A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

“I hold,” said Dr. Southard to the 1919 conference, “whatever
the ideal order, the practical order of work called social work
begins with the eradication of evil. It may sound better to sow
goodness or to transplant goodness, or even to graft goodness in
the eager social world, and beautiful little gardens of Eden or
smaller cases of goodness can be shown here and there to the social
visitor--nevertheless, I hold, with the prejudice of a physician
perhaps, the eradications of evil are more in the first order of our
work than disseminations, transplantations, and grafts of goodness.
At any rate, if there be anything at all in the millennial hopes and
ingrained optimisms of Spencerian evolution, it is plain that by and
large we are putting evil behind us and arriving at goodness by a
clever technique of successful destruction.”[47] This “eradication of
evil” may, as one side of the “technique” of evolution, operate in the
terms of any developing organization; but in terms of eradication of
evil, not in its own functioning or its subject, but in the conditions
of its object it is not common outside of social work. It is not to be
found in the business world where all purveyance shuns the applicant
most in need of its wares and seeks the one best able to pay. It is
not to be found in the law, which tries to hold the scales even to all
comers. It is only slightly and intermittently in state-craft which
while it is coming more and more to inhibit abuse of the helpless
does still, from an age-old sense of security in the alliance with
wealth and power, bend its constructive energies to encouragement of
the prosperous. It is not even in education, which constantly tends
to provide in each school grade teaching suitable for those who will
have longest to study and is only importuned by demands from outside
to cater in the lower grades to those who must get in them all the
education they are ever to have. Social work stands alone in its
purely personal championship of the less secure in prosperity. It is in
its enormous demands for them that it seems to have turned to purely
constructive things.
It is indeed possible that along the lines of prevention social work is
developing a function which is positive in the same sense as hygiene is
positive in the field of medicine and that social work will, to that
extent, independently “plant good” as well as “eradicate evil.” But it
is also possible, and in the light of past developments more probable,
that any constructive phase of social work which proves permanent
should come to be looked on as a routine purveyance and no longer
considered social work. This we have already seen to have happened in
the case of free education and many other things.
The conference has thus confirmed and filled out the elementary
features of social work which it inherits from charity, voluntary
benefaction and response to need. What does it have to say of the