pro
“Social Problems? “The dialogue has gone on too long in terms of women alone.” Betty Friedan, co-founder of NOW”
After getting my Masters in Social Work in 2008, I did a year as a Correctional Officer (AKA Jail Guard) in the infamous Baltimore City Detention Center. Followed that with a year as a Parole & Probation Agent in central Baltimore. Then went to work for National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) as a trainer for various state corrections systems to teach prison staff how to run NFI's "InsideOut Dad" program for incarcerated fathers.
Started a social work consultancy called Working Well With Men whose mission was to provide "tools and training for the Social Work profession to help men give and get all the love they can."
Produced and hosted a radio show called “In a Man's Shoes” on a public station near Baltimore from 1983 to 1989. Was executive director of the National Congress for Men, whose motto was “preserving the promise of fatherhood.”
In 1985 and 1986 I worked with the late, former 7th District Congressman and Black Caucus Chair Elijah Cummings when he was a Maryland state delegate in the effort he sponsored to have Maryland establish a task for force on men to study the connection between male social issues and problems of crime, violence, educational underachievement, unpaid child support and others.
In 1994 St. Martin's Press published my book Good Will Toward Men: Women Talk Candidly About the Balance of Power Between the Sexes, a collection of interviews I conducted with twenty-two women, most of whom identified as feminist, all of whom were ready, willing, able and even eager to talk not just about women's disadvantages as women, but also their advantages, and not just about men's advantages as men, but also their disadvantages.
In perhaps one of the earliest examples of what has come to be known as Cancel Culture, several St. Martin’s staff members expressed displeasure with the book’s challenge of orthodox feminism and all sales and promotion efforts for the book ceased. Good Will Toward Men went nowhere, except to bookstores' remainder bins. After that disappointment, I expressed my unhappy emotions with a wry and pithy book called If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules. I published that one myself because my agent couldn't find an established publisher to take it on. Ironically, that book has proven to be my most popular and successful.
I was named 2012 Outstanding Recent Graduate of the University of Maryland School of Social Work. I gave presentations on the Social Work profession's gender bias at the National Association of Social Workers state conferences in New Mexico (2010), North Carolina (2011) and Maryland (2015). An emblematic piece of feedback came from New Mexico: "The presentation and the presenter pissed me off, but it all made me think really hard and made me realize that I need to keep these kinds of ideas in mind." I also presented at the First and Second (there was no Third) National Conferences on Social Work With and For Men in 2008 and 2009.
