Gender and family policy as well as educational science discourses on the development of the Austrian kindergarten system using the case study of the province of Salzburg from 1945-1985 (en)

Gender and family policy as well as educational science discourses on the development of the Austrian kindergarten system using the case study of the province of Salzburg from 1945-1985

Dissertation project by Daniela Steinberger MA

The care and education of children outside the home in pre-school facilities has been the focus of public, political and scientific attention since its inception. Initially, it was primarily the childcare institutions that emerged in the first half of the 19th century in what is now Austria, which mainly supervised the children of the proletariat, but today it is the elementary educational institutions that are primarily known in Austria as kindergartens and are part of Austria’s social infrastructure.

The dissertation project aims to provide a historical and discourse-analytical account of the development of the Salzburg kindergarten system in the period from 1945 to 1985 using archive sources from the Salzburg Provincial Archives and the Archdiocese of Salzburg Archives. The historiography of the legislation regulating the Salzburg kindergarten system initially serves as contextualization, and the discourse strands derived from it form the topics to be reflected upon. In particular, the historical role of women* comes into focus. Gainful employment posed a particular challenge for women* as mothers*. If children could not be cared for within the family circle, the need for extra-familial childcare took center stage (see Lex-Nalis/Rösler 2019).

In this respect, the research interest relates to the institutional history of the kindergarten and the role of working women* as mothers* and leads to the (research-guiding) questions of what significance – communicated by politics and science – the kindergarten system had in the province of Salzburg and how discourses around the gainful employment of women* as mothers* were expressed.

Main supervision: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Birgit Bütow (University of Salzburg)
Secondary supervision: Ass.-Prof. Mag. Mag. Dr. Ulrich Leitner (University of Innsbruck)