In Harm's Way?: Social Workers, Immigrant Mothers, and Difficult Conversations about Children's Health and Welfare

In the decades after 1945, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, initially from Europe and, after 1967, from Asia, the Caribbean and other “non-traditional” locales, entered Canada. Toronto received a huge proportion of these refugee and immigrant families, whose arrival unleased anxieties over a perceived need to reform their supposedly more deeply patriarchal cultures and to “modernize” the mothers, whose supposed ignorance or stubborn dismissal of “modern” health regimes was harming their children.

The Anglo, ethnic Canadian, and immigrant female social workers who staffed the Toronto International Institute - a post-1945 liberal, pluralist, and multilingual social welfare organization that sought to “integrate” immigrant families and encourage respect for their diverse cultures – carried out front-line work with these families (until 1974).  The key to “Canadianizing” the immigrant family, they argued, was to reach the mother, get into her home, demonstrate to her their problem-solving skills, and build relationships. Drawing from a database of 7,000 case files, my paper considers their efforts to compel often suspicious mothers (and fathers) to get their children medical attention and the difficult conversations it entailed – whether the issue was malnourishment, poor eyesight “nervous disorders,” or “mental retardation.”  It focusses on veteran social worker Edith Ferguson and the projects she led to ensure the health of immigrant children and to educate their mothers. It assesses the benefits and limits of a form of social work pluralism that, paradoxically, sought to respect “difference” but “modernize” immigrant mothers.