Feminist Social Work: Unfinished Business

Abstract

The centrality of the role of women in social work was neatly encapsulated in Hanner and Statham’s (1988) seminal text, where they concluded so much of social work was about women working with women. Hanner and Statham and then White (2006) in her equally seminal text identified that the commonalities that women as social workers and clients share, are by necessity shaped through economic, organisational, political and social contexts. While change has taken place during the intervening years, the need to continue to understand practice and professional perspectives through the feminist lens remains. Such experiences of women as social workers, mothers, carers, and victims, are the foci of this issue, which collates examples taken from around the world. We begin with Meenu Anand’s feminist exploration of an Indigenous Model of Practice in India. She begins by acknowledging that social work is largely construed as a feminised occupation. From this starting point she develops a theoretical article that intersects the commonalities of feminism and social work. These basis are used to then formulate a rich contextualised practice framework which in turn is amplified into developing an Indian model for feminist social work. The article then concludes with three illustrative case study vignettes and by drawing out some implications for practice. Anand’s concluding message is that by embracing the existing struggle for gender equality and justice, feminism continues to play a dynamic and central role in contemporary social work. The explicit discussion of the value of feminism to social work is maintained in our second theoretical article by Vasintha Veeran, Susan Flynn and LeighAnn Sweeney, who explore feminist egalitarian discourse in social work education within an Irish context. They begin by usefully outlining for the reader the specifics of the Irish social work and education perspective. The article then moves on to explore the apparent resistance to engaging with feminist