Prologue: No Silk-Blouse Social Worker

Abstract

‘I’ve never cared for my work here,’ confessed a distraught young settlement worker. ‘I can’t get on with uneducated people and the slum surroundings revolt me…[M]y work takes more courage than I’ve got and it seems quite useless.’ It was not the long hours that bothered her. It was the clientele, their bullying and begging, their insolence and dishonesty. It is ‘crushing me like a heavyweight’, she said. It was a low moment when the 21-year-old social worker finally mouthed the words: ‘I do not love the poor’.² Today when social workers speak such words, their feelings are recognized as professional burn out, the solutions to which range from stress management to a change of career. In 1912, the way out was less clear to Eglantyne Jebb, who reflected in her unpublished novel, ‘The Ring Fence’, upon ‘the horror and squalor’ and the ‘sacrifices’ of a ‘silk blouse’ social worker.³ From the point of view of one of her working-class protagonists, ‘the poor were like “toys” for the rich…Their ideas, their battles, their catastrophes, their passionate longing for freedom’ are all ‘the playthings of a superior class’. The poor ‘craved to possess their souls’, and the rich responded with bribes and ‘an occasional institute’.⁴ An upper-class character agreed ‘Charity’ was a ‘ridiculous’ word but a ‘decent misnomer’ to cover ‘a multitude of sins’.⁵ Everyone in Jebb’s imaginary community affirmed ‘philanthropists were humbugs’.⁶