CHAPTER III

The historical perspective which shows social work to have developed out of charity shows also that there is a close relation between that development and contemporaneous developments in other lines. We know that in every field of production, trade and business, enterprising men have lately developed practical sciences to replace the old rules of thumb, and that even in such a field as teaching there has lately appeared a derived science of pedagogy which levies on psychology and other direct sciences for its material. The stewards of charity, like other people, saw the light of science full on their path. The result was a new hope. Again and again in statements like the following we have been told that the grosser disabilities which charity relieved could be done away with for good if we would systematically search out and treat their causes. “Poverty, vice and crime are no more impossible to stamp out from human society than small-pox and measles. To do the one requires the same intelligence on the part of man, though perhaps in a higher degree, that the other does. The social sciences and arts should have the same expansion as all the other sciences and arts combined in that the relations of men to each other are equally important if not more important than the relations of man to nature.”[18]Or again, “The most formidable obstacle to the adoption of the policy of prevention and treatment is not resistance to the necessary public expenditure, still less inability to raise the money, but the lack of administrative science and the shortcomings of our administrative machinery. Merely to relieve destitution hasbeen nearly as easy as to do nothing. But successfully to intervene in order to prevent—whether to prevent sickness, to prevent the neglect of children, to prevent the multiplication of the mentally unfit, or to prevent unemployment—involves the discovery of causes, the formation of large schemes of policy, the purposeful planning of collective action in modifying the environment of the poorer classes, together with scientifically diversified treatment of those individuals who fall below the recognized standards of civilized life.”[19]

When charity had thus accepted the necessity of using scientific methods there ensued immediate and far-reaching results. Chief of these have been the three developments which transformed charity into social work. It is possible to trace them in performance and to trace a parallel development of philosophy in the literature of the subject. These developments can be simply indicated as (1) a systematization of service; (2) an interest in causes of disaster, and (3) an extension of charitable interest into new fields.[20]

The converts to a scientific method undertook to work within the traditional field of charity with a new thoroughness and system.[21]Fired with the belief of their times in a tenable norm of prosperity and a continuous progress dependent only on scientific control of our environment they naturally hoped that the most stubborn situation could be harmonized with the general melioration by the use of appropriate methods and they were no longer content to offer only relief, work, care for the helpless and such simple services as were once all that was thought of. They constantly challenged the applicability of old palliative expedients and looked for reconstructive measures. “For every one thing,” writes Miss Richmond, “that could then (1832) be doneabout a man’s attitude toward his life and his social relations, about his health, housing, work and recreation, there are now (1917) a dozen things to do. The power to analyze a human situation closely as distinguished from the old method of falling back upon a few general classifications, grows with the consciousness of the power to get things done.”[22]This change in expectation may be seen in the nomenclature of the tasks which social work has set itself. At first “relief” was the objective, then “adequaterelief” and now it is “rehabilitation.” The methods were, first the alternatives “relief” or “corrective treatment,” for there were sheep and goats in those days, then “preventive treatment” and now “adjustment.”

Rehabilitation and adjustment are far more delicate and responsible matters than mere relief or even “preventive treatment” and we find social workers warning each other that “life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations and that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole and that to treat a separate episode is almost sure to invite blundering.”[23]The excuse for quoting so obvious a statement is that former practice actually required it to be made. Philanthropy took little cognizance of its supposed beneficiaries’ “life and habits as a whole.” Such a feat of synthetic judgment cannot of course be more than roughly approximated. It has, however, proved possible to develop a technique of inquiry, analysis, interpretation and direct or indirect remedial action which is known as social case work and can be made the subject of systematic instruction in the schools for training social workers. And within the last six years has come Miss Richmond’s book with the suggestive title, “Social Diagnosis,” to give a description of simple charity availing itself of the means suggested by an age of scientific experimentand so justifying the expression, “scientific charity,” which, unexplained, sounds so incongruous. The method of social case work is sometimes claimed to be the essential and distinguishing feature of social work but if we study the classic expositions of case work we find that they are describing on their own showing amethod[24]and a method which though applicable to many types of social work is not applicable to all and which is, moreover, by no means confined to social work. Case work, in any connection, is the systematic study of all considerable effects and causes in a particular situation and the development and application of special means to alter that situation in some preferred direction. Social case work is simply case work in the form it takes when applied in social work. There are some fully accepted forms of social work which have no occasion to use it. Important as it is we must recognize it as an expedient and not social work per se.

