Interpreting Abraham Flexner’s ‘Is Social Work a Profession?’: The Problem of Presentism In Social Work History Research

Background and Purpose

The US Department of Education’s removal of social work from its list of “professional” occupations retriggered social workers’ status anxieties. Reflecting the persistent nature of this self-doubt, social workers continue to discuss Progressive era educator Abraham Flexner’s speech “Is Social Work a Profession?” (1915) a century after it was delivered. Flexner proclaimed that social work was not a profession according to criteria he had developed to evaluate medical school curricula.

Gelman and González (2016), Austin (1983), and others have treated Flexner’s speech as a pivotal event that catalyzed social work’s perpetual insecurities about its own rigor and status. In this conceptualization, Flexner’s declaration set a goal for all social workers: the pursuit of unimpeachable, medicine-adjacent professional authority. This paper interrogates this interpretation of Flexner’s address and its role in constructing an influential narrative of social work’s history.

Methods

Employing humanist qualitative methods, this study utilized a grounded, iterative approach to data analysis. Drawing on Davidson and Lytle’s (2005) description of historical methodology as “seeking out connections and contexts that are not obvious at first glance,” (p. 459) we looked beyond oft-cited published sources to reconstruct a past that has been rendered invisible. In doing so, we consulted a wide variety of published and unpublished archival materials created between 1910 and 1950, including papers of the National Urban League, the American Association of Social Workers, and the Young Women’s Christian Association.

Results

We found that 1) Flexner’s 1915 speech had little impact on the growth and development of social work in the pre-World War II era; 2) his ideas were ignored or refuted by many because his commentary had limited salience in early-twentieth century social work, in which practice, the labor movement, feminism, helping traditions, and faith were important intellectual influences alongside social science; and 3) after 1950, a subset of social workers who wanted a less diverse, more scientifically-oriented profession rediscovered the speech and granted it an exaggerated, mythic importance in retrospect.

Much of the social work literature on Flexner elides the contingent nature of history and overlooks significant minoritized voices and social movements that shaped the profession. Because most social work researchers have examined Flexner’s speech through a presentist lens, they have decontextualized his definition of professionalism, which was grounded in racist and sexist ideology, giving it unearned legitimacy and outsized influence on social work’s sense of itself.

Conclusions and Implications

During this time of resurgent authoritarianism, it is crucial that social workers understand the contingency in our profession’s past as we imagine better futures and move towards the transformative action this moment requires. Overlooking internal contestation and external resistance has left modern-day social workers with a misleading picture of what social work has been and could be. Rather than trying to counter bad-faith arguments made by powerful politicians, social workers can draw inspiration from our progenitors to chart a principled path in challenging times.