The Limits of Trauma in the Work of Liberation: Surfacing Race and Gender in the History of Trauma 1860-1925

Background/Purpose

The concept of trauma has been understood to be a tool of liberatory potential since its resurgence into the popular imaginary in the 1970s. At that time, trauma was mobilized to comprehend the effects of the Vietnam War and to validate the women’s anti-domestic violence movement. Since then, trauma’s cultural relevance has only grown, and the concept has become a naturalized element of popular and scientific discourse alike.

In this historical study, we assert that the under-interrogated history of trauma in the nascent field of social work at the turn of the 20^th century tells an important and new story about the dual workings of race and gender inside of the early history of trauma.

Methods

This study engages feminist archival methodology to investigate the history of the trauma concept from its inception in the mid-late 19^th century through the 1920s. It uses an historical case study approach, centering analysis on a set of case histories published in the 1920s by the founders of clinical social work: physician Elmer E. Southard and social worker Mary C. Jarrett. Additional primary sources of data include:

• Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine archives, which houses the case records from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a leading American psychiatric and research institute.
• Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History archives, which hold the Mary C. Jarrett papers, among others relevant to the founding of clinical social work.

Results

The early history of the concept of trauma has three lineages: labor, war, and hysteria. According to much of the literature in the extant historical record, the concept of trauma was newly extended to women and people of color during the wellspring of activism of the 1970s-1990s. As renowned scholar Judith Herman has argued, trauma was wrested from the feminized condition of hysteria by the close of the 20^th century and used almost exclusively to understand the psychological experiences of men during wartime.

However, plumbing the early archives of clinical social work’s inception reveals diagnostic applications of the concept of trauma that disrupt narratives of trauma’s masculine past. Instead, they suggest that trauma was one of the conceptual tools employed by social workers in the 1920s to criminalize variously “wayward” women and to police evolving systems of race, gender, and sexuality.

Conclusion and Implications

One of the outcomes of the feminist anti-domestic violence movements of the 1970s was an increase in racialized systems of incarceration. Such a pairing of simultaneously regressive and progressive social change is unexpected without historically accounting for the submerged intersections that already existed between gender, race, and trauma. This historical study turns to the origins of clinical social work to intervene in the extant story of trauma and gender, reading the early history of trauma through feminist of color critique. Working from the perspective that all concepts do political work, we assert that the critical re-examination of this valued concept is a necessary task for understanding its ongoing capacity to be mobilized towards regulatory ends even when its usage intends towards liberation.