Lecture | CMGI Brown Bag Seminar
Tracing the roots of a women’s network between the two feminist waves, the immediate postwar period, with a focus on the late 1940 and the 1950s
- Date
- Wednesday 11 December 2024
- Time
- Series
- CMGI Brown Bag Seminars 2024-2025
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
In the immediate postwar period, authorities and policy makers perceived professional social work a potential solution to multiple problems: such as displaced persons as a result of the Second World War, broken families, and the arrival of large numbers of postcolonial migrants. The recently founded United Nations even organised seminars on topics related to social work in the broadest sense. Also, international organisations on social work came into existence and organised such conferences. On all these occasions passionate female social work experts from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean met each other and exchanged ideas to improve social work. In this way they formed a network, called by themselves with the intriguing name ‘girls’ network’ which would allegedly have formed a counterweight to the well-known ‘old boys’ network’. In this paper I analyse the origins of this network and the place of especially Dutch female social work pioneers such as Marie Kamphuis in this community of female social reformers and social work experts. Based on the extensive correspondence of British social work expert Eileen Younghusband I conclude that the ‘girls’ network’ would not have come into existence without the combination of the transnational, maternalist tradition in the women’s movement and the professionalising tendency in social work during that period.