Why California Registers Its Social Workers

Abstract

FIIFteen years ago, on September 20, I933J a group of five people sat down and considered blankly their assignment as the first Board of Examiners for the registration and certification of social workers in California?no, not just in California, the first such board in the country. Blankly? Well, the board felt blank, but they were not the ones who were working in a vacuum. It is the first pioneer who faces sands without a single footprint to show direction, and that pioneering had begun in the California Conference of Social Work years before. In fact, it is a matter of record that the conference began talking about registration in 1920. Then the idea went into hibernation for eight years but came out again with a rush, this time not in the form of talk but of action, for in 1928 the League of Women Voters had prepared a law for submission to the legislature of 1929 providing for the registration of case workers in California with a professional education. The League asked for, and got, the co-operation of the conference in this undertaking. Young social workers were learning to walk in 1929, so they do not remember that that was the year when the stockmarket index climbed up and up and up?and then dropped with a crash, leaving former playboys on the corner selling apples and lines of workers miles long waiting for a bowl of soup. The League of Women Voters did not know that either when the legislature met in 1929, nor did the legislature. It remained for the years just ahead to unfold the unbelievable tragedy of one out of five persons in these lavish United States receiving some kind of public aid, with a rising tide of operations in the relief field which would transform the obscure occu-