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Who put the social in social work?

Article Excerpt
WHEN MARY HARRIMAN, daughter of the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, was ready to be formally presented to New York society in 1901, she was so appalled at the cost of her coming out ball that she gathered together some of her fellow debutantes to atone by raising money for the poor. These reluctant debutantes soon created the Junior League of New York, the first of the Junior League's many chapters.

The Junior League quickly attracted scores of young women from affluent families. None was more prominent than Eleanor Roosevelt, niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. In the fall of 1903, Eleanor Roosevelt spent some time at the College Settlement House in New York's Lower East Side, where she taught "fancy dancing" and calisthenics to young women. On at least one occasion, she brought her fiance, Franklin, to the settlement. She later recalled that "all the little girls were tremendously interested" in her "feller."

Though much influenced by the settlement house movement, which, as historian Robert Bremner observed, attracted well-to-do young bohemians "born too late for Brook Farm and, in most cases, a little too early for Greenwich Village," the Junior League remained a mainstay of old-fashioned charity imbued with the notion of noblesse oblige.

Mary Harriman was a socialite, not a social worker. Other women who could have been socialites but instead created a new field of endeavor--social work--soon came along. They were well-heeled women from prestige colleges, and they were active between 1900 and 1920. They were strong, independent, and imaginative women who had wrongheaded ideas about aiding the indigent. They transformed aid for the poor from locally controlled private agencies largely staffed by volunteers to government agencies staffed by professional social workers armed with graduate degrees. Their legacy...