Alice Salomon is best known for her pioneering ideas in the emerging field of social work and her critical role in the feminist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. She was crucial in establishing several international committees and organizing conferences in order to promote global dialogue and collaboration in both areas. The focus of this essay is one of Salomon's lesser-known texts, Kultur im Werden: Amerikanische Reiseeindrücke (Culture in the Making: Impressions from Travels in America, 1924), in which she presents her impressions from two trips to the United States, one in the summer of 1923 for the National Conference of Social Work in Washington, DC, and the other during the winter of 1924 to give a series of lectures throughout the country. Kultur im Werden explores how and why American women were able to successfully establish social welfare programs, whereas German women were not. For Salomon, the convergence of these innovative and motivated women in this resourceful place resulted in the ideal conditions to combine the theoretical and practical components of helping others, and she defines the outcome as women's sociological and social activity.

Salomon was born in Berlin in 1872 to an assimilated Jewish, middle-class family; she converted to Protestantism in 1914. She was a contributor to the seminal Handbuch der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Guide to the German Women's Movement, 1901) and served on the International Council of Women from 1909 until her death in 1948. With a dissertation in 1908 on the gendered inequality of pay, she was one of the first German women to receive a doctorate degree. After completing her education, she began establishing schools that taught social work and authored textbooks on the subject. Salomon helped found the International Committee of Schools of Social Work, an institution that still exists today.