Professional Identity in the Oral History of Moroccan-born Women Social Workers from Beer Sheva

Abstract

This article examines the professional narratives of two women of a group that has received little scholarly attention, namely, educated women who immigrated to Israel from Morocco in the 1950s and who were employed as social workers in the southern city of Beer Sheva in its first decades. The narratives reveal that their background and knowledge of Moroccan and French contributed much to their professional success. Both women began working in welfare before acquiring professional training thus gaining experience in the profession on the job. Eventually they founded a number of welfare institutions in Beer Sheva and throughout the south.

The author analyzes two sub-genres (dialogues of confrontation and stories of work incidents) that appear frequently in the women’s oral-history and shows how they added to self-justification and glorification of their careers and outlooks. In retrospect, the values that they stressed in their stories can be seen as the roots of today’s feminist approaches to the social work profession, approaches that challenge earlier concepts of objectivity and distance between social workers and the communities they work with. The stories of conflict and work-incidents reflect the women’s empathy and acceptance of the people they served and rebuff the distinction between the private individual and the professional social worker.