Journal entry 3

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Canadian Social Work Review, Volume 27, Number 2 (2010) / Revue canadienne de service social, volume 27, numéro 2 (2010) Printed in Canada / Imprimé au Canada

Mary Valentich is professor emerita in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary.

FINDING ONE’S OWN IDENTITY AS A FEMINIST SOCIAL WORKER

Mary Valentich

Abstract: Calling oneself a feminist social worker suggests that one’s profes- sional identity is well-formed and identifiable in terms of characteristics that may be shared by others. In the context of contemporary feminisms, however, there are diverse feminist identities. Some social workers may be inclined toward feminist perspectives, but will not necessarily develop identities as feminist social workers, particularly if they have no well-established feminist practice context or role models. This personal, reflective account of the evolution of one social worker’s sense of feminist identity identifies components significant to her and is offered as an opportunity for self-discovery and identification of commonali- ties and differences among those considering themselves feminist social workers.

Abrégé : Qui se dit travailleuse sociale féministe possède vraisemblablement une identité professionnelle non seulement bien définie, mais également recon- naissable par ses caractéristiques communes. Les identités féministes varient toutefois au gré des féminismes contemporains. Certaines travailleuses sociales inclinent peut-être à des perspectives féministes sans nécessairement devenir des travailleuses sociales féministes, surtout en l’absence d’un contexte d’exer- cice féministe de la profession ou de modèles de comportement bien établis. Ce compte rendu personnel et réflectif de l’évolution du sentiment d’identité féministe chez une travailleuse sociale permet de dégager les éléments impor- tants pour celle-ci et se veut une occasion pour celles qui se considèrent comme des travailleuses sociales féministes de s’auto-découvrir et de cerner leurs res- semblances et différences.

PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY refers to how one defines oneself in rela- tion to one’s chosen profession of social work. Does professional identity matter? I believe that having a “reasonably firm” professional identity gives confidence, a sense of what is important, guidance in decision- making and planning, and overall a perspective for consideration of issues occurring at micro, mezzo, and macro levels. By “reasonably firm” boundaries, I do not mean “rigid” ones that exclude the possibility of growth and change as one reflects on one’s developing body of knowledge

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and experience. Nor am I suggesting that there is a single feminist social work identity or that the profession, or social work education, has pre- scribed expectations with respect to the development of professional identity. I share, however, the position of Jarman-Rhode, McFall, Kolar and Strom (1997) about the importance of social workers having a strong professional identity and leadership potential, being committed to social change, and being able to contribute to the visibility and viability of the profession. For me, that strong professional identity means being a fem- inist social worker.

In keeping with third-wave feminism, I value diverse perspectives: Baumgardner and Richards (2000) present at least 17 prominent femi- nisms based on identity. The Canadian social work scene would include First Nations and other indigenous peoples as well as African, Caribbean, and Black feminists. Not surprisingly, Miles, Rezai-Rashti and Rundle (2001) declare:

Feminism today does not have one meaning, one political goal, one social agenda, or one economic objective. It is often unrecognizable from its predecessors due to its multifaceted, multidimensional, and multicultural nature. There is no “one feminism” but rather there are many feminisms to which women belong, challenge, expand, resist, iden- tify, annoy, disrupt, and support. (p. 1)

Within such a context, pursuit of one’s professional identity is a highly individualized and complex matter that can be both joyful and painful and will likely involve several phases (Kirst-Ashman, 1992). I often hear social work students remark that they are drawn to feminist work, but they shy away from designating themselves as feminist. Over the past five years, when I have asked classes of social work students (anonymously) whether they ever refer to themselves as feminist social workers, a minor- ity say they always call themselves feminists, a larger group say they never do, and a majority indicate that they sometimes do. In discussion, I sense a full-fledged endorsement of feminist social work practice from only a few; most students convey a hesitant stance toward feminism, feminist practice, and its acceptability in their workplaces, often medical and child welfare settings. Their responses are similar to those found over the years in strikingly different settings (Parnell & Andrews, 1995; White, 2006).

