Social Work & Society ▪▪▪ C. Kuhlmann: Alice Salomon

HISTORICAL SW&S PORTRAITSGLOBAL LEADERS FOR SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION:
THE IASSW PRESIDENTS 1928-2008

Alice Salomon (Germany), President 1928/29-19461
Carola Kuhlmann, University of Applied Sciences Bochum, Germany‘You start thinking that all differences in possession and education
could be changed immediately. (…) You start seeing everything inblack and white and then comes the time when you are awake atnight, sleepless, racking your brain over the shadows between.
This is probably the hardest crisis you have to go through in Social
Work, the deepest disappointment, when you lose …the belief in aradical change, when you have to accept that you are only able toimprove the state of affairs with economic and educational
support.’ (Salomon 1916, 93f.)
1

Why should we know something about Alice Salomon?

1.1 One of the earliest feminist approaches to Social Work
Salomon belongs to the known and nevertheless unknown ‘pioneers’ of social work in theworld. She founded one of the first Schools of Social Work (Berlin 1908) and was the firstpresident of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (1929-19372). Her
theoretical work however is almost forgotten or not really part of the debate about social work
history.
This is partly due to her expulsion from Germany in 1937, partly it is the ‘normal’ destiny offemale intellectuals (Staub-Bernasconi 1991). The lacking or superficial interest in her
theoretical work led to many - still existing - prejudices about her definition of social work asa female, a ‘motherly’ profession. Studying her more than 350 articles and more than 30 (text)books (see Kuhlmann 2000) reveals a great treasure of knowledge about the character andthe methods of social work, about social and economic background factors of poverty andabout the ethics of the social profession. Above all, Salomon’s theoretical work represents
one of the earliest and till today almost unique feministic approaches to social work theory.

1

This article was first published 2001 under the title “Historical portraits of important European leaders in social
work: Alice Salomon (1872-1948) – Germany” in the European Journal of Social Work, Vol.4, No.1, pp.65-75,
published by Taylor & Francis Ltd.. We thank the author, the Journal and the publisher for the permission toreprint the article in this supplement.
2
According to Kendall Alice Salomon remained titular head of the International Committee of Schools forSocial Work until René Sand took over in 1946. The Committee was renamed after 1954 and became the“International Association of Schools of Social Work” (cf. Kendall 1978, p. 177 and 182). (Footnote added by
the editor)

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1.2 A fascinating character
As a person, Alice Salomon had a rare mixture of intellectual and emotional gifts: she wasdown-to-earth, had a truly scientific nature - and was at the same time a passionate fighter
against all sorts of injustice. From the beginning of her conscious life – as she wrote in her
biography - she ‘always felt an urge to take sides with the underdog’ (Salomon 1944a, 321).
Essentially the goal of her work – she says - was ‘to even out differences of class andopportunities: otherwise there could be no peace and no brotherhood.’ (Salomon 1944a, 321)
From childhood to old age she was full of energy, always busy in doing something to change
the bad living conditions of women and children, first in practical work with a Charity
Organisation Service and later on in organising better education programmes for social
workers through national and international associations. She was very gifted in mediating andorganising – today we would probably say, in social management. She was the one totranslate ideas into action.
Salomon had a strong charismatic influence on young girls, being a kind of a female ‘leader’,at a time when it was still the normal destiny of women to obey either their fathers or theirhusbands. Her lectures were an ‘attraction’ (Jüngling and Roßbeck 1994, 60). Her message
was: there is something to do outside the family, because state, economy and society, made bymen, are not well run. War, exploitation, child labour, unjust women’s wages – all this canonly happen, when women have no political influence – so Salomon one hundred years ago.
1.3 An outstanding biography
Alice Salomon was born in April 1872 in Berlin, one year after the foundation of the German
Empire, 60 years after the emancipation of the Jews in Prussia. Her father was a businessmanin the leather trade, comfortably-off, but not rich; both her parents were Jews but not
religious.
The family of her father lived in Prussia since the beginning of the 18th century; thegrandfather of her mother had been a Christian who converted to Judaism and had been killed
in a Pogrom in Vilnius (Lithuania).
Together with her sisters, Alice Salomon went to a Christian school nearby (founded by
Huguenots). She enjoyed it very much and took also part in the religious lessons, which wasincidentally one of the main reasons for her baptism in 1914.
Unfortunately formal schooling for German girls at that time ended at fifteen. Afterwards herlife became a boring and fruitless waiting period. Her only option was to become proficient infine needlework. She therefore felt ‘reborn’, when, six years later in 1893, she joined a Junior
League, the ‘Girl's and Women's Groups of Social Assistance Work’, a group enlisting girls
for unpaid service in philanthropic activities.
For some years she worked in a shelter for schoolgirls and with a Charity Organization
Society.
Her intellectual ‘mother’ at that time became Jeanette Schwerin, a member of the board of the‘Society of Ethical Culture’ in Berlin and of the National Association of Women. Schwerin
brought Salomon in contact with the ideas of social reform and women’s liberation. Salomon
now started to read English social philosophers like John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle (see forexample Carlyle 1894 and Ruskin 1905) and was influenced by the German so-called

