ABSTRACT
Across 30 years of writing, a consistent emphasis in the feminist social work literature has been calls to women social workers to align themselves with principles that have been proposed as the basis for their practice. In seeing themselves as affiliated to what feminist social work is considered to stand for, women social workers have been urged to embrace a feminist social work identity that has been characterised as rooted in eclecticism. In the literature’s elaboration of this eclecticism, it is common for the diverse perspectives that fed into the origins of feminist social work to be mentioned, with little precision about their legacies and a broad measure of consensus about the open-ended nature of feminist social work, rooted in common principles. This eclecticism has been reappraised because of the diversity that is concealed within the term ‘women’. In response to critiques of eclecticism, one stance has been to view such challenges as capable of being used to revise and extend feminist social work, thus holding on to the promise of a unifying feminist identity. Another stance has been to seek to refine eclecticism through the adoption of a broader anti-discriminatory agenda that encompasses gender within a range of social divisions. Finally, some writers have stressed the splintering of feminist identity under the impact of postmodernist critique.