This reflection is offered to social work students and social workers at any career stage who wish to consider my feminist journey and the facets of my identity that may resonate with their own interests, values, beliefs, work styles, and settings. I recognize that having an academic career and a small private practice has given me freedom from various constraints related to managed care (Strom-Gottfried, 1997), manage- rialism (White, 2006), and a highly bureaucratized service delivery sys-

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tem within a neo-liberal Canadian context (Baines, 2002; Baines, Davis & Saini, 2009; Carniol, 2000; Evans & Wekerle, 1997). Nonetheless, I hope that a narrative regarding the emergence of my feminist self may be of historical interest and, perhaps, foster a sense of connection among feminist social workers for more concerted social action.

Growing up … and becoming a social worker

As a child born in Canada to immigrant parents from Croatia, I was always aware of the Englesi, those whom we were not like and who gen- erally were in positions of power and affluence in small-town Ontario life. My father’s subservience as a labourer, always subject to the employer’s rules, evoked in me a sense of powerlessness and injustice. I determined to excel, finding my routes through education and sports. In my undergraduate years at McMaster University, I discovered soci- ology and recognized my intense desire to understand the cultures and systems within which people lived as well as individual functioning. Sev- eral times I drove to the Five Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, to come closer to a reality that I found hard to process—who were these Indians, separated from the general population, subject to prejudicial attitudes and discrimination, yet somehow part of Canada, the golden land of opportunity? Their reality did not make sense to me, but I had not yet found a way to conceptualize what had transpired for First Nations people.

I was, however, aware of the failings of one institution, the Catholic Church, and how badly it treated women: while denying women access to birth control, it nonetheless punished them for becoming pregnant or even daring to think of themselves as sexual beings. With a growing real- ization of the church’s misogyny and sexually repressive teachings, I rap- idly fell away from practising as a Catholic.

A major event in the formation of my identity occurred in my third year of Honours Sociology. Having been a day-camp leader and direc- tor during the summers as well as a salesclerk in a hardware store, I real- ized that I enjoyed direct work with people. I concluded that I could not see myself as a sociologist, engaged primarily in quantitative research. By my fourth year, I had decided to become a social worker.

My original choice of a social work program was Columbia Univer- sity in New York. I had visited New York as a Grade 11 student and had found the city an incredibly exciting mix of peoples, ideas, and the arts. Before considering me for a scholarship, however, Columbia wanted an assessment by an MSW supervisor of my summer employment at Hamil- ton General Hospital as a case aide. A supervisor with one of the Uni- versity of Toronto’s early BSW degrees would not do. My 1963 summer employment did, however, confirm my beginning sense of myself as a helping professional with a capacity to act independently: even as a case

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aide, I could do assessments of the need for social work services and offer them, without seeking a physician’s approval. The location of the hospital in east-end Hamilton, where the steel plants coated everything with dust, fostered my awareness of social class differences and their implications for access to resources such as parks and clean, fresh air. The day-long health clinics for the poor did the same.

I chose St. Patrick’s School of Social Welfare at the University of Ottawa, envisioning field placements in New York. Instead, I found myself in Rochester and Potsdam (NY) in 1963 and 1964, respectively. Given the political climate of unrest, primarily due to the African-Amer- ican Civil Rights Movement, I am surprised, in retrospect, that a more radical self did not emerge. I did realize that some clients perceived me as an agent of social control, especially when I ventured into parts of Rochester where one was “very White” and easily recognizable as a social worker. After a few flat tires, I found other means of transportation when I was doing home visits. Poverty in these neighbourhoods loomed large, and I saw desperation at first hand, but had yet to fathom the larger forces that kept people in poverty. I was beginning to ask questions about economics: I recall driving some distance to the University of Rochester to hear John Kenneth Galbraith.

Though I remain positive about my MSW social work education, I recall little in the curriculum that prepared students to deal with indi- vidual and family troubles deriving from social problems such as poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism. I am quite certain there was nothing that related to how women were faring in Canadian society or to the societal turbulence that was beginning to present itself as women gathered in consciousness-raising groups to challenge institutions of mental health, medicine, religion, education, and the law.

My first position, in 1965, was in a women’s unit in a psychiatric hos- pital in Toronto. I saw how female patients were sometimes subjected to inhumane treatment under the guise of helping— from water treatment to ECT and even lobotomies. There was little appreciation by staff that the problems women presented might have their roots in their unequal treatment in the family or workplace. Occasionally, a kindly psychiatrist was receptive to the social worker’s assessment of a troubled marriage as the context for the woman’s disturbed behaviour, but I and other staff members did not consider abuse by male partners or the very limited lives of some of these women as possible sources of their despair. Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness (1973) was yet to be written!