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Social Work & Society ▪▪▪ C. Kuhlmann: Alice Salomon‘armchair socialists’ like Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner (see Schmoller 1908;
Wagner 1912). Then, in 1899, when Salomon was 27, Schwerin died and Salomon’s lifechanged in many ways: she became a member of the board of the National Council of Women(as a successor to Schwerin) and she took over the chair of the Junior League where she
started the first annual training class in social work.
Soon she realized that her private studies were insufficient to meet the challenges of her new
obligations. And although German women were still officially denied access to university,
Salomon received special permission and became a student of ‘Nationalökonomie’, a mixtureof political economics and social science. She received her Ph.D. in 1906 with a thesis on theinequality of wages of men and women. In 1908 she transformed the annual classes of the‘Groups’ into the first German regular school of social work and became president andteacher of the school. In 1909 she became Corresponding Secretary of the International
Council of Women (ICW) and was from now on in contact with the leading women in manydifferent nations like Jane Adams, Lady Aberdeen etc. (Salomon 1936).
During World War I she worked with the National Service of Women, organizing war welfare
services and working - in spite of her many scruples - in the War Office. After the armisticeand the revolution Salomon's work proved crucial for the formation of the profession of social
work in Germany:•

she founded and became president of the National Association of Schools of Social
Work (1917-1933),•

she founded and became president of the ‘Academy for Social and Pedagogical workof Women’, the first post graduate school for social work (1929-1933).

During this time she wrote many textbooks for social work, for example ‘Introduction to
Welfare Work’ (Salomon 1921), ‘Introduction to German Society: economics, state, social
life’ (Salomon 1922), ‘Social Diagnosis’ (Salomon 1926a), ‘Social Therapy’ (Salomon andWronsky 1926b), ‘Education for Social Work’ (Salomon 1927). In the early thirties she
started a family research project about the economic and social value of the work of women in
the family (Salomon 1930a).
In 1928 Salomon was asked to take over the chair of the division on social work education
during the International Congress of Social Work in Paris. At the end of this congress theleaders of about ten different schools from Europe and USA decided to found a newassociation. This was the beginning of the International Association of Schools of Social
Work (IASSW), which was officially founded a year later in Berlin. Alice Salomon becamepresident until she was forced to give up her work in 1937. On the occasion of her 60thbirthday in 1932, the Prussian state honoured Alice Salomon with a medallion and she
received an honorary Ph. D. by the Medical School of the University of Berlin. In 1933 shelost all her professional positions and honours because of her Jewish ancestors and in 1937
she had to choose between leaving the country and deportation to a concentration camp. She
emigrated to the United States, where she died in New York in 1948. During her last years in
America (especially during World War II)) she suffered not only from being parted from her
German friends, relatives and former tasks (Wieler 1987) but also from having to witness thedestruction of all that she had struggled for (Salomon 1944b).

