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RETRACTED - Agents of Change? Families, Welfare and Democracy in Mid-to-Late Twentieth Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2022

Jennifer Crane Open the ORCID record for Jennifer Crane [Opens in a new window]
Jennifer Crane*
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School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Rd, Bristol BS8 1SS, United Kingdom
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Abstract

This special issue argues that historical work must take ‘the family’ seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change. The issue offers seven case studies from across the North to South and East to West of Europe, ranging from the 1940s until the present, and looking across authoritarian, liberal democratic, communist and fascistic systems. In all case studies, authors look ‘from below’ to show how individuals thought of themselves, in messy and complex ways, as living within ‘families’. This powerful yet shifting idea shaped people's social lives, political choices and activism. This introduction explores grand narratives of welfare and democracy in the twentieth century; offers a new working approach to analysis of family ‘agency’; and then summarises the collection's main findings around chronologies and geographies of change.

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Introduction
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Contemporary European History , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , August 2023 , e1
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 This collection is indebted to the work of Laura Lee Downs, Paul Ginsborg and Sally Alexander, who have been central to establishing and maintaining an EUI network in this area, ‘Trajectories in the Quest for Welfare and Democracy: Voluntary Associations, Families, and the State, 1880s to Present’. The majority of contributors in this special issue were brought together, by Laura, Paul and Sally at a workshop at the EUI in November 2017. Jennifer Crane was since asked to edit this volume, but remains very grateful for the initial work of these scholars and their network. I gratefully acknowledge that my research time to work on this introduction was funded by a Wellcome Research Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number: 212449/Z/18/Z].

2 Titmuss, Richard, Problems of Social Policy (London, 1950)Google Scholar. Virginia Berridge and John Welshman have supported the idea that war shifted political attitudes, leading ‘to a determination to do something about the burden of poverty and ill health which had been revealed’: Berridge, Virginia, Health and Society in Britain Since 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Welshman, John, ‘Evacuation and Social Policy during the Second World War: Myth and Reality’, Twentieth Century British History, 9 (1998), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Historians such as George Gosling, Martin Gorsky, Daniel Fox and John Stevenson, meanwhile, have emphasised the continuities between post- and pre-war welfare settlements, thus challenging the idea that evacuation was a highly significant shifting force: Fox, Daniel M., ‘The National Health Service and the Second World War’, in Smith, Harold, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 32–57Google Scholar; Stevenson, John, ‘Planner's Moon? The Second World War and the Planning Movement’, in Smith, H. L., ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 58–77Google Scholar.

3 Hendrick, Harry, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate (Portland: Policy Press, 2003), 128–9Google Scholar.

4 Harry Hendrick, ‘Children as Human Capital: Some Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Social Investment’, in Meike S. Baader, Florian Esser and Wolfgang Schoer, eds., Kindheiiten in der Moderne. Eine Geschichte der Sorge. November 2011. Draft Paper, 6.

5 Ginsborg, Paul, ‘The Politics of the Family in Twentieth-Century Europe’, Contemporary European History, 9, 3 (2000), 421–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Anderson, Peter, ‘The Struggle over the Evacuation to the United Kingdom and Repatriation of Basque Refugee Children in the Spanish Civil War: Symbols and Souls’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52, 2 (2017), 297–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid., 298.

8 Stokes, Lauren, ‘“An Invasion of Guest Worker Children”: Welfare Reform and the Stigmatisation of Family Migration in West Germany’, Contemporary European History, 28 (2019), 372–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Chappel, James, ‘Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany’, Contemporary European History, 26, 1 (2017), 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Anderson, Peter, ‘The Struggle over the Evacuation to the United Kingdom and Repatriation of Basque Refugee Children in the Spanish Civil War: Symbols and Souls’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52, 2 (2017), 300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Stokes, ‘“An Invasion of Guest Worker Children”’, 372–89.

