Intersectional History of Social Work in University Didactics

Autobiographical Sources of Female Welfare Workers from the Vienna Youth Office in the 1930s

Abstract

The historiography of social work receives significant impulses from intersectional perspectives and raises new questions that also concern the didactics of history in higher education. A teaching concept was implemented in the context of a course on the history of social work. The profession for women, which emerged in Austria in the 1920s, established itself primarily in the Youth Welfare Office. Two sources, the personal testimonies of Jewish female social workers who had to flee in the 1930s, provide an insight into the everyday life of this institution of the City of Vienna. Together with social work students, these sources were analysed using theories of intersectionality on a structural, symbolic, and individual level. In this way, complex discriminations and privileges in the institution’s mission between help and control were reconstructed.