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What is Social Case Work? an Introductory Description
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Friendly Visiting Among the Poor: A Handbook for Charity Workers
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Friendly Visiting Among the Poor, a Handbook for Charity Workers .. - Scholar's Choice Edition
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Mary Ellen Richmond was an American social worker, administrator, and author.
Background
Mary Ellen Richmond was born on August 5, 1861 at Belleville, Illinois, the daughter of Henry and Lavinia (Harris) Richmond. Her parents had come from Baltimore, and shortly after her birth they returned to that city, where they remained during the Civil War. Both died in comparative youth of tuberculosis, and Mary was reared by relatives in moderate circumstances. The early years of her life were full of limitations and hardships, but a strong tendency to liberalism which was apparently inherent in her character was encouraged, especially by her grandmother and an aunt, and she heard many discussions of such current subjects as woman's suffrage, vivisection, and spiritualism.
Education
Although she was not sent to school until she was eleven years of age, she learned to read very early, and found in literature a channel of escape and enrichment which remained one of her great mainstays all her life. She graduated from the Baltimore Eastern High School in 1878.
Career
She went to live in New York with an aunt who was proof-reader for a firm publishing books chiefly of a radical tendency. Mary secured a clerical position with the same firm and worked twelve hours a day, teaching herself stenography at night. Within two or three months her aunt broke down and returned to Baltimore, where she was supported chiefly by Mary's earnings. There followed for the girl a period of poverty and loneliness.
She had practically no diversions aside from attending lectures at Cooper Union; she was haunted by the fear of tuberculosis, and in time she contracted malaria. Returning then to Baltimore, she acted as bookkeeper in a stationery store, from about 1881 to 1888, and then as bookkeeper and office assistant in the Altamont Hotel. At about this time she became a member of the Unitarian Church, through which she made congenial acquaintances and was introduced to the realm of music, which was thereafter a second great source of refreshment to her.
In 1889 she happened to read an advertisement for an assistant treasurer of the Charity Organization Society of Baltimore, an organization of which she knew literally nothing. An initial interview allured her, and she accepted the position. Here she came into contact with certain persons who affected her life deeply, particularly Daniel Coit Gilman, Amos G. Warner, and John Glenn. From this time on her life was a steady progression upward to success in the new profession of social work, during which she gained the respect, admiration, and affection of her fellows in that field. Her position with the Baltimore Society - in 1891 she became its general secretary - was basically one of promotion.
Money had to be raised, standards and technic of social work developed, and manifold duties attended to, including the publication of many papers. She recognized the need for professional training of social workers and earnestly advocated it.
In 1900 she went to Philadelphia to accept the general secretaryship of the Society for Organizing Charity. Here her task was essentially that of reorganization and introduction of new methods. She became a power in the city and a true community leader, helped to secure important social legislation, and took part actively in reform politics, but usually behind the scenes. At the same time she was continuing to develop the case method, both in her own work and in her teaching at the Summer School of Applied Philanthropy, New York, and in 1906 at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1909 she accepted the position, which she held to her death, of director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation, and took up her residence in New York. In addition to the immediate duties of this office, she continued to teach for a time in the New York School of Philanthropy (now New York School of Social Work), and did editorial work in connection with the bulletin of the Field Department of Charities.
She also conducted with great enthusiasm a Charity Organization Institute as a department activity from 1910 to 1922, which attracted promising young case workers from all over the country, and in 1915 she established a supervisor's conference. During the World War she was active in social work.
The closing years of her life were a race between failing health and the completion, in collaboration with F. S. Hall, of Marriage and the State (1929), upon which she had set her heart. The book was victorious by a narrow margin, though it was not published until after her death.
Achievements
Throughout her career she wrote voluminously, publishing numerous magazine articles and several notable books, among them Friendly Visiting Among the Poor (1899); The Good Neighbor in the Modern City (1907); Social Diagnosis (1917), perhaps her most important volume; What Is Social Case Work? (1922); and Child Marriages (1925), with F. S. Hall.
In 1921 Smith College conferred upon her the honorary degree of master of arts, in recognition of her work in "establishing the scientific basis of a new profession. "