Working in a large bureaucracy did, however, show me how power was distributed. Men occupied most of the senior positions; nearly all the psy- chiatrists were men. The rest of us—the nurses, social workers, psychol- ogists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists—were definitely in a secondary role, and mostly women. Generally, we did not speak up in case conferences or meetings. To make a point, one went to one’s supervisor,

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all women at that time, who would then, behind closed doors, negotiate with those who had power over decision-making and resources.

I could not identify with this style of female leadership and knew there had to be a better way, in which one could speak up and expect to be heard and treated with respect, not condescension. I was not pre- pared to be a “hand-maiden” to the physician: in a symbolic rebellion against being classified as “medical” personnel, some of us in social work stopped wearing white coats that linked us to psychiatry, but differenti- ated us from other occupations, each of which was identified by a uniform of a certain colour.

I valued my three years at the hospital, in particular the last, when a small number of us instituted the first adolescent unit in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. I liked being a member of an innovative team that, in this instance, was offering a behaviourally oriented program. With approval of the unit’s psychiatrist, we made contraceptives, not yet legal in Canada, available to adolescent girls who were sexually active. We did less well in appreciating adolescents’ reasons for running away from home or for self-mutilation. Sexual abuse, diagnostically speaking or otherwise, was not yet on the books. The knowledge derived from con- sciousness-raising groups about the sexual violence that women experi- enced in Canada was unexplored terrain for the helping professions. However, I was becoming aware of inequities, the authority of institutions, and the emerging feminist literature; the foundation for my feminist identity was settling into place.

Professionally formative years: 1968-1976

In 1968 I was invited to join the faculty at the St. Patrick’s School of Social Welfare at the University of Ottawa, one of three newcomers, all hired for the new ideas we might bring to the school. A pivotal point in the emergence of my feminist identity was being asked by the director, Father Swithun Bowers, to teach the human behaviour courses, previously taught from a medical model perspective by a psychiatrist. In particular, I was asked to include material about “these role changes.” Uncertain about what he meant, I decided that he must have been referring to the changes in sex roles, as we called them in that era, that were being pro- posed by the emerging Women’s Movement. An excerpt from my 1971 lecture follows:

There is almost no escaping the ferment in today’s society in regard to the place of women … [who] are being challenged to gain greater free- dom and equality inside and outside the family.… The challenge to women is to re-examine the assumptions about femininity and by impli- cation, masculinity.… While the moves toward equality and freedom of men and women can prove advantageous to both, great change will not

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occur unless (a) the state recognizes and provides for the fact that women still do bear children and hence require maternity leaves and day-care services.… Social workers need not only be knowledgeable about the recent changes in male and female roles, but of their own values; for these influence their diagnostic and treatment activities, as well as the positions they develop in relation to questions such as abortion, day-care, and discrimination in their own and other occupations. (Valentich, 1971)

The students were appreciative of my evolving feminist self: they recog- nized that the “times they were achanging.” In particular, the student civil rights movement exploded during the late 1960s on the St. Pat’s cam- pus, bringing with it calls for a student voice in course content and organ- ization as well as personnel and other decisions that students saw as affecting them directly.

One of the other newcomers to the faculty in 1968, Jim Gripton, heightened the turmoil in the school by promoting a radical change in the nature of the social policy course, beginning in the summer of 1969. Rather than offering a review of Canadian social policies and services, he challenged students to evaluate social policies and their translation into provisions for social welfare as these were conditioned by ideologi- cal, social, and economic factors. Students were expected to examine the linkages between ideological perspectives and the development of individual, couple, and family problems being considered in the casework courses. I recall the buzz among students as they grappled with how best to respond to issues of poverty, drug use, and mental illness.

Gripton was also bringing in non-caseworkers to teach—Dogan Akman, a lawyer; Bill Zimmerman, a community organizer; and Andrew Armitage, a policy analyst. I found Gripton’s approach illuminating and in keeping with C. Wright Mills’s (1959) translation of private troubles into public issues. Some faculty, however, saw the revised social policy con- tent and experiential, research-oriented teaching format as destructive of the school’s casework focus. Similarly, Kurt Fuerst, who also joined the faculty in 1968, was seen as attacking the predominant psychodynamic model because he taught Albert Ellis’s (Ellis & Harper, 1961) rational- emotive approach to practice.

