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Gender, Race and Class in Definitions of Modern Social Work in Interwar Romania
| This paper proposes an incursion into the definitions of modern scientific social work in interwar Romania and how they were developed around particular understandings of gender, race and class divides. In the period, modern social work was broadly defined in opposition to other more empirical and traditional forms of social care in the sense that it had to rely on a solid scientific knowledge and methodology. Yet, this scientific knowledge and methodology, most of the time borrowed by Romanian promoters of social assistance from the experience of Western Europe and the United States, needed to be adapted to Romanian realities. The adaptation of a knowledge and methodology, already developed around particular understandings of gender, race and class understandings determined the re-formulation of these concepts according to interwar Romanian political, economic and social priorities and to what in the period was defined as a “national specificity”. This paper proposes an analysis of the ways in which these particular formulations of gender, race and class influenced the emergence of modern scientific social work in interwar Romania.
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