Wisdom, Justice, & Charity: Canadian Social Welfare Through the Life of Jane B. Wisdom, 1884–1975 by Suzanne Morton (review)

This is a remarkable book about a seemingly unremarkable woman. Jane Wisdom, although well known by Canadian social workers of her time, was by no means one of the profession’s leading lights. If Charlotte Whitton was the diva of twentieth-century Canadian social work, Wisdom, the subject of Suzanne Morton’s finely crafted biography, was a talented and dependable voice in the chorus. A signal accomplishment of Wisdom, Justice, and Charity, however, is that we learn more about the trajectory of the Canadian welfare state as a flawed liberal project and of social work as a gendered career through this detailed study of one of its rank and file than we do from the more voluminous scholarship around one of its best-known celebrities, Charlotte Whitton. This biography is not about the force of personality to reshape public policy or to create organizational legacies, although there is certainly some of that to be found within its pages, especially near the end of Wisdom’s career. Rather, Morton uses Jane Wisdom’s life as a case study to explore how locality, gender, religion, social class, and the influences of British liberal idealism and American pragmatism shaped social work practice, charitable organization, and welfare state formation in Canada.

Wisdom, Morton tells us, had an “uncanny knack for being in important places at pivotal moments” (224). Her biography is organized around Wisdom’s work within these local contexts and moments that range from her education at McGill University and her early involvement in the settlement house movement in Montreal prior to the First World War; her apprenticeship, between 1910 and 1916, with the pioneering American casework theorist Mary Richmond within Brooklyn’s immigrant communities; the catastrophic Halifax explosion of 1917, which claimed 2000 lives; a succession of miners’ strikes in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, from the 1920s to the 1940s; the plight of young single mothers in Montreal during the Great Depression; and the movement to abolish the Poor Laws in Nova Scotia in the 1940s and beyond. Morton mines the details of Wisdom’s career in all of these settings to provide the reader with a rich evocation of the “look and feel” of social work practice “on the ground” in a mostly pre-welfare state era as well as to explore many of the local, cultural, and intellectual influences that shaped her generation of mostly female casework professionals (6).

Wisdom, who like many women social workers of her era never married, was raised within a Presbyterian, middle-class family in Saint John, New Brunswick, and the significance of religion, region, and gender are three of the key themes of Morton’s book. Wisdom’s career was “specifically an eastern Canadian story,” as she circulated across jobs in Montreal, New York, Halifax, and Glace Bay (6). Neither western Canadian populism nor radicalism formed part of her political thought. Her intellectual trajectory, Morton argues, occurred essentially within the framework of an evolving liberal individualism shaped by her Presbyterian upbringing, her exposure to British idealism at McGill, her introduction to Mary Richmond’s social casework theory in New York, and her interest in the pragmatism and environmentalism of American philosopher John Dewey, especially during her work with young single mothers as the head of Montreal’s Women’s Directory during the 1920s and 1930s.

It was also influenced by her experiences on the front lines of social work. Like many of her colleagues trained in the principles of “scientific charity,” Wisdom was initially skeptical of the state’s role in social welfare. However, her work in Halifax dealing with the mass misery caused by the aftermath of the 1917 explosion, Morton argues, “made her a Progressive . . . who now regarded the state as a potential ally in solving individual and community problems” (108). Like her mentor Mary Richmond, and many others in social work, including...