overview of the Historical and Contextual development ● 19Northern Hemisphere countries, the mutual misunderstandings and disap-
pointments echoed the same concerns about theory, practice, and the place
of values.
Initially, the gender profile of Australian and New Zealand academic
social workers was not particularly feminized. Men were prominent among
academic staff and were strongly represented among the first cohorts of
students. McMahon’s (2003) commentary on hidden aspects of the history
of Australian social work adds, however, an interesting perspective to the
matter of gender. He suggested that disciplines that are heavily invested in
professionalization, involving the establishment of professional associations
and university courses, might be especially prone to promoting the involve-
ment of men and overlooking the contributions of practitioners, activists,
and women. He noted that in Australia, in the latter half of the nineteenth
century and in the early twentieth century, there were several women activists
who might have been readily claimed to be forerunners of social work. Their
work revolved around fair wages, women’s rights to suffrage, and the right to
education, particularly for poor children. These women activists, including
religious women, were omitted from the historical narrative, perhaps, as
mooted by McMahon, because the presence of so many women was seen to
undermine the discipline’s efforts to be seen as a high status profession. By
the middle of the twentieth century, social work’s goal of being recognized
as a profession was being very actively pursued internationally, including in
Australia and New Zealand. Eventually, however, irrespective of any efforts
to omit women from the public narrative and so reduce their prominence,
the overwhelming involvement of women in the profession matched the
international gendered pattern, and the profile of social work in these two
countries also became indisputably feminized.
More powerful even than the erasure of women from historical
accounts, which sociologists will recognize as having also occurred within
their discipline, has been the loss of indigenous stories and perspectives.
Internationally, indigenous forms of social thinking and practice have been
overlooked or expunged as being irrelevant. Over recent decades, however,
important work has been done on indigenous perspectives within New Zea-
land (Nash 2003) and Australia. Social workers there, who formerly tended
to turn to North America and the United Kingdom for developments in
theoretical and practice approaches, have begun to recognize local indigenous
innovations. These include developments in bicultural practice frameworks
in New Zealand and anti-oppressive and critical perspectives emerging in
Australia. Such developments are relevant to all people studying and working
in the human services; they will be expanded on in later chapters in this book,
particularly chapters 2 and 6.