Feminism is a word we do not use or hear often enough, especially considering that women accounted for 85% of employed social workers in 2020, 88% of students at UMB SSW, and a majority of social work clients.
When I began the MSW program in 2018, I was shocked looking through the course list to find very little focused explicitly on feminism, women’s issues or women’s studies, nor was there even a feminist student group. We do have an advanced human behavior course on intimate partner violence, 2 courses that mention feminism in their overview, and 6 that mention women. Additionally, we now have an Intersectional Feminism and Social Work student group, though unfortunately it is inactive due to a lack of student leadership. (That can be remedied by filling out this form!)
It may seem that social work is beyond the need for feminist theory because we claim to have feminist roots. We have all heard of Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, and the settlement house movement. But how many of us have heard that the original purpose of settlements was to educate university men? Or that settlements were predated by Irish Catholic and Anglican sisterhoods whose work has been minimized and ignored? What about any specifics on the various forms of mutual aid from around the world that are recognized to have a significant impact on social work values and practice? Are we not upholding patriarchal and oppressive systems even in the narrative we tell about social work history?
Additionally, the limited available research indicates that, while social work students tend to have a progressive view of gender roles, there is not a significant recognition of feminist issues as salient among those students and, in practice, social workers tend to endorse traditional gender roles.
Not only do women predominantly populate the social work field, the ratio of women to men is trending up in social work and in therapeutic professions like counseling and psychology. This trend is comparable to that detailed in the book, The Big Sort – that as well as sorting ourselves geographically by ideology, we may also be sorting ourselves into what we perceive as our “proper” roles. It is symptomatic of how we have abandoned a holistic and truly liberatory form of feminism in favor of pushing women into traditionally male roles in a way that allows us to claim victory while upholding the same patriarchal system. We have failed to recognize the value of those roles that are traditionally female, to substantively challenge gender norms and the gender binary construct, and have foregone any fundamental restructuring of society.
One place we can see this failure is in the narrative around the effects of the pandemic on women, like this article from The Atlantic, “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism.” While there are many ways this pandemic is particularly devastating for women, whether it is greater job losses or disproportionately increased caretaking responsibilities, the feminist disaster has long passed. The pandemic has simply brought to light the exploitative and unsustainable system in which undervalued care work is passed on to the most exploited segment of our population—women of color—who make up over 95% of child care workers and are not paid enough to support themselves or to send their own children to daycare.
Another manifestation of the issue is the popular misconception of social work. The conceptual feminization of the field has been coupled with a minimization of its scope. How many times have we heard social work referred to as a caring or service profession? While this aspect is crucial, it does not come close to encompassing the full spectrum of our work and its implications. There is an underappreciation for the fact that adequately caring for people is an essential component of a well-functioning society, that it must be central to all our systems if they are to be sustainable, and that an integral part of social work is to examine those systems and to restructure them when needed.
This misconception is partially due to macro social workers being a minority. For example, at UMB SSW the breakout is roughly 80% clinical and 20% macro. But even the treatment of clinical and macro work as separate forms of practice has facilitated this misconception and has served to individualize fundamentally political problems. It is a dichotomous approach fundamentally at odds with a liberatory feminism like that developed by bell hooks in her 1981 book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.
We must recognize the interdependence of all aspects of social work practice and the need for truly radical ways of thinking about the world. More fully embracing feminist theory and values in social work is a necessary part of that effort.
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