workers and keepers of charitable and penal institutions. This was the good news—by classifying social workers as semiprofessionals, the census at least acknowledged that they were full-time workers. The bad news was the heterogeneous list of occupations with which they were grouped: notaries, fortunetellers and healers, keepers of pleasure resorts and racetracks, sportsmen, and theater owners, among others.⁶

The reordering of the census reflected Edwards’s desire to rank occupations according to status, to distinguish owners (“keepers” would be the census term) from employees and those who sold services from those who made or sold commodities. The “keepers,” for instance, did not achieve professional standing even in 1930. They had a distinct social profile and had moved outside the mainstream of the field: although their ranks nationwide nearly doubled between 1910 and 1920 from 7,491 to 12,884, approximately two of every three were male. In contrast, as early as 1910, most individuals in the “workers” category were female, and women would increasingly predominate. The number of “workers” increased from nearly 16,000 to over 41,000 between 1910 and 1920, with the percentage of women increasing from 55.7 to 65.6 percent (see appendix, table A.1).⁷

As if the indignity of being listed as a semiprofession and lumped together with sportsmen and fortunetellers were not enough, the class and professional ambitions of social workers received a second devastating blow five years later. Abraham Flexner’s famous address in 1915 before the NCCC was equally disparaging. Promoting a medical model of the “ideal” profession, Flexner argued that social workers, possessing no special skills, could never become “true” professionals.

Flexner’s judgment carried considerable weight. Earlier, under the prestigious auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, he had helped to upgrade medical education by introducing modern science to medical school curricula. His 1915 speech, which set out comparable criteria for measuring professions, became an obsession in social work debates for a long time to come. Social workers fretted over his devastating judgment for the next twenty-five years, remarking on it at annual meetings of the AASW, whose own identity as a professional association was in question. Flexner had not simply insulted social workers; his indictment of their professional standing had undercut the basis of their claim to middle-class status.⁸

Faced with Flexner’s critique and the census’s damaging classification, social workers mobilized to offer counterevidence. That same year, a joint committee of the New York School of Philanthropy and the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations undertook a formal investigation of the occupation. The New York School of Philanthropy, which had begun as the educational arm of the New York City COS, the major social service organization of the generation, spoke for the professional ambitions of the occupation. The investigators, without rancor, challenged their association in the census with the other semiprofessions. “Evidently,” they complained in their report, “census tabulators do not yet regard social work as a profession.” The remainder of the report then sought to claim professional status for social work.

The joint committee’s 1915 report had two objectives: to demonstrate that the census enumeration of social workers was “incomplete” and to discredit its appraisal of social workers. The investigators secured data to argue that the actual number of social workers in New York City was 100 percent greater than the census count. The 1910 census had enumerated 862 men and 1,394 women in New York City who could be classified as religious or charity workers or keepers of charitable or penal institutions, a category that included orphanages and oldage homes. The report accepted both as appropriate categories of social work, totaling “keepers” and “workers” as an inclusive category. In contrast to the census, the investigators counted more than 4,000 women and men at work in the private sector alone. “If to the social workers in private agencies,” the report concluded, “we add those in government service, social work takes rank numerically with the most important of the recognized professions.” Second, using wage and educational data, the investigators argued that social work techniques and underlying principles were comparable to those of other professions and “not less important than that of the teacher, the lawyer or the physician.”⁹

Despite the protestations of social workers, it was not until 1930 that the census moved social and welfare workers into a new category—“other professional pursuits.” They were now listed alongside librarians and “county agents, farm demonstration.” A 1935 Russell Sage Foundation classic on the new profession attributed the achievement to “the vigilance of the American Association of Social Workers.”¹⁰ This tortuous path to respectability, however, would continue to be strewn with category pitfalls; for another fifty years, debates raged over who was and who was not a social worker and whether being a social worker conferred professional status. But as a public marker, the 1930 census shift demonstrated that some social workers had begun to sort out the ambiguity in emerging hierarchical distinctions and that the census had followed their lead: although social and welfare workers achieved the status of professionals, keepers of charitable and penal institutions and the now-isolated religious workers still remained under “semiprofessional and recreational pursuits.”¹¹

The emergence of the occupation of social work in the census between 1900 and 1930 illuminates both the transformation of work during this era and the difficulty people encountered in finding a language and set of categories for comprehending it. Settlement house, hospital, and industrial social workers; probation officers; and school visitors vied with charity workers from a range of secular and religious philanthropies and churches for classification as social workers. After 1915, they collectively (and increasingly) expressed dissatisfaction with the 1910 categories, but they did so from the perspectives of their different work experiences. While the various types of social service workers debated among themselves and endeavored to prove that their relationships with those they served were appropriate to the social worker title, they also debated with their “bosses”—those who hired or funded their work—over the nature of their work (the labor process) and what it meant to do “efficient” or “good” social work. At the center of their disagreements, then, were questions about their occupational identity rooted in th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Working with Class
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Epigraph
• Prologue: Locating the Middle Class
• Part One: The Professionalizing Project
• Part Two: The Middle-Class Worker
• Part Three: Race and the Classless Class
• Epilogue: Work and the Politics of the Middle Class
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index