Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Women’s School (Soziale Frauenschule) 1 – but it also presents images of social
work practice. Such images are very rare, and so the album would be important
for this reason alone. But even this does not explain the album’s special value
and its special attraction.
This can be said: The photo album tells the history of social work or,
more precisely, of social women’s work in its beginnings around 1900 when the
modern social work profession was born as a profession for women. One must
say that the profession was created and developed by women in association
with the women‘s movement. That is to say, it developed in the context of each
woman’s own emancipation and of women’s emancipation in general, which
was an international development.
It is not only the fact of telling this exciting history that makes the
album an interesting and stimulating source. It is the album’s special way of
communicating this history that makes it such a precious source for research
and education. I will try to give an impression of both aspects.
The rather large album (it measures 40 cm by 30 cm) does not impress
by its physical appearance. It is of simple design, being covered only by coloured
paper. It contains just eighteen sheets with forty pictures all together. Some of
them are professional photos but mostly they are snapshots. The sizes of the
photos vary. The earliest photos were taken before 1900, the last ones around
1929.
1
The forerunner of the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences was the Soziale Frauenschule – Social
Women’s School – with two-year training courses for social work. It was founded by Alice Salomon in 1908. The
Alice Salomon University celebrated its 100th anniversary in October 2008. Predecessors of the Soziale Frauenschule
were the one-year training courses for social work which started in Berlin in 1899. Almost at the same time, in
1898, the Summer School of Philanthropy started in New York, the later New York School of Social Work (since
1941: Columbia University School of Social Work.) and in 1899 the first school in the Netherlands, School voor
Maatschappelijk Werk, (today Domein Maatschappij en Recht / School of Social Work and Law at the Hogeschool
van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences). Cf. Alice Salomon, Education for Social Work: A Sociological Interpretation
Based on an International Survey (Zürich: Verlag für Recht und Gesellschaft, 1937), 191-193, 238-239,
with reference to the history of the Alice Salomon School see Adriane Feustel and Gerd Koch, ed., 100 Jahre Soziales
Lehren und Lernen: Von der Sozialen Frauenschule zur Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin (Berlin: Schibri-Verlag,
2008) [with an Introduction in English].
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