Social Work

“Aided by the popularization of psychiatry during World War II, psychoanalytic ideas held undisputed sway over social work theory on illegitimacy” (Kunzel, 148) . . . Beginning in the 1940s, social workers joined psychiatrists and psychologists in viewing out-of-wedlock pregnancy as the unmarried mother’s attempt to ease a larger unresolved psychic conflict” (149) . . . The psychiatric understanding of unmarried motherhood offered social workers a discourse of illegitimacy cast in an esoteric language appropriate to the professional, filled with medical terms and cloaked in the legitimizing mantle of science” (151) . . . Professional aspirations of social workers help explain “the rise of the neurotic unmarried mother. . . . Psychiatric explanations gave social workers a way to comprehend the illicit sexual behavior of young white women of the middle class as something other than willful promiscuity” (153). “Yet, psychoanalytic concepts seem rarely to have found their way from conference programs to case practice” (Kunzel, 148). . . . “The wartime and postwar years witnessed the construction of white out-of-wedlock pregnancy as a symptom of individual pathology and the simultaneous reconceptualization of black illegitimacy as a symptom of cultural pathology. . . . Mounting fears over black illegitimacy expressed larger anxieties about race relations that crystallized and intensified during and after the war. . . . the wartime race riots of the summer of 1943 (Kunzel, 163, 164). . . . The new constructions of white and black illegitimacy – making the white unmarried mother a subject of psychiatric analysis and the black unmarried mother a subject of national social policy – ultimately worked to undermine social workers’ claim to expertise. By the 1950s, social workers found themselves on the lowest-rung of a professional ladder that they had helped construct, jockeying for position with professionals whose status was much more secure than their own. Authority in the field of illegitimacy passed from social workers, most of whom were women, to psychiatrists and policymakers, most of whom were men” (169) . . . professionalization promised a gender-neutrality it did not deliver. By the 1950s, the rules of professional hierarchy, which social workers had used to gain status over evangelical women, now dictated social workers’ subordination to the new experts” (170).