Drawing on established literature on how American economic development since the Civil War has never "solved" the persistence of widespread poverty, Walkowitz tells the story of how private philanthropy attempted and ultimately failed to address the problem with an army of upper-middle-class volunteer women who, prior to the 1880s, were the heart and soul of the social services. Overwhelmed, private philanthropy and public social welfare agencies replaced "Lady Bountiful" with a new army of salaried workers. They were usually badly paid and, for this reason, tended to be women. They aspired to professional status, but the employing agencies resisted this demand. As Walkowitz shows, like some clergy, social workers in the first decades of the twentieth century were obliged to take virtual vows of poverty and commonly worked long hours for substandard pay. During those years they were likely to remain single. Together with teachers, many women among them were cast in the role of the dedicated spinster and were married only to their vocation and their clients.

One of the most vivid stories Walkowitz tells is that of the social workers' long and hard fight to win professional status. Inevitably, they had to endure comparison with physicians, lawyers and professors. The prestigious 1915 Flexner report on medical education found that social workers, "possessing no special skills, could never become 'true' professionals." In order to bid up the price of their labor, social workers established degree programs that could exclude the uncredentialed from practice. A century after its emergence, social work is still struggling for professional recognition and living standards comparable to similar occupations. The line worker who provides direct services to clients is all but donating her services to the agency that employs her. In today's market, to go to school full time and obtain a master's degree she must borrow tens of thousands of dollars to complete the standard two-year program. Upon graduation she is likely to be offered less than $30,000 a year to start. Many spend half their working life paying back loans. Walkowitz links this dire state of affairs to gender. Social work has always attracted large numbers of women, who today account for 75 percent of the field. In fact, their salaries compare badly with those of their sister professions, for example schoolteachers, who after 1970 entered unions en masse and are now the most organized sector of the country's working population.

Walkowitz offers a trenchant critique of the trajectory of social work. With some exceptions, social work remains a policing occupation. But in two rare moments, the thirties and the sixties, many social workers were at the forefront of reform: They identified with movements such as the black freedom struggles and defined themselves as part of the radical labor movement. Social workers combined their own struggles with those of their clients. Inspired by Communist leadership in the fight for a massive public relief program in the early thirties, they formed the Rank and File Movement, which was at the cusp of these struggles. They formed their own unions, especially in New York, where Local 19 managed to organize social workers in nearly every Jewish welfare organization despite the opposition of philanthropic leaders, many of whom were prominent Jewish manufacturers, merchants and bankers.

The cold war interrupted the forward march of social-work unionism. Like other locals that were under Communist leadership, Local 19's parent, the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA) at first refused to sign the Taft-Hartley provision that required union officers to sign a non-Communist affidavit as a condition for protection under the National Labor Relations Act. As a result, employers were no longer required to maintain collective-bargaining relationships with the local and began to discharge and otherwise harass its activists. Management encouraged anti-Communist unions to intervene. By the time UOPWA agreed to sign and force retirement of the Communists among its leadership, Local 19 had been decimated.

Walkowitz's sympathies are plainly with the CP-led unions. He convincingly shows that by promoting their working-class side and by achieving genuine power through union organization, the party and its activists began to overcome the debilitating effects of social workers' professional class identity. Although sharply critical of the mainstream labor movement for its collaboration with the cold war, he disputes accounts that ascribe the decline of the left in the labor movement exclusively to McCarthyite repression. For Walkowitz the Communist left bears some responsibility for its own demise:

[The Communist Party] fought hard and well, establishing the principle of trade unionism in social work. But to Jewish agency staff, who provided the core of Rank-and-Filers, the troubling positions of the Communist Party [on the Nazi-Soviet Pact] and the tendency of some prominent union leaders to genuflect before them began to drain the political energy and resonance of the "proletarian" ideology from the identity of the professional worker.

The demise of proletarian ideology among social workers was, according to Walkowitz, assisted by two important postwar developments: the dramatic rise of consumer society and the introduction of a vast clinical practice based on Freudian psychoanalysis, widely disseminated at precisely the moment of the raging anti-Communist labor wars. Under the influence of the new therapeutic practice, it was not long before professionalism returned with a vengeance. These influences reinforced tendencies--deeply embedded in the older casework--to pathologize the poor, thus undermining the idea that the socioeconomic system produced poverty. In a curious reversion to prevailing nineteenth-century belief, the poor themselves could again be blamed for their condition--with not laziness but mental illness needing treatment.

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