I began to see myself as an active agent for change, prepared to take risks. When my colleague Jim Gripton proposed that we offer a human sexuality course, the first elective since the school’s inception in 1949, I quickly agreed. Despite evidence from a needs assessment that elicited strong support from students, field instructors, and some faculty mem- bers, this non-credit elective took two years to pass through the various hurdles both at the school and at Carleton University, with which the school had since affiliated. In 1973 the course was finally taught to five women and five men. To fend off possible criticism and with permission of the students, all sessions of the first course were videotaped.

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The course content reflected the instructors’ developing ideas about gender and feminist perspectives: direct practice issues and sex-related social problems were integrated in the course; the sexual revolution was examined in terms of its effects for both women and men as well as the development of a range of non-traditional lifestyles; and women’s sex- uality was recognized in its own right, not simply as similar to men’s sex- ual expression. Homosexuality, in the DSM until 1973, was presented in a non-pathological fashion. Sexual oppression became a key concept in understanding why and how some people did not “qualify” as sexual persons with legitimate rights to sexual expression. The course was also strongly experiential with group exercises and role plays as well as sex- ually explicit films smuggled across the American-Canadian border in Windsor, Ontario, by the University of Windsor.

By September 1973, Jim Gripton and I were living together in Den- ver in the first phase of an enriching life partnership of over 30 years in which personal and professional matters were greatly intertwined. There is no question that my identity as a feminist social worker was greatly affirmed by lively engagement with an ardent feminist who had worked all his professional life to improve the status of women. In human sexu- ality, our endeavours ultimately resulted in two co-edited books (Grip- ton & Valentich, 1986; Valentich & Gripton, 1985), numerous other pub- lications, and certification as sex educators and therapists as well as advocacy through various forms of speaking out, in particular, with respect to the rights of gays, lesbians, and transgendered persons within a heterosexist society. However, in the early 1970s at Carleton University, we were often vilified for giving visibility to this “private” topic.

The other event that gave impetus to the development of my femi- nist social work identity was the furore related to Gripton’s (1974) pub- lication of his ground-breaking 1970 survey of members of the Canadian Association of Social Workers with respect to salaries, education, employ- ment, and conditions of work, “Sexism in Social Work: Male Takeover of a Female Profession.” His analysis attributed the disparity in the treatment of women and men to sexism, the higher value attributed to male social workers despite their having equivalent credentials and experience as their women colleagues. Critics accused him of attacking the profession by revealing its dirty linen—namely, that social work was treating its own unfairly. This research strengthened my commitment to changing the pro- fession and academe to enhance women’s chances to succeed and led to my doctoral research on what were then known as “sex differences” in career management among social workers (Valentich & Gripton, 1978).

I embarked on my PhD program in the United States in 1973 and returned for one year, 1975-1976, to Carleton University. By then, Mau- rice Moreau (1979) had begun the development of his structural ap- proach. I was sympathetic to social work efforts to change social structures, but Ottawa social agencies with field placements were up in arms: in

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those early years, Carleton’s structural approach appeared to omit direct assistance to persons in need.

I drew inspiration from Helen Levine, a sessional instructor who provided a remarkable model of a feminist practitioner. She fostered the birth of a feminist approach (Levine, 1976) to helping women that entailed no formal assessment, diagnosis, or treatment, processes that she perceived as equating individual problems with pathology. She and many other feminist authors and practitioners enabled me to initiate a femi- nist social work practice course in the late 1980s in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary and to author reviews of feminist social work theory and practice (Valentich, 1986, 1996, in press).

In 1975, after the PhD years of study and research, I was ready for my first major social action in the community. I was a doer; taking action was a strong feature of my feminist social work identity. My focus, like that of growing numbers of feminist activists, was sexual violence against women. I joined sociologist Sue Nelson and physician Martin Gillieson in initiating Ottawa’s first rape crisis centre, designed to fill a gap in existing services for women, to advocate legal changes, and, more gen- erally, to promote equality in social relations among women and men. The existing social services simply were not prepared to address the needs of these women.

