It was not until the emergence of
industrialization and
urbanization that the informal helping systems of the church and family began to be replaced by social welfare services. The practice and profession of social work has a relatively modern and scientific origin, and is generally considered to have developed out of three strands. The first was individual casework, a strategy pioneered by the
Charity Organization Society in the mid-19th century. The second was social administration, which included various forms of poverty relief. Statewide poverty relief could be said to have its roots in the English
Poor Laws of the 17th century, but was first systematized through the efforts of the Charity Organisation Society. The third consisted of social action - rather than engaging in the resolution of immediate individual requirements, the emphasis was placed on political action working through the community and the group to improve their social conditions and thereby alleviate poverty. This approach was developed originally by the
settlement house movement. This was accompanied by a less easily defined movement; the development of institutions to deal with the entire range of social problems. All had their most rapid growth during the nineteenth century, and laid the foundational basis for modern social work, both in theory and in practice. Professional social work originated in 19th century England, and had its roots in the social and economic upheaval wrought by the
Industrial Revolution, in particular the societal struggle to deal with the resultant mass urban-based
poverty and its related problems. Because poverty was the main focus of early social work, it was intricately linked with the idea of charity work.(also see:
Sturdy beggar) With the decline of
feudalism in 16th century England, the indigent poor came to be seen as a more direct threat to the social order. As they were often not associated to a particular feudal manor, the government moved towards the formation of an organized poverty relief system to care for them. The origins of the
English Poor Law system can be traced as far back as late medieval statutes dealing with beggars and vagrancy but it was only during the Tudor period that the Poor Law system became codified.
Monasteries, the primary source of poor relief, were dissolved by the Tudor
Reformation causing poor relief to move from a largely voluntary basis to a compulsory tax that was collected at a parish level. Early legislation was concerned with
vagrants and making the
able-bodied work, especially while labour was in short supply following the
Black Death. The first complete code of poor relief was made in the
Poor Relief Act 1597 and some provision for the "deserving poor" was eventually made in the
Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. It created a system administered at parish level, paid for by levying local rates on rate payers. Relief for those too ill or old to work, the so-called '
impotent poor', was in the form of a payment or items of food ('the parish loaf') or clothing also known as
outdoor relief. Some aged people might be accommodated in parish
alms houses, though these were usually private charitable institutions. Meanwhile, able-bodied beggars who had refused work were often placed in
houses of correction or even subjected to beatings to encourage discipline. As populations grew in
Colonial America,
almhouses were built to house vulnerable people with no other support, including people with a long-term illness or older people without families. The first recorded almshouse was built in 1713 near
Philadelphia by William Penn, and was only open to
Quakers. A second one was built nearby in 1728, this time with public money. In 1736, New York opened the Poor House of the City of New York (later renamed
Bellevue Hospital) and in 1737,
New Orleans opened the Saint John's Hospital to serve the poor of the city. The
Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 completely overhauled the existing system in Britain and established a
Poor Law Commission to oversee the national operation of the system. This included the forming together of small parishes into
poor law unions and the building of workhouses in each union for the giving of poor relief. Although the aim of the legislation was to reduce costs to rate payers, one area not reformed was the method of financing of the Poor Law system which continued to be paid for by levying a "poor rate" on the property owning middle classes. Although the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 did not ban all forms of
outdoor relief, it stated that no able-bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a
workhouse. Conditions in workhouses were to be made harsh to discourage people from claiming. Workhouses were to be built in every parish and, if parishes were too small, parishes could group together to form
poor law unions. The
Poor Law Commissioners were to be responsible for overseeing the implementation of the act. In France, poverty relief suffered after the
French Revolution reduced the role of the
Catholic Church in the country. The
Napoleonic Wars further stretched the resources of the poor, and it wasn't until the rise of the
French Third Republic around 1871 that the state became organized and wealthy enough to provide thorough poor relief. This was in-particular due to the 1880s efforts of
Radical Republicans who emphasized
solidarity and referenced back to the Revolution-era
Jacobin views on the "sacred national duty" of assistance to the poor.
Private philanthropy The 19th century saw a great leap forward in technological and scientific achievement. There was also a great
migration to urban areas throughout the
Western world, which led to many social problems. This galvanised the socially active, prosperous middle and upper classes to search for ways to ameliorate the physical and spiritual conditions of the poor underclasses. This was coupled with a religious revival, and many Protestant mission efforts (urban missions), attempted to resolve the problems inherent in large cities like poverty, prostitution, disease, and other afflictions. A new philosophy of "scientific charity" emerged, which stated charity should be "secular, rational and empirical as opposed to sectarian, sentimental, and dogmatic." During this time, rescue societies were initiated to find more appropriate means of self-support for women involved in prostitution. State-built
Mental asylums were built from the 1840s to assist in taking care of the
mentally ill. Most historians identify the
Charity Organization Society, founded by
Helen Bosanquet and
Octavia Hill in London in 1869, as the pioneering organization of the social theory that led to the emergence of social work as a professional occupation. pioneered many aspects of social work. Portrait by
John Singer Sargent, 1898
Alsager Hay Hill was prominent from its foundation, acting as honorary secretary of the council until July 1870, and as an active member of the council until 1880. Hill also worked as an almoner to the Society for the Relief of Distress in the East of London. He campaigned about the many flaws in the
poor laws and urged for a more scientific classification of paupers. His 1867 pamphlet, on
Our Unemployed, was one of the earliest attempts to highlight the problem of systemic
unemployment; he suggested a national system of labour registration. In 1871, Hill pioneered a system of
labour exchanges in England, establishing 'The Employment Inquiry Office and Labour Registry,'. There, Hill advised applicants for assistance, and founded and edited
Labour News to improve communication between masters and men seeking work.