An interest in the causes of disaster is responsible for the development of those forms of social work which do not retain the immediate serviceableness of charity proper. It has developed as part of the already described attempt to systematize philanthropic service and also on an independent line of its own. “In practically all departments of the work of prevention” write the Webbs, “in the campaign against degeneration and in favor of promotion of better breeding; in the campaign against the ruin of adolescence, the creation of unemployment and the demoralization of the unemployed—we are always being stopped by the need for further experience and additional research. We know enough now to know how extremely important it is to increase our knowledge.”[25]

This need of more knowledge after every step before the next can be taken, this constant challenge offered by ouruncharted social life has caused the development of an interest in observation and investigation independent of any direct errands of mercy. Many known abuses exist which are sure to claim their victims from time to time and a certain amount of social work takes the form of an independent crusade against such abuses. This type of social work often embarks on a search for causes of trouble which proves endless and indistinguishable from the search for knowledge. A great deal of social work is now of this sort—the studies of the Russell Sage Foundation and the lesser local foundations for research and prevention, the original “Pittsburgh Survey” and all those that have followed it, the careful neighborhood studies of the settlements from the “Hull House Maps and Papers” on and the intensive group studies, studies, comparative statistics and stock takings of uncounted miscellaneous agencies. Inquiry bids fair to be as common in social work as ever alms was in charity.[26]

The extension of a philanthropic interest into new fields, the third result of scientific thoroughness and system has, bewildered us and occasioned most of the inquiry as to what social work may be. Today in the administrative departments of Federal and State governments, in the churches, the courts, the schools, the hospitals there is work being done which has a double allegiance. On the one hand it is responsible to government, religion, law, education or public health, as the case may be, and on the other it is all alike responsible to social work.

The persons who engage in this work are as much social workers as those in any traditionally philanthropic field and have simply followed persons whom they are trying to help into situations which philanthropy did not formerly considerto be its business. Philanthropy has long taken an interest in jails and reform schools, it has only quite recently followed into court anyone still unconvicted. This it does in the case of children and is beginning to do for some classes of adults. The social worker of the adult court is the probation officer, a representative of voluntary chivalry toward the defendant, standing in the very stronghold of implacable justice. The contrast between the points of view of criminal law and social work is clearly put by a judge in describing the function of the juvenile court. “The inquiry (in the juvenile court) is not to determine whether the child is a criminal or not, but to determine its status in relationship to its need of the care and protection of the state. Being adjudged in need of such special care the state assumes its guardianship and oversight, always for the welfare of the child. The aims and methods of the courts which administer our criminal laws proceed upon an entirely different theory. Our penal laws are enacted for the purpose of promoting the happiness and well-being of society at large, and any who violate them are termed criminals and outlawed as unfit units of society. The penalty provided for under these laws is imposed with the end in view of deterring the offender from again violating his obligation to the body politic and also of deterring others who might be like-minded.”[27]

In some other fields the introduction of the social worker simply adds a new sort of service to what is already given. The obligations of both the doctor and the medical social worker are to the welfare of the patient, but their work is complementary. Often the social worker has responsibilities no less than the doctor’s but her diagnosis is of a situation and its possible interference with the curative process the doctor prescribes. She must discover and change working conditions or personal habits that tend to defeat the doctor’s efforts. It is not a mere accident that this became the task of a social worker. It is not because it was nomedical job and the charitably inclined were available for it. It is because of a certain characteristic of social work which is a direct result of the single minded address to the service of need—namely, a tendency to look upon people from no point of view but that of interest in their needs, of whatever sort those needs may be. This habit of taking asyntheticview of their lives, if such an expression is permissible, gives exactly what was needed to complement the special and limited services of the doctor.

The same is true in the case of the social worker in the schools.[28]It is not because there is no other obvious title to give her that the school visitor is called a social worker but because her responsibility is not to the standards demanded by the school system nor to any subject of instruction but to the child himself and the need of the child in any capacity in which that need may occur. She must satisfy the need or put him in contact with others who will. The same is true of social workers employed to give suitable distribution to the benevolence of churches or who investigate for government departments or administer government services. There is abundant evidence that this concern for the individual as such is what is everywhere expected of the social worker. It is a paradox of this modern development of philanthropy that scientific method should have led away from generalization and formula and to a separation of the individual from the category and the predicament. One can pick up a “Survey” of any date and read of the social workers reviewing all sorts of data for light on the nature of individual lives. They study official records of vagrancy and extract from them information about vagrants.[29]They attempt to give relevance to Americanization work by studying the specific backgrounds of diverse foreign groups.[30]

Miss Addams writes of the settlement that “the socialinjury of the meanest man not only becomes its concern, but by virtue of its very locality, it has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of the social injury.” This is in a certain sense true of other forms of social work as well. Because of their interest in individual lives, and their constant response to the challenge in every sort of insufficiency and adversity they transcend the ordinary barriers of social provincialism and come to know everywhere those who bear the brunt of the social injury. The social worker seems always to be speaking for someone who has not managed as well as possible for himself, or for whom life has arranged badly, or who is not old enough or strong enough to be his own guardian. He often looks like a fool rushing in where angels might well fear to tread, but we must concede that he is doing for someone in an apparently untenable position things that only the self-sufficing can do for themselves. This synthesis of the interest of all social work in “personal” predicaments is indicated in the word “social,” for our social relations are simply our relations as persons. But it seems to need further exposition because the word social has been used loosely and no longer carries clear-cut implications. A lawyer speaking to the 1919 convention defines “individual” interests as “the claims which the human being makes simply because he is a human being. For example, the claims to be secure in his reputation and honor, in his social existence, to be secure in his belief and opinion, his spiritual existence, to be secure in his domestic relations, in his expanded individual existence and to be secure in his substance, his economic existence.”[31]It will be noted that, in the attempt to define these individual interests even a superlatively able lawyer could come no nearer to legal precision than to say “for example.” The concept is one which social work itself continues to alter,fill out and expand with every breath it draws and is not the less significant because it is elusive. As social work becomes more systematic with an almost technical practice, more dissociated from the specific act of relief and more widely and variously allied with the practices of other callings this personal, this “social” interest, becomes increasingly important as one of its distinguishing features.

