NASW Foundation National Programs

NASW Social Work Pioneers^®

Helen R. Wright (1891-1969)

Helen Russell Wright was a pioneer social researcher, economist, and social work educator. She was the first president of the Council on Social Work Education. She also had the formidable task of becoming dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Chicago. Following the Abbotts, she became an important transitional figure in the emerging profession of social work, one who often went against the then current trends by carrying on policy reform tradition as opposed to the emphasis on the primacy of casework within the profession.

Wright was born in Iowa and received a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1912. She then went to the University of Chicago and studied economics and social work under Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckenridge at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. It was here that she developed her affinity to social reform through applied research and economic understandings. In 1922 she received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. She received an appointment as a staff member at the Brookings Graduate Institution of Economics where she conducted research for studies on the nation's capacity to produce goods and its inability to purchase them.

In 1928 Dean Abbott asked Wright to join the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration to strengthen its research program. It was there that Wright continued to engage in the applied research necessary for the development of social services and successful social reform. She published a number of articles in the Social Service Review and conducted several studies for the United States Children's Bureau. In 1941, Wright was appointed as Edith Abbott's successor as dean of the Social Service Administration, a position she held until 1956. From 1950 to 1956 she was editor of the Social Service Review. In these years she was particularly concerned with the future of social work in the post World War II era and published a number of articles on this subject.

Upon her retirement from the deanship in 1957, the CSWE asked Wright to head a technical assistance team being sent to India to assist in the development of a school of social work there. Again, she published articles and a book concerning her experience. After her return from India, Wright lived in Pasadena, California where she continued to conduct research and teach part time at the University of Southern California.