The Personal and Political Are Essential to Social Work
by Aaron Kennell, MSW
The “personal is political” is a resounding critique of culture’s silencing toward empowered voices. The voices of Gloria Steinem, Carol Hainisch, Kerry Burch, Robin Morgan, and more pioneered and echoed the sentiment through the currents of second wave feminism and beyond. The meaning is powerful – patriarchal society is open to discussion and analysis, and the indignation and oppression of our lives deserves to be validated.
Jane Addams took a similar and irrefutable feminist approach in her own social work role. Addams led the development of Chicago’s Hull House and promoted women’s suffrage during feminism’s first wave. Addams opened the discussion with American society’s cruel, capitalist-driven use of child labor – a cruelty that denied children’s need for social and emotional development, and that their lives must live by the patriarchal anvils of labor and markets. Addams’ movement resisted and ended the patriarchal practice of not allowing women the vote, thus validating women – and Addams’ own life and womanhood – as equal participants in their democracy. Briefly describing my experience in feminist clinical social work, this essay will promote that our own unique experience of “personal is political” is essential to social work.
My journey began in 2012 as an earnest undergraduate student, and developing, searching, and making meaning in a political world. I invested in left-leaning movements at the University of Central Florida, the largest of my investments being involved with women’s-oriented empowerment groups on campus, such as National Organization for Women at UCF and Generation Planned Parenthood.
Living in the limelight of social consciousness and community, I also discovered connection, intimacy, and romance for the first time. Tragically, my growth, connection, and intimacy were shattered. I experienced the vicarious trauma of dating violence, whether it was from the woman I cared for, or from the abusive man who haunted her through his cruelty and inflicted trauma. Resources at my college campus were small, if at all developed. I had little avenue for direct empowerment from services. Despite any compounding difficulties of dating as a hard-of-hearing person, being denied a world of intimacy, feeling, and safety was my first cruel experience of patriarchy.
Becoming a graduate student at the University of Central Florida in 2015, I developed an important role as a graduate student, and a role that would shape my professionalization. Empowered by my peers and instructors, I applied a victim and survivor centered, feminist social work lens and critique to every assignment and class. Regardless of the class type and topic, I challenged patriarchal gender roles and applied the knowledge of trauma, and my experience of dating violence, to seek out practice skills and knowledge to open a discussion within the cruel, patriarchal world we inhabit. I imbued my technical skills of survivor advocacy and healthy relationship building into my internships and into my current role as a school social worker.
Similar to Addams’ validation in creating change through women’s suffrage, my work is developing healthy relationship-building curriculums and spaces. This lens states, yes, women, non-binary people, and men are feeling beings – with desires, wants, and needs – deserving of nurturing connections. It is a validation that women, non-binary people, and men deserve to develop into equal participants in their own emotional worlds, free from violent relationships perpetuated by patriarchal systems.
This is what I desire for my fellow social workers to know: that which is personal and political deserves professional expression in our work. We, too, are beings of connection. Alongside the success of our profession’s evidence-based practice, we deserve to elevate our profession to a political art form. Giving ourselves permission to openly discuss the harms and cruelties of society and culture, and validating the participation in our political, social, and economic lives, is essential for our work.
Aaron Kennell, MSW, graduated in 2019 from UCF, and has worked toward becoming fluent in social justice and feminist clinical social work practice. Aaron currently works in a county school system in central Florida promoting general well-being, social services, and advocacy for healthy relationships, for survivors of relationship and domestic violence and trauma.