The extension in many states of “state aid to mothers” to cover deserted wives is an indication of this changed view.  In most states, however, some safeguards are set up; the wife must take out a warrant, and a given number of years must elapse during which the man shall not have been heard from, before state aid can be granted to the wife.

Finally, it is more clearly recognized than formerly that the time to “close the case” is not just after the man’s return.

A case supervisor speaks of “the strong temptation to close our records as soon as relief becomes unnecessary.  The man’s return to the family is often the critical point at which there is need of skilful and sympathetic friendship.  These cases cry out for continued treatment.  We need to think more humanely about all the unsettling elements in our urban civilization and to see that all the nice individual adjustments that as case workers we can make are made.  If the man’s work gives him no opportunity for self-expression, what attempt are we making to give him such opportunities outside his work, to connect him with a trade union, with clubs and with fraternities?  How much are we thinking about cures for inebriates, psychoanalysis, vocational guidance, recreation?”

Briefly, then, changes in the social worker’s attitude toward treatment have meant less emphasis on punitive and repressive measures, more consideration of the man’s point of view, less tendency to press court action, at least in the beginning, fewer commitments of children, a more liberal relief policy (partly as a preventive of “forced reconciliations"), and lastly, longer supervision after the man has resumed support of his family.

FOOTNOTES: 

[15] Adapted from the writer’s article on “Desertion and Non-Support in Family Case Work,” The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science, May, 1918, p. 98.

[16] Breed, Mary:  Eleventh New York State Conference, 1910, p. 76.

IV

FINDING THE DESERTING HUSBAND

A few years ago a young Jewish woman reported to the National Desertion Bureau[17] that her husband had left her and their children.

The couple had never got on well, and the man seemed to have been a melancholy and impractical fellow.  The usual methods of the Bureau brought no results in finding the missing husband.  Then the wife was more carefully questioned, and urged to tell all that she could recall or had heard about her husband’s early life, his tastes and peculiarities.  Among other things the Bureau learned that the man’s father had died in America years ago, having come here to make a home for the family left behind in Russia.  The boy had grown up in ignorance of the place of his father’s death and burial, and, as the eldest son, he felt it his duty to find his father’s