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2

Salomon’s concept of Social Work and Social Work Education

2.1 Social justice –key to Salomon’s Social Work theory
An almost unspoken precondition of social work is the ability to identify social problems andto acknowledge the suffering of disadvantaged people. Salomon was very gifted in describing
the needs and problems of poor people and comparing them with the life circumstances of the
middle-class students she had:
‘We are sitting in a room with carpets, pictures and so on, while outside there are working
men in the winter cold without sufficient clothing and women sitting in attic rooms bent oversewing machines to give their children at least a bit of bread’ (Salomon 1912, 71).
According to Salomon it is more a kind of emotional intelligence social worker should haveto feel the injustice of those comparisons and to demand more social justice in the world.
But what is the nature of social justice? Will we ever be able to build a society on social
justice? According to Salomon social justice is the final aim of social work; nevertheless she
was aware that we shall never be able to reach this aim. All ‘utopias’ of social justice areclosely affiliated to dictatorships or are not working (see her critique of Robert Owen:
Salomon 1932, 14; and her critique of the ‘final solution’ of social problems in Nazi
Germany: Salomon 1983, 279ff.)
Though social justice can never be reached, its achievement should always be attempted. The
precondition for this is to have the same rights for men and women, for all classes, ethnic
minorities or other disadvantaged groups. One of the main problems in achieving more social
justice is the fact that human beings are equal and different at the same time. Treating all
persons in the same way could therefore also be unjust (for example having no special labourlaws for pregnant women or expecting children to earn money, see Salomon 1903a)
Without the analysis of the existing inequality and the belief that this status quo needs to bechanged towards peace and social justice, social work loses its identity. In the radical
perspective of Salomon, ‘social’ does not mean all what refers to society (societal), but anidealistic social conscience that acknowledges the interdependence of human beings, fights
against the philosophy of individualism and is convinced that mutual aid is the law of life
(Salomon 1923). According to Salomon, without this ethical commitment social work could
be done by any state clerk.
2.2 Production and consumption makes people dependent on one anotherAccording to Salomon’s anthropology the responsibility for your neighbours is not a special
task of social workers but for everyone and this not only for idealistic, but also for very
material and economical reasons. Human beings depend on one another, even if they do notnotice any dependence. In pre-industrial times production and consumption of all goods took
place in extended families, everybody was aware of what the others were doing for theirsurvival. The economic structure of an industrial society makes its members blind for what
others are doing for them. We eat meals, use electricity, read newspapers and we dress
ourselves, but we do not know the producers of theses goods: are they paid according to theirimportance and their every-day needs (Salomon 1909)? Salomon said that we are responsible
for the exploitation in the sweat-shop industries by wearing clothes that were produced there yesterday in our neighbourhood, today in the so-called Developing Countries. She felt thatone should not profit from the work of others if one does not give back an equivalent toSocial Work & Society, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2008
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Social Work & Society ▪▪▪ C. Kuhlmann: Alice Salomonsociety, because we are not only responsible for what we do but also for what we fail to do.
Everybody is part of the chain of life, receiving and giving care, ideas, culture and knowledge(Salomon 1933, 723) and there is ‘no need that takes no revenge on those who ignore it’(Salomon 1922b, in: Muthesius 1958, 197).
2.3 A liberal capitalist economy causes an unjust distribution of work and wealth
In 19th century Germany there had been revolutionary social changes due to the process ofindustrialisation, urbanisation and the vanishing of extended families. Traditional structures ofsocial support and security broke down and the state had neglected to build up new ones. The
official policy of the Prussian state was to rely on the self-healing power of a free market.
In contradiction to this position Salomon argued that the liberal capitalist economy is anunjust exchange that has to be controlled by the state because the state represents common
interests (see the concept of the German ‘Nationalökonomie’).
The economic development in the 19th century had created two classes: the propertied and thenon-propertied. The non-propertied class is not free; working men and women depend on thework they get. Free work contracts are a lie according to Salomon. A free economy means
exploitation of those who have nothing but their labour to sell. At the end of the long chain of
exploitation one can find women and children. So Salomon fought also for fair wages,
supported strikes of women workers and demanded labour and child protection laws. For ashort time she thought about joining the socialist party and had also contacts with August
Bebel (the leader of the German socialist party, see Bebel 1892). But she decided against this,on the one hand because she believed in the progress of social reforms (instead of a violent
revolution, which was the aim of the socialistic party till 1914) on the other hand because shethought that the patriarchal family was not a product of capitalism. In socialism – she thought– there might be still no equality between men and women and the dominance of men in theSocialist party made her sceptical.
In Salomon’s concept of social work understanding of the social conditions of theunderprivileged class is crucial. Knowing about the unjust economic system social work can
no longer be a kind of charity but has to be defined as a human right. In contrast to othertheoretical approaches of that time in Germany, which defined social problems as being
purely of an educational nature (Nohl 1919) or as a question of a personal lack of the abilities
to adapt (Klumker 1918) Salomon emphasises the responsibility of the economical andpolitical system.
However Salomon argued that social work is not the same as social politics. Politics is one
way to change injustice; social work is another. Unlike her socialist friends who believedsocialism would make social work superfluous, Salomon was convinced that many problems
that do not depend on material circumstances will always remain: for example orphans, oldage, illness, personal problems, etc. Social work on the other hand is much more than the
carrying out of new welfare laws; it should act as a motor for social development and adapt
welfare to changing needs.
Nowadays in our phase of capitalist development (without the competition of socialism), a
development that led to structural unemployment, to a global ‘supermarket’, to the breakdown of national controls over economic developments and to the crisis of the Welfare State
Salomon’s conviction of the social responsibility of those who have possessions is as relevant
as it was at the beginning of the last century.

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2.4

Social work and gender

2.4.1 Poverty as a female problem
In all her writings Salomon had a special perspective on women: mothers, girls, widows,
working women. Working women suffered, according to Salomon, double oppression bothfrom their employers and from their husbands. For her the capability of giving birth was themain difference between men and women. This put working women at a disadvantage in thelabour market. They are on the one hand not able sell their whole working time and on theother hand they have either to serve their husbands at home or to earn money for theirchildren too (as a single mother, widow or wife of a husband with low wages). This is thereason until today why poverty worldwide is mainly a female problem.
This was even more a problem at a time, when an ‘uncontrolled physical urge of men’(Salomon 1912 in Heinemann 1912, 5) forced women to give birth to babies they could not
feed. Contraception was almost unknown and wives were not allowed to say no to theirconjugal duties even if they had already many children. This was one mostly unspoken factorof the high rate of infant mortality. Unlike today, motherhood was not only a separate period
in life, but many women were constantly either pregnant or nursing babies. Most wages ofworking class husbands did not allow the wives to leave their work for a long time.
After working 11 hours women of the working class were additionally obliged to dohousework. Some husbands left their families without getting divorced officially (because it
was too expensive) or spent their wages only on themselves. The records of public and private
charity organisation contained thousands of such cases (Salomon 1927, 155). Neverthelessthere was a tradition especially in public welfare to ignore the special needs of women(Salomon 1912b, 16), for instance if they hold an idealistic idea of ‘family’, are happy if adomineering father returns to his wife and forget that this means the oppression of women andchildren (Salomon 1930a, 15).
To give another example: a mother was convicted for manslaughter through culpable
negligence because one of her children fell into a wash-tub and drowned during her absence.
The mother claimed innocence because she had to work to feed her children. Salomon
defended her in an article: the alternative would have been to starve. Public Welfare should beblamed – so Salomon – because Berlin had not enough crèches and day care centres (Salomon
1896).
2.4.2 Social work as sisterly help: solidarity among womenAccording to Salomon, it was also the responsibility of women of the propertied classes tosupport women of the non-propertied classes and thus work for the reconciliation of theclasses.
The rich and educated but idle women should transfer their ‘motherly’ love from their hometo the community. But this (often criticised) concept (see for example Simmel 1981) was not
grounded in biology: Salomon argued that women live in a milieu of care and education
because society expects them to bring up the children. Men delegate family work to womenand in the family environment an attitude develops that is different from that of the male‘objective’ position (Salomon 1927: 154). But society suffers, argues Salomon, if the logic ofcare is only delegated into the private sector. She demanded a maternal politics comparablewith the concept of Sarah Ruddick (1989) that is based on the mothering life practice of
women.
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This means that in Salomon’s concept the nature of social work is a compensation andsocialisation of private care. It turns the private work of women into the public and makes it
visible.
2.5 Social Work as a Profession
As Salomon had found in her doctoral thesis female labour mostly suffered from being not areal profession with formal education. So she tried to organise good schools for women who
wanted to do social work and demanded even a salary for field work during the studies.
Nevertheless she was convinced that social work by volunteers should always be an integral
part of this field and that also volunteers should have the right to being educated in socialwork.
2.5.1 Volunteers and Professionals
Salomon mentioned five reasons for the necessity of volunteers:•

It would be too expensive, too bureaucratic and formalized to meet all social needs ofa society without volunteers.

