The Social Worker Speaks: A History of Social Workers through the Twentieth Century

Most writers on social work history do not deal with the lives of individual front line social workers—for example, how they behaved, their attitudes, frustrations, triumphs and even occasional misdemeanours. Burnham's book attempts to remedy this, dealing with the motivations and activities of workers in the public sector from the Poor Law to Social Services Departments, as well as those in probation and workers in the voluntary field, including philanthropic visiting societies and more specialist societies such as the NSPCC. The period covered begins with the establishment of the first Guild of Help in 1904, which it seems had a more giving spirit than the Charity Organization Society, and ends with the 1989 Children Act and 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. The research included a detailed literature review, including records of voluntary organisations, and testimony from forty-eight social workers, some of whom worked before the end of the Second World War, while others are still working today. The narrative ends in 1990, apparently because the closer the respondents' experiences were to the present day, ‘the more likely the subject matter was to be sensitive and the more guarded the interviewees became’ (p. 4). There is a focus on Bolton, thereby ‘using local experiences to inform general understanding’ (p. 6).