Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

civilise the lower classes. The civilising of lower-class family life became government
policy. It found its expression in an emphasis on preventive poor relief 10
and public schools, and in the appearance of day care institutions as well as
the earliest forms of preventive health care. Day care centres for children were
considered the best model for the new policy.
Children were understood to be the main area of concern. The slogan
was: “To save the children of today is to save the society of tomorrow.” However,
this policy was fully implemented only after the Civil War when the major
concern was an acute crisis in the care of children of the working-class “reds”
and their proper moral instruction as members of society. The rapid increase
in the number of orphanages after the 1918 Civil War and the expansion of
public and private child care meant in practice the feminization 11 of poor relief
with respect to the total number of paid workers. This was not the case in administration.
The new policy also produced a breakthrough in child counselling
clinics, supported by the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare. At such
clinics, women whose families were members of the Finnish professional elite
and who had been trained at professional schools of social work in the United
States, practiced the skills of a social case worker as an assisting member of the
social psychiatric team. The object of this activity was the “problem child”.
To explain why feminisation took place in the 1910s, we need to
examine the purpose of poor relief and its societal context. In most documents
the economic aspects of poor relief are what define it. The local Poor Law
committees continued to express interest in the economic advantages of various
alternatives to poor relief for the local economy. However, the inspector of the
Poor Law influenced these committees by requiring that their activities should
become effective means of the social control of reproduction among the lower
classes. This explains why individualisation and care of families became the
focus of government policies. And for these purposes women’s work was most
appropriate. Only women were considered capable of producing the magic
relationship of individualisation, and only women were regarded as being able
to guide mothers, children and morally questionable women as visitors or as
orphanage managers. It was considered to be an extended role of the housewife
10
This was approximately the period when the term Poor Law (vaivaishoito) disappeared and the field was renamed
officially poor relief (köyhäinhoito).
11
Feminisation meant in practice that totally new careers, including caring and advising, were opened up to women.
Meanwhile, positions that men had achieved were by no means feminised.
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