A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

The man of sub-normal intelligence, of bad nervous organization, of specific defect even, can, in most modern communities keep alive by his own efforts. He will drag on, abysmally incompetent, indolent, badly behaved or ill. He may irregularly rent a shelter which other men would refuse, he will inevitably do his little bit to demoralize the labor market and the work he from time to time takes up and he may, for one reason or another, go for awhile to prison. His demands on the almshouse we will omit as it would probably in this connection count as social work. He can do our work badly, put the cost of his keep on the community if he goes to prison, make our pockets or our persons unsafe, if he happens to be that way inclined, spread disease and even, for a consideration, vote. What is to be gained by leaving this poor creature to his own devices and the haphazard propagation of his species? From a biological point of view, nothing at all, and his running amuck is a nuisance and a menace. What could social work do? From a biological point of view, also nothing. If indeed the man were so far defective that it could confine him to an institution it might in that way prevent his leaving a family but this simple precaution the biological critics would probably arrange for through some other agency. But social work might greatly limit his troublesomeness.

One can only conclude that those who advocate leaving the unfit to their own destruction do not know, as social work knows, how slow that destruction is going to be, how costly and troublesome to the community in which it is taking place, how many people may be, first and last, involved in it and, above all, how little likely it is to culminate before the unfit man has left children to succeed him.

Such glaring cases of unfitness are however not typical of the sort with which social work most often deals. More typical is such mild cherishing of unfitness as the securing of eye-glasses for a nearsighted child. Would it do any good to leave him without glasses, unable to see the blackboard at school, considered a blockhead, unhappy and defiant and growing up at odds with the world? He would be no whit less likely to have a family of shortsighted children.

Since the relative security of civilized life allows the unfit, left to their own devices, to live long enough to demoralize their community and perpetuate their strain, a humane guardianship supplied by social work, with an eye to prevention and all the possibilities of the social situation, is simply the safeguarding of a group in which spontaneous elimination has ceased to be sufficiently expeditious for the public safety.

The last of those who would say “hands off” believe that the needs to which social work at present ministers are chargeable to a few major abuses in our economic system which could and would be removed by swift revolutionary measures were it not for false hopes of gradual reform—hopes which social work helps to keep alive. They think that if the distress caused by “the present system” were left unrelieved people would be shocked into summary abolition of the system. The chances of concerted action on any such program are so infinitesimal that it is difficult to regard such a proposal as anything but a mere “talking point” of propaganda. The abuses of the “present system” are too hideously great for us to risk any momentary discontinuance of their relief without a very certain guarantee of the desired results.

And when it comes to that we can but remember that the blackest nights of human oppression have not led to the brightest mornings of human brotherhood, though there has been many a fine gesture of uprising. What Mr. Wells remarks in his “Outline of History” apropos of the results of the French Revolution seems to be true of any attempt to emancipate life at a blow. “When these things of the ancient regime had vanished, it seemed as if they had never mattered. * * * the immense promise and air of a new world with which the Revolution had come remained unfulfilled.

“Yet, after all, this wave of revolution had realized nearly everything that had been clearly thought out before it. It was not failing for want of impetus but for want of finished ideas. Many things that had oppressed mankind were swept away forever. Now that they were swept away it became apparent how unprepared men were for the creative opportunities this clearance gave them. And periods of revolution are periods of action; in them men reap the harvest of ideas that have grown during phases of interlude, and they leave the fields cleared for a season of new growth, but they cannot suddenly produce ripened new ideas to meet an unanticipated riddle.”[69] Despite the years of thinking that have elapsed since 1789, the Russian revolution finds itself in the same case. The present party that has attempted its clean sweep of previous organization is rich in coherence and intention but not in organization and expedients.

Much of what social work is now doing is developing expedients of social practice equally applicable and equally necessary under any form of government. The question of whether social work as such should occupy itself with the development of such expedients or with revolutionary projects belongs not with the discussion of its overdoing, but of its doing too little. The advocates of revolution say “hands off” but they really despise social work for temporizing.

To those who charge it with temporizing, the third and last group of its critics, social work listens very gravely. They touch it where its conscience is tender. The first group, those who charge it with unworthy patronage and intrusion do not touch its principle at all. It knows better than any one else the sort of thing that may easily be done in its name, knows that its recruits are unregenerate human beings who will have to learn to put aside personal for scientific curiosity and resist their enormous temptations to tyrannize. It knows that the things for which that first group condemns it are things which will always continue to menace it but things which, on the whole, it is growing away from. The second group, those who charge it with interfering with natural selection and wasting opportunity on lame ducks do not shake its conviction. It knows perfectly well that not social work but the abundance of mere food and shelter and the ingrained sympathy or solidarity, or what you will, of civilized man is what prevents the elimination of the unfit and that these unfit can only be made innocuous and self-supporting by methods and arrangements worked out by the intelligence of the especially fit.

But when this third group tell social work that it is not extending benefits but in the long run delaying their extension, when they tell it that there is a dragon “privilege” which can grow new heads of offence faster than it can cut them off, when they say that social work must be either utterly entangled in its own red tape or corrupted by the flesh pots of Egypt not to see that it is simply compounding with the mammon of unrighteousness to allow the continuance of privilege and abuse, then indeed social work itself is troubled. It has known all along that those are wrong who say it is a mistake to serve the disadvantaged, but to be told that it—social work—is not serving them, that is a very different matter. The charges are two, first that it is selfish and pharisaical, and second that it is practically bought for the defense of privilege. The first complain of