That year I also began my private practice, perhaps not unlike the feminist social work practitioners in the United States whom Thomas (1977) studied, some of whom worked as private practitioners. Private practice made it possible for me to be both an educator and a practitioner. Indeed, one of the reasons for the establishment of an “agency” setting in the late 1960s in St. Patrick’s School of Social Welfare at the Univer- sity of Ottawa had been to permit faculty to engage in direct practice. I was concerned about those who could not afford the services of private practitioners, but overcame doubts about engaging in social change as well as private practice by assisting clients to develop a social analysis of their problems and facilitating opportunities for them to engage in social action, if they wished.

Years of action: 1980s

In 1976 Jim Gripton and I moved to Calgary where he had obtained a position at the School of Social Welfare at the University of Calgary. Having grown in confidence as an activist, I immediately joined a col- lective of approximately 60 women who were offering services to women who had been raped as well as sorting out how to organize themselves in keeping with feminist ideals. I introduced the model of the commu- nity agency initiated in Ottawa and, within a few months, we formed the first Calgary Rape Crisis Centre. I remained involved until 1984, offer- ing training to volunteers and staff, serving as a board member, helping

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to keep the agency as non-hierarchically structured as possible, and advo- cating legislative changes pertaining to levels of sexual assault.

During this period, I became increasingly aware of liberal, socialist, and radical feminist perspectives and how these influenced the centre’s organizational and service activities (Valentich & Gripton, 1984). I saw myself as radically oriented, although mainstream social work, for the most part, espoused a liberal feminist tradition (Valentich & Gripton, 1985). I believed, however, in what Eisenstein (1981) had proposed, that within liberal feminist perspectives there could be a radical core.

Thus heartened, I engaged with the Women’s Caucus of the Cana- dian Association of Schools of Social Work, a group formed in 1975 in Edmonton at the CASSW conference by Joan Gilroy of the Maritime School of Social Work at Dalhousie University, Maureen Wilson of the School of Social Welfare at the University of Calgary, and Gillian Walker of British Columbia. In the mid-1980s when I chaired the CASSW Board of Accreditation, Jane Aronson and I embarked on developing and including criteria related to women into the guidelines used in accredi- tation. A few years later, when Nérée St-Amand and I were co-chairs of the Board, we encouraged Carol Christensen and others in revising accreditation standards to address anti-racism. Their work, as well as that of many others, has borne tremendous fruit over subsequent years with respect to social workers embracing cultural awareness and com- petence as important aspects of both professional identity and practice (Este, 2007; Todd, 2007).

During the 1980s, numerous practitioners and authors from many parts of the world were developing both feminist theories and practice that did not pathologize women or blame them for their problems. Terms such as “victim” fell out of favour. Women sensed their empow- erment, and some feminists were almost euphoric about the possibilities for major societal change. There were blind spots, however: the women’s movement that I am describing was primarily organized by White women, generally well-educated and reasonably affluent. For these women, includ- ing myself, gender was the primary basis for oppression, whereas many other women experienced oppression by virtue of their race, gender, and class as well as sexual orientation and physical abilities.

Social work was aware of other voices calling for diversity and inclu- siveness such as bell hooks (1984) or Mary Bricker-Jenkins and Nancy R. Hooyman (1986), who advocated diverse feminist social work practice models in their influential Not for Women Only. I also recall Pam Col- orado, a colleague in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Cal- gary in the 1980s, whose work on the role of indigenous people in sci- ence fostered social work’s appreciation of Aboriginal contributions to social work knowledge (Baskin, 2005). On a daily basis, principles of inclusivity were not heeded, however, and backlash proclaiming the fail- ure of feminism from various critics (Faludi, 1991) weakened feminism

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as a social movement. Postmodernism also challenged “essentialism” or treating women as homogeneous beings (Chambon & Irving, 1994; Van Den Bergh, 1995).

Although I was proud of my professional background, at times I kept my professional profile low, knowing that “expertise” was seen and expe- rienced as social control by some feminists and clients. As a feminist social worker, I was prepared for criticism, but it was not pleasant to receive. I did strive to incorporate criticism without feeling diminished or overly angry. I recognized that being angry was part of the popular image of feminists and also part of my identity as a social worker. Despite having been told by an older female faculty colleague, when I was first in academe, that my anger was “inappropriate,” I used my anger to spark problem-solving and feminist organizing.

