Building on Women's Strengths - A Social Work Agenda for the Twenty-First Century (Paperback)

Contributing authors to Building on Women's Strengths examine major social issues affecting women today. The authors, women social work scholars, promote a new agenda for the profession. Through this new agenda, they show how policymakers and practitioners can address pertinent issues and transform women's lives today and in the coming century.Individual chapters challenge social workers to look anew at major areas of women's lives and to explore how, as social workers, they can engage in micro- and macro-level practice that empower women. This approach is the new agenda for the profession, an agenda that redresses the continuing inequalities that women face, one that is built on the strengths of women, and one that is firmly grounded in the values of the social work profession.Building on Women's Strengths is designed to enable social work students and faculty to get a fresh and exciting look at the interconnected ways in which women's lives can be transformed. It draws together practice and policy issues, looking at the close interconnections between the macro- and micro levels of practice. The contributors cover diverse issues, among them: a feminist overview of policy issues affecting women in the twentieth century social work roles in enabling women to become self-sufficient economically child welfare as a women's issue policy issues affecting older women how social workers can bring women's stories and their strengths into the openThroughout the book, social work scholars detail specifics of a needed social work agenda for women in the twenty-first century. The diverse topics they cover are tied together by the common commitment to rewriting women's stories to emancipate them from oppression. Readers are reminded of women's historic exclusion from the public domain and the struggles they experience today as they seek to find their own balance between their public and private lives.