Social work grew out of the slums of industrial England
As factories drew crowds into Victorian cities, mass urban poverty overwhelmed older forms of charity. In London the Charity Organization Society began visiting families one by one and recording their circumstances. That method, individual casework, became one of the three strands from which the modern profession of social work was woven.
Help for people in need is ancient, long provided by almshouses, private charities and religious bodies, and state poverty relief in England traces back to the Poor Laws of the seventeenth century. Social work as a defined profession, however, took shape in the nineteenth century. Helen Bosanquet and Octavia Hill were central figures in the Charity Organization Society, which historians widely see as the pioneer of the approach. A second strand was organised poverty relief, and a third was social action, pioneered by the Settlement House Movement, which tried to change conditions through community and political effort instead of case by case.
Key figures followed. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Mary Ellen Richmond wrote Social Diagnosis, an early text drawing on law, medicine, psychiatry and history. William Beveridge, architect of the welfare state, placed the profession within a broader system of public provision. The pressures of child labour, widespread poverty and later the Great Depression pushed the field to become more rigorous.
Mental health became a major branch. Dorothea Dix, a retired Boston teacher, crusaded from the 1840s to change how people with mental disorders were treated, and though she died in 1887 before the profession existed, psychiatric social workers claim her as a forerunner. In 1918 the Smith College School for Social Work opened, with students trained under Mary Jarrett at Boston Psychopathic Hospital.
Practice today works at three levels: micro, with individuals and families; mezzo, with groups and community agencies; and macro, through policy, research, advocacy and administration. The profession draws on psychology, sociology, law and economics, often working alongside health and education staff, with goals ranging from protecting vulnerable people to broader social reform.
Source: Social work
