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By Lena Dominelli
Palgrave
£15.99
ISBN 0333771540

I finished this book the day Barbara Castle died. She was a passionate campaigner for women's rights and equal pay. Child benefit, she insisted, was to be paid into the purse, not the wallet. But, to the end, she maintained she was not a feminist. In this book Lena Dominelli asks what to Castle would have been an unthinkable question: "should we work with men?" Both women would, I think, answer yes if it achieved social justice and equality for women. Castle, though, would have added "and also for men".

It is not only the definition of feminism that is problematic - others are equally slippery. Professionalism, social care and even social work are put forward as valued concepts but also as code for oppression and injustice. I would like to know why this is.

I felt this book suffers for being published at a time when social work is receiving more support than for a generation. Dominelli's concerns that social work would be devalued within a General Social Care Council, for example, were written before social work became a graduate profession with enforceable standards.

This book feels too pessimistic. Things have moved on and I am hopeful we now have a framework where we just might achieve equality.

Lynne Berry is chief executive, General Social Care Council.