Carol H. Meyer

Practice and Policy: A Family Focus

In considering and dealing with the impact of social policy on families, social workers should elicit all possible implications—good or bad—for practice

Integrating Practice Demands in Social Work Education

ferences were concerned with such topics as co-ordinating agency and school practice modes and fitting the graduate into agency molds. The tie to apprenticeship training was discernible in the choice of topic. Perhaps, then, todays interest in finding ways to incorporate the demands of practice in the educational structure is an indication of social works growth as a profession. The current structure of social work education rests on an assumption that may require scrutiny, however, if progress is to be made in solving the venerable problem of town and gown. The assumption is that the schools, in their educational programs, and the agencies, in their practice programs, exhibit similar, if not identical, commitments to the service role of social work in the community. It is assumed that the school and the agency are concerned with the same ultimate goals and that social work education and practice are more or less integrated. Carol H. Meyer, D.s.W., is Professor, Columbia University School of Social Work, New York, N.Y. Her article is based on a paper presented at the Annual Program Meeting of the Council on Social Work Education held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 24, 1968.

The Changing Concept of Individualized Services

THE CONCEPT of individualized services has been accepted by the social work profession and by leaders in the field of social welfare for almost a century, but throughout this period the concept has undergone many radical changes. These changes must always be viewed against the backdrop of the prevailing social and economic conditions and the preoccupations of the particular era in which they occurred, for it is the broad societal influences in each era that have shaped social legislation, agency programs, and professional methods and techniques. In this article, I shall present an examination of the concept of individualized services as it has been altered and reshaped by four kinds of CAROL H. MEYER

Purposes and Boundaries–Casework Fifty Years Later

It takes knowledge and a particular stance to be able to properly see personality and environment in transaction and ecological balance with each other

The Seduction of Political Subtexts

urbs. White middle-class students are at risk as Congress savages student loans and universities lose federal support. (Poor minority students have already been disadvantaged by the loss of scholarship funds and the increase in tuition in state colleges and universities.) The public is deluded by the pitting of the health and welfare of poor women against defense spending, farm supports, and tax relief. Yet again we are told that people of color and women are threatening the social fabric of the white middle class.

Making the Political, Personal: a Sinister Trend

Whether the daytime talk shows and soap operas are leading or reflecting the social discourse, they are important because they are telling us something that permeates our culture. Women are starring in new roles; no longer homebound, they are on the television stage as wives and &dquo;enablers&dquo; of alcoholics and drug abusers; as coconspiring mothers of abused children; as angry surrogate mothers; as forlorn natural mothers of lost adopted children; and as victims them-

Creating Our Own Role Models

or even that their sense of dis-ease is embedded in a context larger than themselves. Subject to the influence of romantic myths, traditional rules, and implicit threats of instability and loss if things were to change for women, many of us, if we are aware at all of our &dquo;status issues,&dquo; continue our pursuits with some doggedness, hoping at the least that we can get through the thickets of unfairness unscathed. But through the work of the authors in AFFILIA, women may find new ways of thinking and acting; during the moments of reading, they may discover sources of affirmation and role models for living differently and for practicing from a feminist perspective. The models are both in the projects reported and in the authors themselves, who have chosen to make their own statements. It cannot go unnoticed that in the case of these authors-all authors-they have courted some risk in writing. By writing, they have risked exposure and criticism, and they have entered the public world affirming whatever commitment they have chosen. Thus, they have become role models for the rest of us, who may have been living without awareness of our

On the Bias

Preserving abortion rights is again a top priority as a consequence of the 1989 Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. That decision returned to the individual states authority to restrict abortions in significant ways. By the time you read this, other restrictive decisions may well have been handed down. In this issue, the members of the editorial board of AFFILIA share their

Book Reviews: Learning about Women: Gender, Politics, and Power. Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vol. 116 (Fall 1987), whole issue, 210 pp.,

maintaining full employment intertwine economic policy with social policy. Thus, those countries’ policies for the poor are kept focused on structural elements of the economy and social policy, rather than on characteristics of the poor. Wilson’s book does not provide us with much in the way of incremental steps that social welfare activists can espouse, but it does something more important. It helps us conceptualize and clarify some key issues about which we have lost our way in recent years. One issue is the importance of universalist policies and programs as a way of targeting meaningful aid to the neediest. Expanded employment, the enforcement of child support, child care, health care, and tax policies that function as children’s allowances would help all currently working and nonworking women and men but could help the neediest the most. Another issue is the correlation of economic reality with social welfare, so the wrong turning of the War on Poverty is not repeated. Given the vastness of the task of social welfare reform that confronts

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There could be no more prestigious circumstances supporting a book than that it was written by Kenneth Keniston, Mellon Professor of Human Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his unusually qualified colleagues from many disciplines (including social work), that it is one of the Carnegie Corporations commissioned reports for its Council on Children, and that it was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times BookReview. Thus, one approaches All Our Children with a predisposition toward awe and respect. Would one like the book because, after all, how could it miss? Would it be unAmerican to be critical? In the case of this reviewer the impression was that it was a very fine job. The book begins with a strong, welldocumented section on the myth and reality of family life, dealing in a straightforward manner with societys erroneous assumptions about the self-sufficiency of American families. Its excellent historical view of changing family functions and the necessity for sreater reliance upon social institutions make abundantly clear that parents as individuals cannot go it alone. The books second section addresses what is to be done, and here the authors, following their assumption that economic insufficiency underlies family dysfunction, develop a comprehensive employment and income maintenance system. They present program details simply, with charts and commonsensical language, but the implications of their programs are purposeful and forward-looking. The book, short as it is, neglects little in its effort to present a full scenario. It analyzes the relationship of working-time arrangements and family life, and it states exactly what services to families and children are-the social, economic, health, education, legal, psychological, and technological supports essential for family life in our society and in our era. The book closes with a kind of political action agenda which is an effort