Sabine Hering and Berteke Waaldijk, eds., History of Social Work in Europe 1900-1960: Female Pioneers and their Influence on the Development of International Social Organizations.
Schade, Rosemarie
Sabine Hering and Berteke Waaldijk, eds., History of Social Work in
Europe 1900-1960: Female Pioneers and their Influence on the Development
of International Social Organizations (Opladen: Leske und Budrich 2003)
THIS TIMELY comparative study of social work in a European
perspective presents papers from the conference "Designing the
Social Sphere, a Challenge for Europe" held in Mainz in 2001. It
crosses the divides between western, southern, and Eastern Europe (which
are often treated separately) by also including contributions inter alia about Hungary, Roumania, and Lithuania. The broad chronological (late
19th and 20th centuries) and wide geographic spread makes for a useful
overview of developments in social work under vastly different political
regimes and diverse social and cultural conditions. The work is an
excellent introduction for English speakers to the relatively
inaccessible world of studies in Eastern and Southern Europe, and thus
fills an important gap in our knowledge of international social work.
There are several approaches to the area of social work represented
here. A large part of the book is devoted to introducing the biographies
of women who were crucial in the development of welfare and social work
in their respective countries, but are virtually unknown in Canada and
the United States. For example, Roxana Cheschebec writes about Princess
Alexandrina Cantacuzino of Roumania. The intellectual and practical work
of Hertha Krauss, whose career spanned the US and Germany, is explored
by Beate Bussiek. Jelena Stassowa of Russia, and Mentona Moser of
Germany (whose achievements are noted here by Elena Resch and Sabine
Hering) were both instrumental in the International Red Aid, a communist
welfare organization whose internationalism and anti-capitalism provides
yet another example of organized welfare, albeit one that resisted the
bourgeois states of Europe who were also building their welfare
organizations. Kurt Schilde takes the story of the International Red Aid
further than the biographies of Moser and Stassowa by providing national
and institutional insights into this largely Moscow-dominated aid
network which provided legal counselling, children's homes, support
for political prisoners, and help for political refugees. It was at
times a huge organization, with, for example, the German section
numbering some 504,000 in 1930, of whom 141,000 were women. (142)
Dissolved in 1941, little has been written previously about this
organization for reasons that have to do with the politics of the
"two Germanies." This gap has recently been filled by S.
Hering and K. Schilde, eds., Die Rote Hilfe (Opladen 2002). In the west,
its image was tainted by its purported connection to the Red Army
Faction of the 1970s and 80s, and in the East it was neglected because
many of its members fell victim to Stalinist purges. The inclusion of
this highly important and gravely neglected topic serves to remind the
reader of the extraordinarily wide range of charitable activities women
were engaged in during the 20th century.
Two final areas of the book deal with the challenges and sources of
archival research; there are also portraits of some of the most
important archives and their holdings in this area of study. The book
ends with portraits of the authors and information about the
"Network for Historical Studies of Gender and Social Work"
which grew out of the Mainz conference.
The book is geographically and methodologically diverse, so I will
limit myself to presenting just a few issues which were of particular
interest to me. It was a pleasure to see the internationalization of
Canadian social theory in the article by Mirja Satka, "Gender and
the History of Social Work: Biographies of Male and Female Social Work
Pioneers in Finland," which draws heavily on the insights of
Dorothy Smith. The internationalization of ideas and frameworks is also
described in many of the contributions, as for example by A. Boet and B.
Waaldijk in their article on the Dutch social work reformer Marie
Kamphuis, in Kerstin Eilers' look at the First International
Conference of Social Work in 1928, and in Elke Kruse's revisiting
of Alice Salomon's study of 1927, which was the first attempt to
create an international comparison of social work training.
The book will be of interest to historians, social workers, and
anyone with an interest in gender and women's studies in the 20th
century. The contributions vary somewhat in quality, but are solidly
researched and interesting in content and perspective. It is an
important contribution in its field.
Rosemarie Schade
Concordia University
