Feminism, Social Work, and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Women social workers and their women clients share a common oppression in so far as they are both treated less well than men because of their sex. Women are concentrated in the lowest and least well-paid ranks of social work and have much less power than those in higher levels of the profession to determine either their own conditions of work or the overall character of the service provided to clients by social workers. Similarly, in non-professional jobs, women are concentrated in poorly paid, ‘un-skilled’ work, often with few of the fringe benefits — training, paid holidays, sick leave, and pensions associated with ‘skilled’ employment. And because women are less well paid than men both in middle- and working-class occupations they often find themselves economically dependent on men, or on the state where they have no one else financially to support them. Women’s lack of economic independence also results from the fact that even when they take on potentially well-paid jobs, either say as social workers or as factory operatives, their domestic commitments prevent them working on a full-time basis in these jobs, or doing the shift work or overtime that might secure them the same wages as men. And this reflects another inequality between the sexes, namely the fact that domestic work and the care of dependent members of society involved in that work — care of children, the sick, handicapped, and aged — falls primarily to women.