Social Work and Political Visibility: Activism, Education and the Disciplining of Social Service

This article considers social service work as a vector from which elite and middle-class Indian women claimed gendered citizenship during the 1940s and 1950s. The article highlights the ways in which these women emphasised social service work as a way to create visibility for themselves, while obscuring the labour of other women whom they claimed as clients. The article also traces the professionalisation of social work through the 1950s, a move which undermined these women's claims to representative power and political visibility based on their social work.