ABSTRACT
The book has provided an account of the feminist social work academic literature and has followed up points of tension between that literature’s proposals for feminist practice and women social workers’ descriptions of their experiences. In exploring the tensions between the literature and women social workers’ experiences, the dominant perspective in the literature has been questioned, namely that women social workers in state social work can align themselves with a feminist identity and engage in egalitarian relationships with women service users, with the goal of empowerment. In contrast to the dominant perspective, the book has demonstrated the existence of diverse identities, identifications and stances amongst women social workers. The only consistent aspect was that none of the participants primarily aligned themselves with a feminist identity as a stance from which to approach their work. The majority of the participants were, in their own terms, seeking to use principles they perceived as being derived from feminism, with varying degrees of attachment to the term ‘feminist’ itself. ‘Feminist’ had stronger support as a term that indicated their commitment to women’s interests within an overarching notion of anti-discriminatory and/or anti-oppressive practice, than it did as a term of self-identity and self-identification. Langan’s (1992a) and Wise’s (1995) formulations of anti-discriminatory practice capture the stances of the majority of the participants more effectively than the proposals of the dominant perspective in the feminist social work literature.
