Relationship and Leadership: Sophonisba Breckinridge and Women in Social Work

Abstract

This article explores the career of Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866–1948), a pioneering social work educator and a key figure in the professionalization of social work, to suggest how contemporary female social workers may reclaim their historic leadership role in the profession. In particular, it contends that women’s relationships were the key to female leadership in the formative decades of the social work profession. It thus suggests that contemporary women social workers may recapture a leadership role by reinvigorating a reform minded and social justice-oriented tradition and reviving a legacy of female mentorship and feminist collaboration.

Resurrecting Nannie Minor and Orie Hatcher

“…In focusing on Minor and Hatcher’s contributions, we reveal how two feminists who were not social workers were instrumental in the School’s creation. Their erasure in the School’s formal histories supports the gendered nature of the education process for professions and reinforces the call for “contemporary female social workers [to] reclaim their historic leadership role in the profession” (Jabour, 2012, p. 22). Minor, a nurse, and Hatcher, an educator, became advocates for social work education in an era when all three fields were seen as “less than” those professions dominated by men.…”

“…In addition, women who were educated in established professional fields could be suspect when they became champions of social work. For example, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, “the first woman to earn a doctor of jurisprudence degree from the University of Chicago” (Jabour, 2012, p. 25) was “the driving force behind the establishment of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration (SSA),” yet until recently, scholars have neglected her career because it was seen to contradict “dominant interpretations of the social work profession” (Jabour, 2012, p. 23). Not only were semiprofessions subjugated to traditional male professions, but in the case of the School featured in this article, women’s early contributions have been lost.…”

The History of Gendered Social Science: a personal narrative and some reflections on method

“…82 Much of the strength, especially of the women's network, came from the meshing of the personal with the professional: the 'seamless merging' of both sides of life, as one historian of women and social work has put it. 83 Social background and the way lives are lived cannot easily be separated from professional ideologies and practices, as Wright Mills demonstrated many years ago in his classic essay on American social pathologists. 84 It is a specialty of the sociological, as well as the biographical, imagination to make these bridges between the public and the private, between personal troubles and public issues.…”

Work/Life Fit

“…A strategy to overcome this obstacle is to implement peer mentoring. Jabour (2012) contends that ''female circles of friendship, same-sex partnerships, and single-sex political networks facilitated women social workers' political effectiveness, professional causes, and personal fulfillment in the formative decades of the profession'' (p. 25). Peer mentoring is a model that may reinforce female faculty's agency.…”