What Are You Thinking?

Reflections on 90 Years of Excellence in Social Work Scholarship

What are you thinking? With that earnest query, the publication now titled Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services was launched nine decades ago to gauge existing conditions in the burgeoning field of social work while tracking trends that would direct its future.
 

The journal’s mission remains unchanged 90 years later. Originally published as The Family by Mary E. Richmond—widely considered the founder of social casework practice—the journal will celebrate its 90th anniversary throughout the 2009 volume and is seeking contributions from our valued readers, authors, and reviewers to mark the occasion.
 
Readers like you have molded and shaped this publication throughout its esteemed history in the pages of The Family, Social Casework, and Families in Society. Now help us celebrate nearly a century of excellence in social work scholarship.

Download the PDF or E-mail this page.

What are you thinking?
Share your insights, observations, and proposals:

• Analysis on the state of social work scholarship, and its role in fulfilling the link between research and practice

• Essays or commentaries that convey your questions, concerns, or expectations of the past and future directions of social work

• Reflections on articles and contributors that imparted seminal discourse in the field

• Participation in readership surveys and social media forums on the journal Web site

File(s) should be submitted to Manuscripts@FamiliesInSociety.org.

Essays, field notes, commentaries, or research briefs should not exceed 14 pages. All submissions will be reviewed by the editors for acceptance, acceptance contingent upon timely and necessary changes, or rejection.

Deadlines for submissions are December 1, 2008 (Vol. 90, Issue 1), February 6, 2009 (Vol. 90, Issue 2) , and May 1, 2009 (Vol. 90, Issues 3 and 4).

Questions may be addressed to the editor of the journal by sending an e-mail to Editor@FamiliesInSociety.org.

A New Journal for a New Field:
Annals of the Family Social Work Movement

The Family, like most organic things, has a history, beginning long before its first appearance in tangible form. Every since the family social work movement became clearly enough defined to have a national association some sort of forum has been inevitable.

Thus, we were quickened into life, and now we are born,....and at once there arises the question: What manner of being are we going to be? What is to be our platform, our policy, our philosophy of life? In social work, as in politics, there are tendencies and parties: conservatives line up against progressives, the ranks maintain tradition against the too radical assaults of the originals and bohemians. Are we going boldly out to meet the issues of the day, or are we going to sit coyly in the background, waiting to be wooed and won by each new idea,—afraid of making a mistake, conservatively dallying, never declaring our mind till the need of our assent is gone? Well, in reply to that question, we might state here and now just what we mean to be and to do—more specifically, that is, than by saying that we intend to further the best that there is in the family social work movement.

For The Family will be democratic: no particular school, no “interests,” will mould it....The readers and contributors must work out their problems among themselves, using The Family as a medium.

One who contemplates the early gropings, the slow battling into recognition, and the splendid marshaling of spiritual forces accomplished in the last decade, cannot escape a thrill at the possible triumphs of the future. The Family wishes to be in the ranks, an agent in the winning of those triumphs; but as to the concrete policy—well, you, the workers and readers—and the exigencies of the changing battle, must determine the concrete policy.
 

—Excerpted from Mary E. Richmond, (1920). What are you thinking? 
The Family, 1, 1–5.

Support social work scholarship and help Families in Society
advance its mission.

Share details about your organization with a special expanded readership in 2009. To learn more about the opportunities below, contact FIS staff.

• Submit a congratulatory ad in the journal or Web site
   

• Support a special issue insert featuring classic articles
   

• Fund one-time or ongoing historical archive digitization projects
   

• Sponsor a special anniversary reception at the 2009 Annual Program Meeting of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE)