Ann Taylor Allen. Women in Twentieth-Century Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ix + 208 pp. $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4039-4193-0.

Reviewed by Jason Tebbe (Department of History, Stephen F. Austin State University)
Published on H-German (May, 2008)

Unfinished Emancipation

Europe's twentieth century was one of the most violent and turbulent in its history, especially for women. While the last century brought horrid destruction and suffering, it also opened unprecedented opportunities for women to participate in politics, society, and culture. Ann Taylor Allen, the distinguished historian of German feminism and motherhood, explores this paradox in her brief new survey of European women in the twentieth century. She focuses her narrative on the issue of emancipation and considers "gender integration" the dominant trend in the history of twentieth-century women. However, Allen qualifies the extent of this integration, ultimately concluding that emancipation has been incomplete because women are still expected to be the primary care-givers, raisers of children, and keepers of homes. Overall, Allen offers a compelling narrative and a fine introduction to the topic of European women's history in the last century.

Summing up the history of half of Europe's population over an eventful hundred-year period and in less than two hundred pages is certainly no mean feat, and Allen manages to do so by concentrating on the themes of political participation, workplace opportunities, family responsibilities, definitions of gender roles, and feminism. These motifs are woven into each chapter and used to evaluate the progress of women's emancipation throughout. Allen begins with the First World War, emphasizing the participation of women both at the battlefield and on the home front. Women seized the employment and political opportunities opened by total war but their gains also engendered considerable backlash. The next two chapters treat Europe between the wars, one concerned with "democracies" and the other with "authoritarian and totalitarian" states. According to Allen, the former were marked by new avenues for women to express themselves as well as a concerted reaction against women in the workplace. She contrasts these developments to those in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, where women were subordinated to the state. The following chapter on the Second World War examines the roles of women on the battlefield, home front, in the Holocaust, and in resistance movements.

One of the book's great strengths is its thorough coverage of the postwar period, a time still underrepresented in many surveys of the twentieth century. In the fifth chapter, Allen examines western Europe from 1945 to 1970, and nuances the traditional stereotypes of the postwar period as a time of reaction against women's rights. She points out that legal restrictions against women fell away, and new thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir laid the groundwork for modern feminism. The next chapter contrasts western Europe to the Soviet bloc, a place where women saw themselves as "too emancipated." Although communism had promised equality for women, the realities of a harsh double burden and political marginalization clashed with official rhetoric. From this point, Allen moves to what may be her strongest chapter, an account of feminism after 1968 that emphasizes both political action and intellectual theory. Although she sees the movement losing strength in the 1980s, it still managed to change marriage and reproductive laws, and to shift mentalities permanently. In this chapter as elsewhere, the author admirably avoids limiting her narrative to only the biggest countries, citing examples from Greece to Denmark to Ireland. Furthermore, she manages to show the diversity within the women's movement rather than focusing exclusively on the most famous figures.

The last two chapters deal with the status of women in contemporary Europe. Post-communist Europe has been marked by attempts to roll back women's rights, a situation Allen calls "democracy without women." In contrast, western governments and the European Union have committed themselves to policies of "gender mainstreaming" to ensure a higher profile for women. Despite these attempts, Allen concludes on a pessimistic note, pointing out that while women's roles have undergone tremendous change in the last century, expectations for men have not. Her conclusion constitutes an elegant and forthright plea to avoid complacency and continue the struggle for gender equality. Although Allen is right to remind readers that much still needs to be done to attain women's equality, in doing so she somewhat understates the utterly revolutionary changes in women's roles wrought by the twentieth century.

Allen's book is unabashedly a history of women, not of gender. This orientation has the benefit of drawing out the agency of women in twentieth century, and the author accordingly peppers her account with anecdotes about individual women. On the other hand, her emphasis on women over gender means that the book can be rather traditional in its attempts to find "where the women are" amidst the grand narrative of European history. Despite this shortcoming, Allen's account is astonishing in its ability to synthesize such a diverse history into such a short space. This book is an excellent place to get a general background on the subject and could be used profitably in undergraduate history classes. Short, synthetic surveys such as this are rarely exalted but nonetheless indispensable. Ann Taylor Allen has crafted a particularly fine representative of the genre.

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Citation: Jason Tebbe. Review of Allen, Ann Taylor, Women in Twentieth-Century Europe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14543

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