•

In capitalist societies volunteer social activities are able to mediate between classes.

•

Volunteers are more likely to criticise the status quo than public employees.

•

Modern society needs citizens’ initiatives: doing something in favour for thecommunity will encourage responsibility.

•

Volunteers have a rich background of different professions and gifts which bring new
perspectives into social work (Salomon 1917, 42ff.).

Volunteering – so the conclusion of Salomon – is not a primitive phase of social work that has
to be overcome but represents the social conscience of civil society and an additional form ofsocial work. Many social workers could improve their work if they would encourage andeducate volunteers. The danger is, however, the abuse of volunteer work as a substitution of
professional work.
2.5.2 Methods of Social Work
The main difference between professionals and volunteers is, next to the knowledge about
laws and society, the qualification in methods. The strength of social work is, other than inother helping professions like law and medicine, a perspective that sees persons in their
entirety (Salomon 1928, 9). Salomon distinguished material and personal areas of
responsibility. Material tasks in social work are:
1. The finding and arranging of money, housing, education, special institutions
or organisations;2. The creating of a network for relief actions;3. The arrangement of the social environment: adapting the external
circumstances to the needs of the client.

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Salomon was aware of the fact that point three is sometimes impossible for social work. For
example, what can social work do if there are no jobs or no cheap flats?
But she was also convinced that there is always something to start with, because she believedthat even though the social context produces many disadvantages people are not only the
product of their surroundings but also free and responsible for their lives. Therefore thepersonal tasks are also very important in social work:
1. Empathy: nobody will share their problems with a person they do not trust. To
inspire confidence you need to initiate a process of visiting and advising andthe gift of compassion.
2. Professional Distance: there is a limit to compassion. Social workers always
deal with the shadow-side of society and therefore they have the duty to carealso for themselves to save their capacity for work (Salomon suggested asabbatical break).
3. Empowerment: the main method to change the lives of clients is to encourage
and enforce their will, to ‘free their energy’ (Salomon 1926a, 5) best by help
for self-help. Above all social work should support clients in dealing with lifecrises: for example suddenly being a widow, becoming a mother, having
moved house and so on.
A precondition for professional social work is the social diagnosis, a representativeinterpretation of the external and internal life circumstances of the clients. Social diagnosis isalways a hermeneutic process and therefore one will never be able to follow ‘rules’.
Nevertheless there is the duty of distinguishing between facts, statements by neighbours,
opinions, circumstantial evidence and so on. Social workers have to be educated inrecognizing their own prejudice and bias and in dealing with them (Salomon 1926a, 16f.)
2.5.3 Social Work as a science and social work education
In contrast to those sciences which have the task to describe or to analyse (like philosophy orsociology) Social Work as a Science is obliged to think about action. The science of social
work should use all disciplines from medicine, psychology, pedagogy to social and politicalscience, if these disciplines can help solve social problems. Maybe sociology and pedagogy
are more important than others, but the only hierarchy Salomon would have accepted was thepre-eminence of ethics – according to her statement that in the 20th century it is no longer
possible to do social work only with the heart, but also not without it.
Salomon was convinced that modern science had already gathered a great deal of knowledge
about the reasons of poverty, illness and injustice, but that there was an increasing gap
between knowledge and action, between scientific and personal responsibility. Knowing
more, she states, does not lead automatically to better action. Salomon said that it is not only
important what you know, but to what use you put your knowledge. She criticised Germany
which, though leading in medical science, nevertheless has one of the highest rates of infantmortality (Salomon 1903b und1930c). Social work education should therefore always attend
to ethical questions behind neutral scientific subjects, because one cannot find scientific but
only ethical reasons against social injustice (she refers to the dispute about Darwin, Malthus
and Kropotkin, see Kropotkin 1987).

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But social work is not only a practical but also an intellectual profession: social workers haveto decide and their decisions may have serious consequences for the lives of their clients.
Therefore social work education cannot be only in-service training. Although Salomonemphasised and integrated a weekly four-hour field work period in her curriculum, social
science and formal knowledge was the basis at her school in Berlin. Above all social workers
should be educated in economics to understand the economic background of social problems(Salomon 1927, 93). Other subject areas were sociology, psychology, pedagogy, social
politics and knowledge about welfare (‘Wohlfahrtskunde’).
And last but not least, social work education should produce a special professional ethics withthree main demands:•

Do not abuse the power you have over your clients, but also use your chance toinfluence them to improve their situation.

•

Social Workers are not allowed to influence their clients to achieve external aims, but
only to achieve the personal aims of the client.

•

It is not allowed to make a moral judgement of a ‘weak’ client. In social work you will
always find a non-transparent mixture between destiny, guilt and needs (Salomon
1922b, 19).

3 Salomon’ s attitude towards international cooperation
As we have seen in part 2, social justice between rich and poor, men and women was thecentral idea in Salomon’s concept of Social Work and it is not surprising that international
cooperation is an integral part of this concept: social justice knows no boundaries, it is not anational but an international affair. Social work education should foster an awareness forthese interchanges. Every student should know about other countries and should be able tocompare the national development with the international.
From the very beginning Salomon herself was very well informed about developments anddebates in other countries. Her first important intellectual influence came from England andalready in her very first article in 1896 she criticized that Berlin had only three crèches forchildren while Paris had already 51.
Being an active member of the International Council of Women she learned to use theexperiences of the social movements in other countries for national progress in social reform.
Oppression of women was an international phenomenon, therefore the struggle against it
should also use international cooperation. What was right for Women’s Liberation – so
Salomon – is also right for the social reforms. The economy started to organize in aninternational context and so social work should do likewise. Social injustice was (and still is)a consequence of an unjust economic system that operates worldwide. Salomon’s lively
exchanges with international colleagues and friends (like Jane Addams in Chicago) weretwice interrupted through World War I and II. During the short period of growinginternational cooperation between 1918 and 1933 she became a leading person in theemerging process of international cooperation of social work and social work education.
Her international contacts after 1918 first had caused a lot of conflict with the nationalist partof the National Council of Women, where she was a member of the board. The other women
tried to prohibit her international work and that was a reason for her to leave the board of theSocial Work & Society, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2008
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German Council in 1920 after 20 years of cooperation. This was really a hard decision, but
Salomon was convinced that international solidarity between social workers and women was
the only way to prevent war in the future. International work - she said - is like social work work for the welfare of mankind. Social conscience has no boundaries. In a lecture in
Washington in 1923 she invited all social workers of the world:‘As social workers we are united in the conviction that the world cannot be redeemed, that it
cannot be freed .... until the ideal of solidarity is accepted by all, until those who are strong
renounce climbing to the top of the ladder, the steps of which are made of those whom they
have trodden down and crushed during their ascent; until those who are strong will be willing
to bear the burdens for the weak.’ (Salomon 1923, in: Muthesius 1958, 208)
In the following years Salomon published a many international comparisons, for instanceabout housing in the Netherlands, child protection in Norway, rural education in Denmark or
the centralisation of social services in Sweden. In 1937 she published the first international
survey of social work education in the world (Salomon 1937). She gave an overview of morethan one hundred schools and analysed their curricula. The existing differences – she said –were a consequence of the different social needs, different societies, histories and educational
systems in each country. Even though there were many parallels in the curricula (and in thefact that social work all over the world was a female profession) she warned against levellingthe differences and bringing all schools into line. On the contrary she encouraged every new
school to adapt their curriculum to the needs of their own country.
As already mentioned, Salomon was the chair of the first International Congress of Social
Work in Paris 1928 and became first President of IASSW. She also was active in preparing
the Second Social Work Conference in Frankfurt (Germany) in 1932. During these congresses
social workers and social work educators from many parts of the world, mostly from Europe,
discussed questions that are still topical today, for instance how important the different
sciences are for social work. They discussed professional ethics, methods, volunteering andgender issues (Salomon 1928a, 3f.; Dietrich 1929, 244; Première Conférence 1928, Volume
II).
In cooperation with the board of the IASSW3 Salomon started to discuss the foundation of aEuropean School for Social Work and succeeded in initiating two summer courses – one in
Belgium (1934) and one in the Netherlands (1935). They also discussed common research
projects. As we all know this process was interrupted by World War II.
After 1933 the German Welfare Schools that were members of IASSW tried to force thecommittee to dismiss Alice Salomon as president. It was really proof of the anti-racist attitudein the IASSW that they refused to do so, even though Salomon had lost all her positions inGermany.

