Title: “I don’t want to organize women”. Feminist Social Work and Power to Act
Abstract: Based on an ethnography of a feminist battered women’s shelter, this paper analyses the transformative potential of feminist social work. It focuses on how professionals of the organization seek to induce empowerment and to make the battered women aware of inequalities due to the gender system. These women are often scarcely aware of feminist ideas and may even disagree with them. The first part presents the principles of feminist social work, and how it is embedded in the professional field of social work and can challenge some of the principles of “classic social work”. The paper then shows how the professionals try to empower women through individual appointments and collective activities, and how women respond to this process of empowerment. Finally, we see how some principles of feminist social work prevent the professionals from playing a role of “organizers” of the battered women, because social feminist work entails a non-directive position in relation to the women.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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