Background

Grace Longwell Coyle was born on March 22, 1892 in North Adams, Massachussets, United States. She was the daughter of John Patterson Coyle, a Congregationalist minister, and Mary Allerton Cushman.

Education

Inspired as a young girl by the writings of Jane Addams, she volunteered at a Boston settlement house while earning a B. A. at Wellesley College (1914). At the New York School of Social Work, where she received a certificate in 1915, Coyle took courses from Edward T. Devine and Mary Van Kleeck. She earned an M. A. in economics (1928) and a Ph. D. in sociology (1931), both from Columbia University.

Career

After three years as a settlement worker in the coal region of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Coyle returned to New York City to work in the Industrial Women's Department of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). Here she designed leadership training courses and nourished an interest in adult education and recreation.

She held a part-time position on the staff of The Inquiry, a New York City-based organization that sought to reduce conflict between races and nationalities through the methodology of group discussions. Those who participated in the investigations of The Inquiry included William H. Kilpatrick, John Dewey, Harrison Elliott, Alfred Sheffield, Herbert Croly, and the recreational theorist Eduard C. Lindeman. All were influential in Coyle's intellectual development.

Her dissertation, Social Process in Organized Groups, was published in 1930, the year she rejoined the YWCA as director of the laboratory division of the national board. In 1934, Coyle joined the group work faculty of the School of Applied Social Sciences at Western Reserve University, where she remained, except for a two-year term on the staff of the War Relocation Authority during World War II, until her death.

She used her influence as perhaps the leading social group work educator in the decade after 1935 to encourage the development of a group (as opposed to an individual, or casework) approach to social work, and to stimulate the training of professionals in group leadership.

Coyle's lifelong advocacy of group work involved an entirely original way of conceptualizing and managing social relationships, built on a foundation of history and social theory.

Conflict between classes, races, and ethnic groups seemed to be the rule, and although some conflicts were based on virtually irreconcilable points of view, many, Coyle argued, were caused by excessive emotion that interfered with rational problem solving. She found the solution within the structure and process of the group. Consensus could be achieved through informal, cooperative group discussion, guided by a leader trained in "collective thinking" and the art of persuasion. Because it was participatory, the process itself would teach the habits of democracy and the meaning of life.

Although she did not often participate in the creation of working groups, her theoretical perspective and world view were of enormous influence in the half-century after World War I. For example, in the strained climate of labor relations created by the war, employers in Dayton, Ohio, brought the city's foremen into the first of many clubs designed to convince these supervisors that their primary loyalty resided with capital rather than with labor. Christian associations, settlement houses, and recreation centers formed hundreds of clubs as forums for applying group process concepts. Several major New Deal agencies, including the Works Progress Administration, utilized the techniques of group process. Even Dr. Benjamin Spock, in The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1945), conceptualized the family as a small group and the parents as group leaders.

In the late 1930's, Coyle joined the social welfare agencies and philanthropic foundations of Cleveland in creating the Golden Age Clubs, in part to provide the elderly with a healthy and democratic organizational alternative to the pension clubs of Francis Townsend. And in the mid-1940's she endorsed self-governing teenage canteens as a means of achieving attitudinal changes in juvenile delinquents.

Coyle appreciated the dangers inherent in her brand of social engineering. Guided discussion could easily degenerate into manipulation. She believed that voluntarism would prevent manipulation, and she had a profound faith in the power of reason and reflection to overcome irrational prejudices, habits, and emotions. Like so many others who had grown to maturity in the age of organization and who had, at the same time, come to question the ability of representative democracy to hold the society together, she could see no alternative.

Coyle died in Cleveland.

Achievements

• Coyle served as president of the National Conference of Social Work (1940), the American Association of Social Workers (1942 - 1944), and the Council on Social Work Education (1958 - 1960). Coyle's most important contribution was to articulate a body of existing social theory.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Social Process in Organized Groups

    (including the functions of leadership)

  • Studies in Group Behavior
  • Group work with American youth : a guide to the practice of leadership.

Views

With Mary Parker Follett, Elton Mayo, Kilpatrick, and others, Coyle believed that science, technology, and urbanization had destroyed traditional sources of social cohesion, such as the neighborhood, and were threatening democracy itself. For Coyle, neither the thousands of functional groups that served the specific interests of their members nor existing ways of eliminating differences between them ensured a sufficient degree of social unity.

Quotations: "One of the primary functions of group work is the attempt to build on the inevitably social interests both of children and adults a type of group experience which will be individually developing and socially useful. By providing within the group work agency for experience in group management, in cooperation for a common interest, in collective behavior, the agency can help its members to discover how to take their place in the organizational life of the community. "

Connections

She never married.

Father:

John Patterson Coyle

Mother:

Mary Allerton Cushman