Octavia Hill is regarded by many as the founder of modern social work. She was a moving force behind the development of social housing, and her early friendship with
John Ruskin enabled her to put her theories into practice with the aid of his initial investment. She believed in self-reliance, and made it a key part of her housing system that she and her assistants knew their tenants personally and encouraged them to better themselves. She was opposed to municipal provision of housing, believing it to be bureaucratic and impersonal. Under her guidance, the Charity Organisation Society organised charitable grants and pioneered a home-visiting service that formed the basis for modern social work. slum in the nineteenth century. She also provided housing for the poor; after being improved her properties were let to those on intermittent and low incomes. At the heart of the Octavia Hill system was the weekly visit to collect rent. From the outset, Hill conceived this as a job for women only. She and her assistants, including
Emma Cons combined the weekly rent collection with checking every detail of the premises and getting to know the tenants personally, acting as early social workers. At first Hill believed, "Voluntary workers are a necessity. They are better than paid workers, and can be had in sufficient numbers." Later, she found it expedient to maintain a paid workforce. Under her methods, personal responsibility was encouraged. She insisted on dealing with arrears promptly; she appointed reliable caretakers; she took up of references on prospective tenants, and visited them in their homes; she paid careful attention to allocations and the placing of tenants, with regard to size of families and the size and location of the accommodation to be offered; and she made no rules that could not be properly enforced. This Movement (creating integrated mixed communities of rich and poor) grew directly out of Octavia Hill's work. Her colleagues
Samuel and
Henrietta Barnett, founded
Toynbee Hall,
Oxford House By 1913, there were 413 settlements in 32 states. The house was both a community service centre and a social research program. Precursors to modern social work arose at Hull House as health professionals began to work with social determinants of poor health. The settlement movement focused on the causes of poverty through the "three Rs" - Research, Reform, and Residence. They provided a variety of services including educational, legal, and health services. These programs also advocated changes in social policy. Workers in the settlement movement immersed themselves in the culture of those they were helping. There were basic commonalities in the movement. These institutions were more concerned with societal causes for poverty, especially the changes that came with industrialization, rather than personal causes which their predecessors believed were the main reason for poverty. The settlement movement believed that social reform was best pursued and pushed for by private charities. One important participant in the scheme was the philanthropist
Charles Booth who published his study
Life and Labour of the People in London in 1889 while working at Toynbee Hall. The study was the first systematic attempt at gathering comprehensive statistics and mapping poverty and influenced both social research and the fight against poverty for decades afterwards.
Further development , Ireland circa 1901. By the beginning of the 20th century, these different organizations with their diverse intellectual underpinnings were beginning to coalesce into modern social work. Foundations were established to examine the root causes of social problems such as poverty, and social workers became more professional and scientific in their methodology. The Quaker philanthropist and chocolate manufacturer
Joseph Rowntree believed that social evils could be tackled by systematic research, and to that end founded the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 1904. Rowntree wanted to tackle the root causes of social problems, rather than treating their symptoms. His Memorandum of 1904 stated: "I feel that much of the current philanthropic effort is directed to remedying the more superficial manifestations of weakness or evil, while little thought or effort is directed to search out their underlying causes ... [seek] to search out the under-lying causes of weakness or evil in the community, rather than ... remedying their more superficial manifestations." Rowntree's son,
Seebohm Rowntree, carried out a series of seminal surveys into poverty in the city of
York that greatly influenced public and governmental attitudes towards poverty and deprivation. His first York study of 1899 (this was followed up in 1935 and 1951) was a comprehensive survey into the living conditions of the poor in York during which investigators visited every working-class home. This amounted to the detailed study of 11,560 families or 46,754 individuals. The results of this study were published in 1901 in his book
Poverty, A Study of Town Life and claimed that 27.84 percent of the total population of York lived below the poverty line. Rowntree defined the poverty line in terms of a minimum weekly sum of money "necessary to enable families... to secure the necessaries of a healthy life", including fuel and light, rent, food, clothing, and household and personal items. This was quantified using scientific methods that hadn't been applied to the study of poverty before. For example, he consulted leading
nutritionists of the period to discover the minimum
calorific intake and nutritional balance necessary before people got ill or lost weight. He then surveyed the prices of food in York to discover what the cheapest prices in the area for the food needed for this minimum
diet were and used this information to set his poverty line. In analysing the results of the investigation he found that people at certain stages of life, for example in old age and early childhood, were more likely to be in abject poverty, living below the poverty line, than at other stages of life. From this he formulated the idea of the poverty cycle in which some people moved in and out of absolute poverty during their lives. Rowntree's argument that poverty was the result of low wages went against the traditionally held view that the poor were responsible for their own plight. The differing approaches to social work often led to heated debates. In the early 20th century,
Mary Richmond of the
Charity Organization Society (COS) and
Jane Addams of the
Settlement House Movement engaged in a public dispute over the optimal approach; whether the problem should be tackled with COS' traditional,
scientific method that focused on efficiency and prevention, or whether the Settlement House Movement's immersion into the problem, blurring the lines of practitioner and client, was superior. Even as schools of social work opened and formalized processes for social work began to be developed, the question "is social work a profession?" lingered. In 1915, at the American
National Conference of Charities and Correction, Dr.
Abraham Flexner spoke on the topic "Is Social Work a Profession?" He contended that it was not because it lacked specialized knowledge and specific application of theoretical and intellectual knowledge to solve human and social problems. This led to the professionalization of social work, concentrating on case work and the scientific method. == Gender perspective in the history of social work ==