ABSTRACT
This chapter examines issues of power and control between men and women both in society and in the agency/therapist/family relationships. Before considering examples of family work to illustrate and locate these issues in practice, it seems important to consider the relationship between the agency, therapist, and family in a more general sense. Women are raised to provide nurturance, care, and attention, and to have others depend on them emotionally. Again trying to be helpful, women working with families in a Social Services setting will not only experience these issues themselves but may replicate them with their clients, providing for them so well that their own power and potential are not energized. Feminist offered an understanding of the context of the Social Services as a hierarchically ordered and male-dominated institution which therefore influenced employees to seek solutions from this perspective. This gave an important clue to the 'stuckness' of the relationship between the social worker and her senior social worker.
