The profession of social work has a long tradition of outstanding women leaders. If asked, you could easily come up with a list of pioneers and social work luminaries who have provided leadership, not only for establishing and developing our profession, but for leading the quest for social justice and better quality of life for our citizens. Names like Jane Addams, Jeannette Rankin, Mary Richmond, Edith Abbott, Frances Perkins, Bertha Reynolds, and more recent leaders like Dorothy Height, Barbara Mikulski, or Barbara Lee might come to mind. This article introduces you to a social work leader you may not know, but whose work has had a significant impact on several areas of practice and on many of our lives and those of our loved ones.

 

Dr. Bernice Catherine Harper has represented the most vulnerable and underserved and those most in need of available and affordable health care services in this country and abroad. She is especially known for her outstanding leadership in the hospice movement and for the national impact she had in establishing and financing hospice services under Medicare. Harper also authored a groundbreaking book on care for the dying in 1977 that helped to create the social work practice areas of medical (now health care) social work and what, today, we refer to as palliative care. She is aptly considered a transformational leader–-someone who creates an inspiring vision of the future, inspires others to engage in that vision, and then works continuously and collaboratively to deliver that vision.

 

One of 12 children in an African American family, Harper was born in the segregated south and began cleaning houses at age 10. She wanted to be a missionary in Africa, but didn’t know how to become one.

 

She was smart and did very well in school. She entered Virginia State College, at the time a segregated Historically Black College, and majored in education and psychology. She needed help paying for college, and she so impressed the president of Virginia State College that he provided housing for her in his own home. He also helped her find a summer position with a Quaker family to serve as a companion to an older woman in Princeton, NJ. The luggage of a deceased family member, Beatrice Whitson, was stored there, and the initials “BW” were on the luggage. The family thought it must have been meant for Harper, whose maiden name was Wright. Beatrice Whitson had been a social worker and had established a college scholarship in social work. The family decided that the scholarship, along with the luggage, should go to Bernice Wright (Harper).

 

Harper considers this “something like divine intervention.” She notes, “I knew absolutely nothing about social work. I knew what teachers and nurses did, and I even knew about sociology, but I didn’t know what social work was.” She felt she had been “called” to social work, and her career was set.

 

When segregation prevented her from pursuing a Master of Social Work degree in her home state of Virginia, she became one of the first out-of-state students at the University of Southern California, obtaining her MSW in 1948. She also became the first woman of color to earn a Master of Science in Public Health from Harvard University in 1959, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Faith Grant College in Birmingham, AL, in 1994.

 

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