One of the controversial issues of this period that sparked much anger within feminist circles pertained to the role of men, both as prac- titioners (Collins, 1992) and clients. Ultimately, I found myself developing a gender-sensitive approach to social work practice (Valentich, 1992), while retaining my identity as a feminist social worker. I believed it was important for social work to have a theoretical perspective for under- standing and working with men (McKechnie & Valentich, 1989) and could not see myself as a social worker who excluded them. I find it reas- suring that the field of intimate partner violence has moved from no contact with men when the first women’s shelters were set up in the 1970s to the development of anger management courses for men by the 1990s, as well as programs that focused not only on anger but on sexist and heterosexist ideology underpinning dominant beliefs about women and women’s place. More recently, there is new theorizing about multi- faceted approaches that may involve couple and family counselling for families wishing to stay together (Damant, Lapierre, Kouraga, Fortin, Hamelin-Brabant, Lavergne & Lessard, 2008; McPhail, Busch, Kulkarni & Rice, 2007; Pyles & Postmus, 2004).

One event during this period united many women and men in mourning and consideration of violence against women in Canada— the massacre of 14 women in Montreal on December 6, 1989. Since the first gathering of feminists in 1989 on the University of Calgary campus, persons of varying ideological persuasions have worked together, guided by feminist principles of respect for all voices, to organize a commemo- rative event as well as activities to eliminate violence against women. For several years, I facilitated this planning group as a feminist social worker (Austin, 2009).

Years of action and reflection: 1990s and 2000s

In 1991 I was offered the opportunity to become the University of Cal- gary’s second Advisor on Women’s Issues. Because I was often asked to

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speak to the media about women’s issues, I included being a spokesper- son as one of the functions of the position. My major task was to facili- tate the implementation of 123 recommendations for change in every unit of the university (President’s Advisory Committee, 1990). The recom- mendations pertained to combining career and family, the intellectual and psychological climate for women, the recruitment of more women, women’s career progress, pay equity, administrative structures, and infor- mation. I was not alone in believing that the Status of Women Commit- tee and many other committed faculty and staff were engaged in trans- formative change of the university into an inclusive entity (Hearne & Lefebvre, 1995; Stalker & Prentice, 1998). Like Bishop (2005), we under- estimated the power of the traditional Western university.

I wonder what legacy my generation of academics leaves their younger colleagues (Valentich, 2000). There have been positive changes in practices related to hiring and retention of women, but the proportion of women academics has not risen as significantly as once was hoped. Maybe the classroom and beyond is friendlier, more inclusive for women, gays, lesbians, and transgendered persons now than in the 1980s and 1990s (Chilly Collective, 1995). Knowledge about women and gender has certainly expanded (Nelson & Robinson, 2002), thereby giving more prominence in policy and program development to the varying needs and situations of both men and women.

However, within my university and community, regular reports of racist behaviours persist. My activities during this period have given rise to another component of my identity as a feminist social worker—my anti- racist self. Within the social work faculty, I was one of the founders of the Diversity Committee, which, for a number of years in the early 1990s, served to educate, advocate, and assist in problem-solving with students and faculty who had experienced racism. I was also one of the founders in 1999 of the university’s grassroots March 21 Stop Racism Committee in which I remain active. Racism as experienced by women and men is the central focus of the Stop Racism group, with gender issues a minor theme. Sexism is recognized, but only as one of the many intersecting “isms” that combine in various ways to oppress (Baines, 1997; CRIAW- ICREF, 2006; Mandell, 2001).

The Stop Racism Committee has also worked on rankism (Fuller, 2003) and White privilege (Kendall, 2006). I find it difficult to recognize these aspects of one’s own personal and professional identity. Nor is there much receptivity within the university or community for address- ing these matters. Recently, however, a newspaper journalist (Seskus, 2010) reviewed the background of Calgary’s city council and called for greater diversity among the “aldermen” (Valentich, 2009).

One successful engagement with major organizational restructuring involved changing the governance process within the Faculty of Social Work. By the late1990s, faculty colleagues were engaged in university

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procedures of complaint, investigation, and mediation to effect changes. The process was costly in several respects, but resulted in governance pro- cedures becoming open and democratic. Although we had not framed this as a feminist transformation of our governance process, we clearly aimed to implement the feminist ideological themes delineated by Bricker-Jenkins and Hooyman (1986): to end patriarchy, empower all per- sons, attend to process, validate the personal as political and vice versa, establish our unity and diversity, and heighten consciousness by regularly engaging in reflection. As a feminist social worker, I was proud to have played a role in this transformation.

