REVISITING THE HISTORY

OF SOCIAL WORK
Dr. Juliet K.  Bucoy, RSW
Professor
 The first social welfare agencies
appeared in urban areas in the early
1800s.

 These agencies or services were

private and were developed
primarily at the initiation of the
clergy and religious groups.
 In 1900s these services were provided
exclusively by the clergy and affluent “do-
gooders” who had no formal training and little
understanding of human behavior or of how
to help people.

 The focus of these private services was on

meeting such basic physical needs as food
and shelter and on attempting to cure
emotional and personal difficulties with
religious admonitions.
 
 An early social welfare organization was the
Society for the Prevention of Pauperism,
founded by John Griscom in 1820.

 This society investigated the habits and

circumstances of the poor, suggested plans
by which the poor could help themselves and
encouraged the poor to save and economize.

 One of the remedies was house to house

visitation.
 
 By the latter half of the 1800s, fairly large
number of private and relief agencies had
been established in large cities to help the
unemployed, the poor, the ill, persons with
physical or mental abilities and orphans.

 Their programs were coordinated and

sometimes overlapping and so an English
invention- the Charity Organization Society
(COS) soon caught the interest of a number of
American cities.
 
 Starting in Buffalo, New York in 1877, COS was
rapidly adopted in many cities. In COS agencies
joined together:
1. To provide direct services to individuals and
families- in this respect, they were the forerunners
of social casework and family counseling
approaches;
2. To plan and coordinate the efforts of private
agencies to meet pressing urban social problems –
in this respect they were the precursors of
community organization and social planning
approaches.
 
 Charity organizations conducted detailed
investigation of each applicant for services and
financial help,
 maintained a central client registration system to
avoid duplication and used volunteer friendly
visitors extensively to work with those in difficulty.

 The friendly visitors were primarily “doers of good

works”, as they generally gave sympathy rather
than money and encouraged the poor to save and
to seek employment.
 Poverty was viewed as a personal shortcoming.
Most of the friendly visitors were women.
 Government with COS movement was
the establishment of settlement
houses in the late 1800’s.

 Toynbee Hall was the first settlement

house, established in 1884 in London;
many others were soon formed to
larger US cities.
 Many of the early settlement house works were the daughters
of the ministers. The workers who were from the middle and
upper classes would live in poor neighborhood to experience
the harsh realities of poverty.

 Simultaneously, in cooperation with neighborhood residents,

they sought to develop ways to improve living conditions. In
contrast to friendly visitors, they lived in impoverished
neighborhoods and used the missionary approach to teaching
residents how to live moral lives and improve their
circumstances.

 They sought to improve housing, health and living conditions,

find jobs, teach English, hygiene, and occupational skills and
change environmental surroundings through cooperative
efforts. Settlement houses used change techniques that are
now called social group work, social action and community
organization.
 Settlement houses emphasized “environmental reform” while “they
continued to struggle to teach the poor the prevailing middle class
values of work, thrift, and abstinence as the keys to success”, In
addition to dealing with local problems by local action, settlement
houses played important roles in drafting legislation and in
organizing to influence social policy and legislation.

 The most noted leader in the settlement house movement was Jane
Adams of the Hull House in Chicago who summarized settlement
house as follows: The Settlement, then is an experimental effort to
aid in the solutions of the social and industrial problems which are
endangered by the modern conditions of life in great city. (Adams,
1959).
 Settlement house leaders believed that by
changing neighborhoods, they would
improve communities and through altering
communities they would develop a better
society.
 
 The first paid social workers were executive
secretaries of the COS in the late 1800s. In the
late 1800s, they received some contracts from
the cities in which they were located to
administer relief funds.

 In administering these programs, COS hired

people as executive secretaries to organize and
train the friendly visitors to establish accounting
procedures to show accountability for the funds
received. To improve the services of the friendly
visitors, the executive secretaries established
standards and training courses.
 In 1898, training course was first offered by the
New York Charity Organization Society by 1904,
the New York School of Philanthropy offered a one
year program. Soon after colleges and
universities began offering training programs in
social work.

 Initially, social work education focused on

environmental reform approaches to meet social
problems. The enactment in 1935 of the Social
Security Act to meet the needs of the poor and
the unemployed is an example of an
environmental reform approach.
 Richard Cabot introduced medical social
work into Massachusetts General Hospital
in 1905. Gradually, social workers were
employed in schools, courts, child
guidance clinics and other settings.
 
 In 1917 Mary Richmond published Social
Diagnosis, a text that presented for the first time a
theory and methodology for social work.
 The book focused on how the social worker should
intervene with individuals. The process is still used
today and involves the study (collecting
information), diagnosis (stating what is wrong),
prognosis, and treatment planning (stating what
should be done to help clients improve).
 This book was important because it formulated a
common body of knowledge for casework.
 In 1920s, Freud’s theories of personality
development and therapy became popular.

 The concepts and explanations of psychiatrists

appeared particularly appropriate for social
workers who also worked in one to one
relationships with clients.

 Social workers at this time used therapy than

reforms. 
 Not until the World War 1 did social work
begin to recognize as a distinct profession.

 Since 1900, there has been a growing

awareness by social agency boards and
the public that professionally trained social
workers are needed to provide social
services competently.
 In 1935, the National Association of Social
Workers was formed to represent the
social work profession in the US.

 Its purpose is to improve social conditions

and to promote high quality and effective
social work practice.
 
 In the recent years, considerable energy
has been expended to develop system of
registration or licensing of social workers.

 Such a system helps assure the public

that qualified personnel are providing
social work services and also advances the
recognition of social work as a profession.
 Social work is one of the most important
professions in our society in terms of the
number of people affected, the human
misery treated and the amount of money
spent.