By Ryan Otteson | Reporter
The role of women in the social work field has been significant historically and to this day. According to Data USA, approximately 81% of social workers in the U.S. are women. Some people think this is due to the fact that women tend to be more nurturing and caring by nature, thus taking on jobs like social workers, teachers and nurses. Subsequently, these have been considered women’s professions in the past.
Multiple women in history that are accredited with famous achievements were also involved in social work. For example, according to Britannica, Amelia Earhart was a social worker. She worked in a settlement house in Boston called the Denison House before becoming a pilot. Here, she oversaw adult education and supervised a girls’ program in which she taught young girls how to play basketball. The Denison House was run by women who were authors, pacifists and educators.
Dr. Laine Scales, professor and Ph.D. program co-director for the School of Social Work, discussed the history of women in social work since she studies religious women and women of color who have helped shape it into the field that it is today.
“Many women started out in what we call home missions, so I study missionaries. And then in the 1920s, a lot of those people became social workers as social work developed as a profession,” she said. “It really wasn’t considered a profession until the 1920s.”
Scales said that historically, women were on the front lines of social work, while the head social workers or supervisors at the top were men, but she believes that this has improved in recent generations. According to the National Library of Medicine, social work has been considered a field in which there are mostly women, but men dominate senior positions.
Plano sophomore Anabelle Sparks is a religion major, but enjoys her social work class as it helps her to recognize the impact that women have had in the profession.
“Throughout history, especially in the early 1900s, many of them opened up homes to help the poor or the orphaned or the widowed,” she said. “People like Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells took these concepts of social work and actually did something with it.”
These women were known for exposing and documenting racial, gender and social inequalities in the U.S. For example, Ida B. Wells was involved with anti-lynching campaigns and fought for the suffrage of African American women. Scales voiced that in the past, there has not been much recognition for minority women like Wells and women of color in the field of social work, but she is working to make sure that their stories are known and taught in schools. Textbooks often only mention the names of Jane Addams and Mary Richmond as social work pioneers.
“What we’re trying to do in this generation is expand our knowledge of so many more women who were mothers of social work, whose voices have been left out of the story,” Scales said.
