Profile

Career Focus:

Feminist social work with girls, protection of women and girls against violence, care work for people with mental impairments, political activism to improve the conditions for social work

Biography

Melitta Nicponsky is an Austrian social worker who helped establish feminist social work with girls in the Association of Viennese Youth Centers as well as provided counseling for over a decade in the social and labor market counseling center for girls and young women Amandas Matz. Subsequently, Nicponsky worked the following ten years in the autonomous Notruf - Beratungsstelle für vergewaltigte Frauen und Mädchen (engl. Emergency Call - Counseling Center for raped women and girls) and offered counseling, process support for raped women and girls, and training on the topic of violence against women. After more than 25 years, Nicponsky then changed her professional field again, first accompanying and coaching home helpers, she then later cared for adults with mental impairments.

Nicponsky grew up together with her younger sister in a working-class household in Vienna. Her father, originally a barrel maker, worked in a workshop for the Austrian Federal Railways after the war. Her mother was a factory worker, caregiver for the elderly, and later a janitor in the house where she lived with her family. Nicponsky enjoyed living in the old building, where all the residents knew each other, and in the working-class district of Ottakring in Vienna, where she had her first encounter with immigrant families in the "Tröpferlbad" (public bathing facility). (Gainful) employment had a positive connotation in her family, as did work done by women. As a girl, she had "[...] learned how to do simple carpentry work [...], just like I learned to cut the potato salad."

Due to the strong social orientation of the secondary school Nicponsky attended, "the world was opened up" to her early on; students were encouraged to become aware of social problems in their environment and everyday lives . Back then, as a 15-year-old female student at an upper secondary school, she could have imagined becoming a forester or a plastics technician - but in the 1970s, these training programs were still too strongly linked to male professional trajectories. A lack of role models and too little insight into these professional possibilities persuaded Nicponsky to take up a more "women-specific" profession after graduating from high school. She went to the Social Academy as the youngest student of her year and became a social worker.

Nicponsky's view of the living conditions of women and workers shaped her from early on: "I always wondered why in apartments where the people who sweat the most at work live, there are the fewest showers" and "[...] that women have been devalued for what they do."

As a young social worker who had completed training in socio-cultural animation (a secondary education, which aims to engage people to actively participate in social life in a creative and target-oriented way), she was active in a variety of fields: she offered theater workshops in the City of the Child (an open housing project for children who could no longer live at home), then worked in the Saftbeisl (a recreational facility for alcoholics), and subsequently accompanied predominantly male youths in a youth center in the Großfeldsiedlung (a satellite town on the outskirts of Vienna). It was there that her attention increasingly turned to the realities of girls' lives and she and the other social workers realized "how little space girls get [in society] [...] and that we have to create it first." Together, they then developed the idea of feminist girls' work and began to implement it in practice by setting up targeted programs such as girls' groups or the girls' disco, to create spaces for girls. In this context, Nicponsky was also actively involved in the founding of the working group for feminist girls' work in the Association of Vienna Youth Centers.

At the same time, four women in Vienna founded Amandas Matz, a feminist project for girls and young women. Five years later, the initially small start-up (which was also supported by the Association of Youth Centers Vienna) had become an established labor market counseling center for girls and young women. In 1990, Nicponsky joined the project Amandas Matz as a counselor. During her 10 years of autonomous and self-determined work, Nicponsky found the exchange with the other social workers in the feminist girls' work group particularly enriching and supportive. However, when Amanda's Matz was incorporated into a large service association of the city of Vienna, Nicponsky left the counseling center.

She then began working for one of the oldest feminist projects in Vienna, the autonomous Women's Emergency Hotline, which was founded in the mid-1980s. For the next 11 years, she focused her work on counseling and supporting women and girls who had been raped, in court, as well as on workshops in schools in which the students' everyday experiences of violence were discussed and actions against verbal or physical attacks were developed.

For a long time, the work of the Women's Emergency Hotline was carried out under precarious conditions. Funding was insufficient, temporary, and insecure, so that the (exclusively female) staff could not be employed continuously. Scarcity of resources and the constant struggle for political recognition of the institution also made social work more difficult. Nonetheless, Nicponsky is proud of the fact that neither the working conditions nor the omnipresent topic of violence had a negative effect on teamwork.

After years of working in self-determined feminist teams, Nicponsky changed the focus and form of her work: Firstly, she started to accompany and mentor mobile home helpers and secondly, she began to care for mentally impaired adults in classically hierarchically organized social organizations herself – a job she held until her retirement in 2022.

Nicponsky has observed that since the 1990s, social work has been increasingly shaped by neoliberal ideas and structures. ‘Hard’ facts, the greatest possible efficiency, and measurable goals have become more important than relationship-oriented work. That is why staff cuts burden the social workers as well as their clients.In this context, Nicponsky has always been concerned with the struggle for favorable working conditions for social workers, through which quality care for clients can only become possible. She is also committed to opportunities for ongoing training. Nicponsky considers conversation in all its facets and possibilities to be the central method for establishing real contact with clients. The development of a sustainable relationship is the most important basis for all social work activities: "We simply learn best through and with the help of relationships. That's true for any relationship, including professional helping relationships."

Sociocultural animation, crisis intervention, trauma processing, feminist social counseling with Agnes Büchele and Sabine Scheffler, and additional specialized training in validation work with dementia patients are just a few of the trainings she has undertaken in the course of her life. Nicponsky counts companions from both her private and professional life among her mentors: "There was an aunt who was everything to us, a great-aunt and grandmother. The woman was very independent, she was a role model for me, self-confident." Other mentors were her supervisor of many years, as well as the director of the Social Academy, the founding women of Amanda's Matz, colleagues at the trade union and a male friend who cooked for her in difficult times.

As a counterbalance to social work, Nicponsky has always been very active politically. In this context, she has been involved in demonstrations against the government's austerity packages or for the continuation of the Autonomous Emergency Call in the 1980s. Furthermore, Nicponsky was also involved in the marches for the "Frauenkampftag" (engl. Women’s Fight Day) on March 8 and on November 25 (day against violence against women), as well as currently in the trade union-affiliated platform "Social but not stupid", which campaigns for better conditions for social workers.

By Emelie Rack & Susanne Hahnl (2022)

To cite this article, see Credits

Selected Works

By and about Melitta Nicponsky

Nicponsky, M. (2021, October 15). Interview with S. Hahnl [Video recording].