Alice Salomon
... her life
Alice Salomon (1872 -1948) was one of this century's most prominent figures in the German and international women's movement and in the develoment of a socially critical and scientifically oriented approach to social welfare. Critical interest in her work has not diminished with time. Rather to the contrary, it is gaining in interest and significance, both in context and in retrospect, at the end of the 20th century.
Alice Salomon - born 1872 in Berlin - belonged to the emancipated and assimilated Jewish middle-class. This background left a lasting impression, even though Alice Salomon converted to Pro-testantism in 1914 and elements of the Protestant social ethic became an important basis of her work. Her decision to study and have a career stepped beyond the borders of the space which was available to her as a daughter of the middle-class. She was correct in counting herself as a member of a pioneering generation of women in such diverse settings as the university on the one side and the workers' quarters and miserable slums on the other side.
From 1902 until 1906 she studied in guest status at the Berlin University although she did not have the school-leaving certificate required for formal admittance, having attended school for only nine years, as was usual for girls of her class at the time. Her publications, two long articles in the handbook on the German women's movement edited by Helene Lange and Gertrud B"umer among others, were recognized as qualifying her for attendance of the university. Finally, it was also the quality of her achievements in science and social policy which helped her to receive permission of the Minister of Education to take a doctorate without the necessary high-school certificate. In her dissertation Alice Salomon analyzed the unequal remuneration of work for men and women, a theme which was a subject of controversy in the women's movement.
Beginning in 1893, Alice Salomon was engaged in women's so-cial work within the framework of "Girls' and Women's Groups for Social Service Work", a social-reform initiative from circles associated with the women's movement and the liberal middle-class. She worked in an institution for girls and in a home for working women, among other places, and became the chair of the organization in 1899. At the age of 27 she already had a reputation in the women's movement and the ranks of the social-reform-minded middle-class. She combined social work with conceptual and organizational work as well as with pedagogical and political activity.
By 1900 she assumed a function within the board of the Feder-ation of German Women's Associations, was active in various commissions particularly those having to do with protection of women workers, took a leading and active role in the international women's movement in the International Council of Women, whose secretary she was for many years beginning in1909 and whose vice president she became in 1920. In 1908 she founded the Social School for Women (Soziale Frauenschule) in Berlin; in 1925 the German Academy for Social and Educational Women's Work including a special division for empirical research; in 1916/17 she initiated and organized the Conference of German Schools for Social Work, which she chaired until 1933; in 1929 she was instrumental in the founding of the International Asssociation of Schools for Social Work/IASSW), whose chair she was even beyond 1933. Her projects continue to exist until the present day. Only the Academy for Social and Educational Women's Work, which Alice Salomon herself closed in order to forestall her house being searched and the organization being liquidated by the Gestapo, was not refounded after 1945.
As in the field of social practice, Alice Salomon was also a pioneer in the areas of science and theory. She confronted increasing differentiation and specialization with a model combining theory and practice, interdisciplinarity and an explicit focus on women. The beginning of this approach was described vividly by Alice Salomon in her memoirs, written during her exile in New York:
"There was no "ready-to-buy" science of social work which we could use in teaching. The staff had to develop it themselves. There were no textbooks - we had to write them. Ours was genuine team-work, a most intimate cooperation, coloring the school with the peculiar character that education for social work needs".
She further developed this approach with the founding of the German Academy for Social and Educational Women's Work. This made possible a course of studies for social work which was virtually of university level while maintaining the practical orientation, interdisciplinarity and explicit focus on women. The same can be said for the Research Division, which was founded in 1926 with Gertrud Bäumer among others. The research which was developed here respected the relevance of practice to theory.
1933 marked the end of this approach. Alice Salomon was forced out of all her public offices and in 1937 she was forced by the Gestapo into emigration. Anti-Semitism, which had increased even in the women's movement since World War I, had already previously obstructed the nomination of Alice Salomon to the chair of the Federation of German Women's Associations; and in 1928 it also prevented her nomination for the chair of the International Council of Women.
Alice Salomon died in 1948 in New York.
Alice Salomon ...
