‘Men, Masculinism and Social Work’

The study of men is big business. Over the last few years, the two or three shelves devoted to women’s studies in our bookshops have been transformed into good-sized sections on gender studies, with a whole new literature centred on men’s psychology and socialisation, men in public and private life, and men’s response to feminism. Men are now exploring their feelings, their friendships, their past and their future, their sexuality and their oppression: this new discourse owes much to the ideas and language created in the struggles of the women’s movement (Canaan and Griffin 1990).

Men within social work have inevitably picked up and developed some of these ideas, and we can see the beginnings of a new agenda for men in social work in magazines such as Working With Men and research studies on men in traditionally female settings such as childcare (Ruxton 1992). But what has feminist social work had to say about men, as clients, colleagues and social work students? We argue that the feminist social work response to date has been to ignore the issue of social work with men and instead to concentrate ideological attention on social work with women. This book sets out to change this, to begin to look at the subject of social work with men from a feminist perspective.