I was, however, advised by senior university administration that pur- suit of further career opportunities at the university would not be suc- cessful. I decided to leave my full-time university position 12 years ago, although I have remained university-based as a professor emerita. I have found no end of issues to address. As an activist-scholar (Valentich, 2002), a descriptor relevant to my own sense of self in the university, I can adopt a critical stance on many issues and take actions that might bring about change. There is congruence for me personally, professionally, and polit- ically. In addition to the Stop Racism activities, I have been involved with the Social Justice Encounter since its inception in 2007, a one-day university/community event designed to give persons involved in justice work a chance to meet and to identify common goals.

I have not chosen to join the association of “retired social workers” (Valentich & Wilde, 2002) because I do not see myself as “retired.” I think their name weakens the impact of their social actions in matters of poverty, housing, and health. Nor have I joined the Raging Grannies, per- haps because I resist seeing myself as elderly. While the feminist practice course no longer exists, perhaps as part of a larger trend across social work programs in Canada, I am asked regularly to speak in justice or diver- sity courses on my past and present perspectives on feminist social work. I have begun to incorporate “historical artifact” into my identity.

I hesitate to use “anti-oppressive” in any designation of my practice or myself, because I am inherently a positively oriented person. I also do not favour the use of such terms as “oppressed people” or “oppressed community” (Mullaly, 2002) as such labels are burdensome to the peo- ple themselves. I share Jeffery’s (2007) perspective that anti-oppressive social work “does not represent a single or unitary perspective on social work practice, but rather includes a disparate and multidisciplinary vari- ety of perspectives taken from feminist, radical, anti-racist, and other critical philosophies and social movements” (p. 126). I do appreciate the steady reworking and refinement of empowerment (Beardmore, Kline & McAlpine, 2004), structural social work (George, Coleman & Barnoff, 2007; Hillock & Profitt, 2007; Lundy, 2003; Mullaly, 1993, 2002; Todd & Burns, 2007), and anti-oppressive (Barnoff, George & Coleman, 2006; Brown & Strega, 2005; van Wormer, 2004) and anti-racist social

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work (Dominelli, 2002, 2008). However, I find it fragmenting to incor- porate the multiplicity of possible descriptors into my own professional identity.

It is more meaningful and manageable to build on and revise my sense of myself as a feminist social worker. I appreciate third-wave femi- nism, though I do not favour lines drawn between so-called second and third waves (Dux & Simic, 2008; Georg, 2009; Gillis, Howie & Munford, 2004; Henry, 2004; Manifesto of the Pan-Canadian Young Feminist Gath- ering, 2008). With the increasing prominence of global feminism and international social work (James, Ramsay & Drover, 2009; Ross-Sheriff, 2007; Wehbi, 2008), I feel increasingly connected to women’s issues around the world. That sense of connection has become an important aspect of how I see myself as a feminist social worker. Issues abound: sexual and reproductive rights (Alzate, 2009), genital mutilation (Berg, 1997), sex traf- ficking and prostitution (Hodge & Lietz, 2007; Sloan & Wahab, 2000), rape for purposes of genocide (Snyder, Gabbard, May & Zulcic, 2006; Valen- tich, 1994), and displacement of women (Dossa, 2008). However, making choices regarding the nature of one’s engagement is difficult, and others may not always appreciate one’s decisions (Lakritz, 2009).

Conclusion

My identity as a feminist social worker has expanded and diversified in each era, but remains grounded in social work’s ongoing commitment to social justice (Brandwein, 2008; Finn & Jacobson, 2003; Hick & Fur- lotte, 2009). Speaking out persistently remains a central feature, and one thus reaches others who may become companions on the journey to justice. Postmodern feminism has raised the question of whether femi- nist social workers can act in concert regarding mutually agreed-upon goals (Dominelli, 2002, p. 4). I believe we can find commonalities that prompt social action. For me as a feminist social worker, it is important to know that I can have both an historical and immediate connection to other social workers and feminist allies who value everyone’s right to peace and the pursuit of a better life.

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