Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

As an example of what it meant for men to have the power to decide
which tasks were performed by whom, it should be mentioned that in positions
of non-institutional care the formal education of men was lower than that of
women in spite of men’s relatively higher status. The boom of therapeutic social
work among families from the 1940s onwards sealed the gender divisions.
In addition, it resulted in a new type of male dominance, as professionals,
including medical doctors, acquired influence over social work.
Concluding Remarks
The formation of gender division in Finnish social work was connected with
many ongoing social processes, not least with the policies of the state towards
the nuclear family of wage labour. In the initial stages, during the period of
poor house policies when there was no positive support for the family, women
were quite free to govern their activities by themselves, if they agreed with the
official policy. When the state began to undertake supportive and educative
intervention in the everyday lives of families, for which it required female
skills and labour, it was necessary to bring the reproductive work of women of
various classes under control. This control was exercised at two levels, placing
lower-class family life under the control of upper- and middle-class women
and ensuring that the women’s work was done in a controlled way that fulfilled
the hidden purposes of the policy.
The control of women’s work proceeded in three stages: at first it
concerned only the criteria of almsgiving. The second step was the Elberfeldian
visiting, which included a visitor’s duty to report the conditions of the poor –
partly in writing − to the Poor Law committee of men responsible for decision
making. The third step was the social welfare bureaucracy, where the top level
belonged to men but the grass-roots work required good hearted females. This
illustrates how social policy tended, from the outset, to favour women’s work
and to maintain the existing gender order.
As soon as the “paradigm” of social work arose in the societal context of
early capitalism, a pressing issue was the ability of the actors to harmonise the
principles of economy and emotion. This found expression, for example, in
the management of the poor house and in decisions in Poor Law Committees
concerning the financial support offered to homes. The issue was particularly
acute in grass-roots work, and so the impact on women was different. At the
47