Engendering Social Work Education under State Socialism in Yugoslavia

Abstract

Prior to the 1990s, social work in Eastern Europe lagged far behind its Western counterparts. Perceived as an activity for petite-bourgeois women in the early twentieth century, it was deemed an unsuitable activity by the communist regimes which came to power following the Second World War. The belief that socialism would be able to eradicate the need for social work interventions and would ensure the well being of every ‘human being’ was also prevalent at the time. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, in Hungary, some university-level social work courses were terminated in 1948 and the Ministry of Welfare and the Social Policy Institute ceased their activities in the following year (Juhasz, 2003). In 1952, the departments of social work at universities in Czechoslovakia and Poland were also terminated (Seibel, 2001). In Romania, the Principesa Ileana Superior School for Social Assistance, which had opened in 1929, was first transformed into the Institute for Social Assistance in 1948 and then into the Institute for Social provision in 1951, before finally being shut down in 1952 (Rachieru, 2005).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.