We may recapitulate the effects of the extension of a charitable interest into new fields. The charitable interest working along scientific lines has produced what we know as social work and social work continues to manifest that interest as its characteristic feature in all the widely scattered fields to which human needs have called it. It is, first, everywhere engaged in the gratuitous extension of benefits. That is to say, it performs services which, while they may be officially sanctioned, are discretionary and adjustable, and are not considered established rights in any but the most broadly construed humanitarian sense. Secondly, it is concerned with negative conditions; not the successes but the failures interest it, not the promising people but the difficult people, not the leaders but the under-dogs. And thirdly, as social work begins to operate in close association with many other services, we see, what was always implicit in charity but now first stands out in sharp relief, a prime interest in the personal needs of individual beneficiaries. This puts social work in a new relation to public affairs for it not only stands by to gather up the human wreckage of bad management but it brings to formalized administration a constant and well-posted challenge to meet individual requirements.

Diversity in social work may today be more conspicuous than likeness but under the diversity essential likeness can still be traced. Despite all appearances to the contrary it has its own department of human affairs and its universalcommon interest inherited from charity and to this department of human affairs, to the service of this interest, it brings a method adopted from science.

Thedepartment of human affairsin which social work operates is that indicated by the word “social”; men’s relations to each other rather than their relations to nature. Theinterestinherited from charity is an interest in untoward situations; social work, like charity turns like a compass to the magnet of need; opportunity, success, superiority do not attract it unless they are beset with some difficulty which it can remove; handicap, deprivation, insufficiency offer the challenge to which it responds. Themethodadopted from science is that of observation and generalization; social work has established the fact that just as man cannot live without a certain food supply, so he cannot thrive as a conscious being without a modicum of interest, incentive, and leeway of freedom, so that matters long considered intimate and implicit have now become the objects of close and deliberate observation. And just as men, endlessly varied in physical appearance are to the physiologist of one general pattern and as, far more strangely, the infinite variety of mind is known by the psychologist to have its common laws of operation, so, strangest and most illusive of all, men individually unpredictable, do yet, in the main, follow laws of social behaviour which it is in the power of an observer to detect. We can say that the main act and final object of social work are those of charity. The means and methods are those of science moving in the fields of charitable concern. Social work seems to comprise a group of allied activities called by a common name and considered to be but various phases of a single undertaking because they are all engaged in spontaneous efforts to extend benefits in response to the evidence of need; they all show a major interest in improving the social relationship of their beneficiaries and all avail themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.

We may propose as a tentative definition, to be tested and carried further in the chapters which follow, that social work includes all voluntary attempts to extend benefits in response to need which are concerned with social relationships and which avail themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.

FOOTNOTES:[18]Professor C. A. Ellwell, in Charities and the Commons for 1907, p. 187.[19]Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 330.[20]Owen R. Lovejoy, Proceedings of National Conference of Social Work, 1919, pp. 666-7.[21]Mary E. Richmond, Ibid. 1920, p. 254.[22]Mary E. Richmond, Social Diagnosis, p. 29.[23]Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, p. 162.[24]See especially Mary E. Richmond, What Is Social Case Work?[25]Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 333.[26]When such inquiries have been undertaken by the government they have often been proposed and prepared for by social work. See for example: Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street, on the U. S. Investigation of the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, p. 137, N.Y. Child Labor Committee, p. 144.[27]Proceedings of National Conference of Social Work, 1920, p. 171.[28]Ibid., 1919, p. 613.[29]Charities and the Commons, April, 1907, p. 577.[30]American Year Book, 1919, p. 402.[31]Roscoe Pound, at National Conference, 1919, p. 105.

[18]Professor C. A. Ellwell, in Charities and the Commons for 1907, p. 187.

[19]Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 330.

[20]Owen R. Lovejoy, Proceedings of National Conference of Social Work, 1919, pp. 666-7.

[21]Mary E. Richmond, Ibid. 1920, p. 254.

[22]Mary E. Richmond, Social Diagnosis, p. 29.

[23]Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, p. 162.

[24]See especially Mary E. Richmond, What Is Social Case Work?

[25]Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 333.

[26]When such inquiries have been undertaken by the government they have often been proposed and prepared for by social work. See for example: Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street, on the U. S. Investigation of the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, p. 137, N.Y. Child Labor Committee, p. 144.

[27]Proceedings of National Conference of Social Work, 1920, p. 171.

[28]Ibid., 1919, p. 613.

[29]Charities and the Commons, April, 1907, p. 577.

[30]American Year Book, 1919, p. 402.

[31]Roscoe Pound, at National Conference, 1919, p. 105.

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