Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

The Feminisation of Poor Relief
At the turn of the twentieth century a new idea for relief policy was introduced
from Germany, namely the Elberfeld system. 9 Under the original system, a
town was divided into districts in which voluntary visitors took care of three
or four poor families. The system was based on the following principles: individualisation
of relief, decentralisation of decision making in delivering help,
and intensive personal relationships. Individualisation meant that the cause of
a social problem was mainly seen as individual by nature. Because of this it was
believed that individual treatment and control would be the assistance that was
needed. The inspector of the Poor Law wrote the following about a visitor’s
duty under Finnish conditions: “A visitor must help the poor as an educator
does and seek reasons for economic shortcomings as a doctor diagnoses in
order to heal people. Then the visitor will recognise that the concern and the
good advice are more effective than money in cash.”
Several male advocates of the new system thought that women should
take care of voluntary visiting, because its object was the home, the traditional
sphere of women. It seems that they had adopted some of the arguments that
the women’s movement had made at the start of their philanthropic activities
several decades earlier. Now both groups argued that women had the suitable
character and experience for visiting and instructing lower-class mothers. This
policy was reflected in practice. In Tampere, for example, 80-90 percent of
visitors were women.
What caused the change towards the feminisation and familisation of
poor relief practices? There is no possibility here of examining the change that
took place in poor people’s everyday lives, but it could be described as the
crumbling of the patriarchal order in the organisation of family life. Upper-class
contemporaries defined it as the problem of a diminishing fear of God in lowerclass
homes. Children were no longer working in factories, and idle children
on the streets were considered a “social problem”. When these concerns were
combined with the ideals of the Enlightenment, which underlay the pedagogically
and individually oriented early forms of social work, the result was, in
an atmosphere of growing nationalism, a policy whose principal aim was to
9
This system was first put into practice in Oulu (1895) and later on in Kuopio, Tampere and other places. However,
its principles had an effect on the whole organisation of poor relief all over the country in the 1910s: personal relationships
as well as visiting the homes of the poor became the “method” of poor relief volunteers.
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