3

Members of the first meeting of the IASSW had been – besides Salomon - Carl Mennicke and the Duchess
Schulenburg from Germany, Mme Brunschvicg, Mme Vallé Génairon and Mme Fuster from France, Miss
Macadam and Mrs. Stocks from Great Britain, Mme Wagner-Beck and Miss von Meyenburg from Switzerland,Prof. Helena Radlinska from Poland, Mrs. Marie Mulle from Belgium and Mme Necasova from Checoslovakia.
Two years later the IASSW had formed a secretariat. Members were: Dr. Breckenridge (USA), Mme Fuster(France), Miss Macadam (GB), Dr. Moltzer (Netherlands), Mme Mulle (Belgium), Mme Wagner-Beck(Switzerland) and Alice Salomon (Germany) (Salomon 1931).

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4 Conclusion: Why did Alice Salomon emphasise social justice and concrete action?
Though there were many social activities both in Catholic and Protestant Churches in German
history the interesting fact is that the main influences on professional social work came frommen and women from a Jewish background. Even though Salomon was baptised in 1914 (andone should respect this decision) it is impossible to overlook the parallels between her ethics
of social work and the ethics of the Jewish religion.
The ‘Societies for ethical culture’, founded in England, America, Germany etc., were one of
the first associations that organised professional social work. In those ‘Societies’ many Jewish
social reformers (like Jeanette Schwerin) were members. They did not want to replacereligion with science or ethics but they tried to found a new ethics of doing the right thingsand criticised the ‘old’ religions as dogmatic and passive (Jodl 1912, 578).
They promoted social activities that broke with the tradition of alms and charity anddemanded organised social work as a form of practical justice, as ‘Zedakah’ (cf. Schwerin
1894 in Fassmann 1996, 240f). Secular and professional social work was formulated as a
critical review of ancient Jewish traditions, as a protest against the state-orientated, Protestantmajority who neglected the question of social justice and emphasised individual ‘belief’ as the
only thing that could rescue man.
Actions speak louder than words and in the Jewish tradition the real act (of helping) is more
worth than thousands of right ‘opinions’. Zedakah is a Hebrew word and means justice andwelfare. Leo Baeck, one of the leading persons of the Jewish communities in Germany, says:‘Zedakah is the positive, the religious, the social justice’ (Baeck 1960, 216) It is not passionof the moment, no sentimental, fruitless mood, but the respect of your neighbour in doing
something for him. The status of the Jews as a minority in most European countries
prevented, so Baeck argues, the development of religious dogmas and shaped a preference forthe practice of religion in social acts above all because they needed mutual aid for survival(Baeck 1960, 7). Welfare then brought Jewish and Christian people together and in doing
what the Jewish religion demands they could also live assimilated to their Christiansurroundings.
The second question is, if Salomon’s ethics of social work is a result of her femalesocialisation. According to Carol Gilligan, women develop a different moral attitude that she
called ‘morals of responsibility’ in contrast to the male moral concept of formal rights. (Forinstance the question in the case of abortion for most men is, if the foetus has a ‘right’ to life.
Women however ask, who will be responsible for the baby; Gilligan 1989.)
This hypothesis is reminiscent of Salomon’s ethics of responsibility and of her definition of
female attitudes that are produced in the work of caring. Both being female and being from a
Jewish background may be reasons for the ethical foundation of Salomon’s social work
concept. And both positions, being Jewish and being a woman in the German society had one
interesting parallel. It was a position of powerlessness. Against the background of thisexperience grew Salomon’s conviction that violence is a bad and law is a good principle.
Especially women (as Salomon learned in the wars) will always, due to their physicalcondition, lose in a free struggle for power Salomon 1919, 16).
Until today social work receives its main innovative influences through social movements by
women or ethnic minorities (see for example ‘Black empowerment’, Solomon 1976), so thatsocial work should stay open and be a cooperative partner to them.

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Author´s Address:
Prof. Dr. phil. habil. Carola Kuhlmann
University of Applied Sciences Bochum
Immanuel-Kantstr. 18-20
D-44803 Bochum
Germany
Email: kuhlmann@efh-bochum.deSocial Work & Society, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2008
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