The Origins of Social Work

My most recent post dealt with the women's suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While doing my research for that piece, I discovered another progressive movement that was linked in a way to the women's suffrage movement. A suffragist, Jane Addams, was one of the founders of this movement. It was the Settlement House Movement.

Jane Addams founded the first settlement house in Chicago, Illinois in 1889. The settlement house movement was a progressive movement to aid new immigrants in their assimilation into American society and culture. They would give aid to immigrants by helping them to learn English, find jobs, and decent housing.

The first settlement house was called Hull House, and it was staffed by members of the educated middle-class. These settlement houses were started based on ideas that came from the new study of social science. Remember from one of my earlier posts that social scientists had the goal of big business and big government working together to manage society.

Women who were college educated were central to the movement. During the late nineteenth century there were very few professions outside of homemaking that were acceptable for women: teaching, nursing, fashion, and lower level business management. The new social sciences gave rise to another profession that was acceptable for unmarried women to pursue: social work.

Social workers received professional training at universities. They were committed to the values of "bureaucratic progressivism: scientific study, efficient organization, and the reliance on experts."

After pondering the above information for a few days there are several observations that I want to point out. The occupation of social worker originated in Chicago where Barak Obama was a community organizer. Community organizing seems to be an outgrowth of social work. While social workers are mainly employed by the government, community organizers are private entities who are funded in part by the government and in part by philanthropists.

On the surface social work seems to be a good thing. However, what social work and community organizing does is take God out of charity. Rather than participating in a cause that comes from God and the community of God, the government has taken something that began as an act of charity, assisting new immigrants in assimilation into the American culture, and changed it into the "Nanny State." People who may have felt the pull of charity and may have wanted to become involved in "social work" in the form of missions now have the excuse, "I pay taxes. Let the government handle it."

When we allow government to do our charity work for us, we fall into the trap of allowing government to be our conscience as well. Now we see public service messages on television from how tall our children need to be before they can wear a regular seat belt to how much we are supposed to exercise per day. The government wants to regulate our salt and sugar intake. They spend millions of dollars a year telling us that smoking is bad for us. Superficially, this is all good, but since God has been taken out of our charity, He has been taken out of almost everything in public life under the guise of the "separation of church and state."

In conclusion, out of the settlement house movement arose the new profession of social worker. This profession was created by progressives to promote the progressive agenda of big government social management. Now 122 years later this government management of people has become the norm. It is even attempting to replace the role of religious mission and charity to the point that people expect the government to intervene in circumstances from child neglect to wildfires.

My next post will delve into another aspect of the women's movement: birth control and abortion. We will meet Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. I will discuss how progressives have not only driven God out of public life; but also out of the most sacred of relationships, marriage.