Many people in the disability community know very little about social work, including the significance of the profession to the world of the disabled. Social Work is a very messy job. Without the incredible services of social workers, people with disabilities might be just as good as dead.
Social workers are our rehabilitators—they help us heal from trauma. They are our “fixers”—they help us get through personal difficulties. They are our life coaches—they provide advice and practical guidelines to help improve our resources and opportunities as the vulnerable and the marginalised.
Social workers are our warriors. Through smarts ad grits, they dutifully fight our battles—our struggles with the institutions and indifferent members of society.
As people with disabilities, social work practices profoundly affect our lives considerably positively. Social workers continually make the world of PWDs a better place–despite that they do so at the detriment of their own health and safety—with very little rewards and remuneration.
Jane Adams, Grace Abbot, Florence Kelly, et al are some of the individuals who influenced the development of social work.
Of all the extraordinary pioneers and influential persons in the history of the social work profession, Jane Addams, as well as her story, is perhaps the most strikingly remarkable. Until her death, Jane Addams played insanely crucial and developmental roles in the shaping of social work.
As a result of her great work, she has laid a very enduring foundation and a pathway for upcoming social workers, including myself to emulate and follow. We will live by her example.
The circumstance of how Jane Addams began her illustrious career in social work is a very interesting one. Plagued in childhood by various diseases, health problems, and suffered poor self-esteem, Addams could not function well with other children, considering she had a limp and could not run as well. Growing up with dreams in her heart to help the poor, Adams developed a voracious habit of reading.
Jane read much of Dickens and, inspired by her mother’s kindness to the poor, she thought she had to be a doctor so that she could live and work among the destitute. It was just a hazy idea, encouraged by literary fiction including Tolstoy’s “My Religion, Mazzini’s “Duties of Man” and Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women”. Thanks to those literary works, Jane Addams’ imagination was sparked.
Thanks to Jane Addams’ gathering of inspiration from books and magazines, visiting and traveling around the world with friends, and watching a bullfight in Madrid where she was left wondering about her own emotional detachment and callousness at the sight of the suffering of the horses and bulls at a battle plus her own personal experience and innate dreams make the world a better place, she decided to start a settlement house with her friend Ellen Gates Starr.
The founding of the settlement house in Chicago will continue to be Jane’s flagship accomplishment among all the other roles she had played in the history of the social work profession. The renowned Hull House boasted of social facilities including an art gallery, a gym, girls’ club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, and a theater, apartments, a library, meeting rooms for discussion, clubs, an employment bureau, and a lunchroom.
Beyond making available social services and cultural events, the settlement house made it an opportunity for young social workers to receive training. Jane Addams further took enormous advantage of the settlement house by integrating attitudes and values including ethical principles for social settlements, emphasizing the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, documenting social illness, and aggressively promoting feminine ideals.
The significance of the founding of the Hull House cannot be exhausted. Bilton & Chris (2006), has this to say about the role of the settlement house which was an “unending effort to make culture and ‘the issue of things’ go together.” The unending effort was the story of her own life, a struggle to reinvigorate her own culture by reconnecting with diversity and conflict of the immigrant communities in America’s cities and with the necessities of social reform.”
The amazing and selfless life of Jane Addams including the roles she played would go a long way in making me a true social worker, true, in every sense of the word, true. After all, the very essence of being a social worker is being resourceful, having an uncanny ability to bring something out of nothing amidst limited available solution-oriented pathways.
Jane Addams demonstrated the importance of having relevant knowledge about a wide range of things. She was a perfect instance of a genuine lover of knowledge, people, and their cultures.
With an excellent sense of imagination and a fine spirit of empathy, Addams had an interesting understanding of how we human beings fit in the larger scheme. I cannot but see an epitome of what a true social worker is and/or ought to be in that of Jane Addams’ life. Her profoundly inspiring life will be there for the world, particularly people with disabilities as a source of guidance and inspiration as the world endures on the path of pain and uncertainties.