12 Chappel, ‘Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age’, 86.

13 Waters, Elizabeth, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Family’, Contemporary European History, 4, 3 (1995), 275–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Shorter, Edward, Knodel, John and Van De Walle, Etienne, ‘The Decline of Non-Marital Fertility in Europe, 1880–1940’, Population Studies, 25, 3 (1971), 375Google ScholarPubMed.

15 Ibid., 377.

16 Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, Suppl. 11 (2016), 13.

17 Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 131–4Google Scholar.

18 Though disappointingly this collection has not managed to include an article focused on the experiences of LGBTQ+ families, this definition draws on the ideas from the article: Cook, Matt, ‘Families of Choice? George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Gender & History, 22, 1 (2010), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Relevant forthcoming work, which will further illuminate this area, will develop from Dr Hannah Elizabeth's Wellcome-funded project, ‘What's love got to do with it? Building and maintaining HIV-affected families through love, care and activism in Edinburgh 1981–2016’.

19 Ginsborg discusses this in: Ginsborg, ‘The Politics of the Family’, 413. Humphries makes this case during a lively and insightful critique of Ferdinand Mount's book, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage (1982): Humphries, Jane, ‘The Reified Family and Tory Social Policy’, Economy and Society, 13, 1 (1984), 101Google Scholar.

20 May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 10Google Scholar.

21 Ginsborg, ‘The Politics of the Family’, 411.

22 Ibid.

23 Barron, Hester and Siebrecht, Claudia, Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, c. 1870–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 In influential examples from early women's history see, for example: Rowbotham, Sheila, Hidden from History (London: Pluto Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Lerner, Gerda, ‘Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective’, Feminist Studies 3 (1975), 5–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Gleason, Mona, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education’, History of Education, 45, 4 (2016), 446–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Lynn M., ‘Historicising Agency’, Gender & History, 28, 2 (2016), 324–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Susan A., ‘Assent as Agency in the Early Years of the Children of the American Revolution’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 9, 1 (2016), 48–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abebe, Tatek, ‘Reconceptualising Children's Agency as Continuum and Interdependence’, Social Sciences, 8, 3 (2019), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See introduction to this special issue and also its articles: Honeck, Mischa and Rosenberg, Gabriel, ‘Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, 38, 2 (2014), 233–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in particular Chatelain, Marcia, ‘International Sisterhood: Cold War Girl Scouts Encounter the World’, Diplomatic History, 38, 2 (2014), 261–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guillory, Sean, ‘Culture Clash in the Socialist Paradise: Soviet Patronage and African Students’ Urbanity in the Soviet Union’, Diplomatic History, 38, 2 (2014), 271–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Millard, Chris, ‘Using Personal Experience in the Academic Medical Humanities: A Genealogy’, Social Theory & Health, 18 (2019), 184–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Gleadle, Kathryn and Hanley, Ryan, ‘Children Against Slavery: Juvenile Agency and the Sugar Boycotts in Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (2020), 97–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, ‘Assent as Agency’, 48–65; Abebe, Tatek, ‘Reconceptualising Children's Agency as Continuum and Interdependence’, Social Sciences, 8, 3 (2019), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Ginsborg, ‘The Politics of the Family’, 441.

29 Chappel, ‘Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age’, 85–109; Lewis, Jane, ‘Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes’, Journal of European Social Policy, 2, 3 (1992), 159–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fishman, Sarah, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

30 Ginsborg, ‘The Politics of the Family’, 441.

31 Ibid.

32 Peacock, Margaret E., Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haberlen, Joachim C., Keck-Szajbel, Mark and Mahoney, Kate, The Politics of Authenicity: Countercultures and Radical Movements Across the Iron Curtain, 1968–1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2019)Google Scholar. See also: Laura Lee Downs, ‘ERC grant: Reframing welfare history in modern Europe’, https://www.eui.eu/ServicesAndAdmin/CommunicationsService/News/2020/ERC-grant-Reframing-welfare-history-in-modern-Europe (22 Feb. 2020); Sonja Levsen and Jörg Requate, ‘Why Europe, Which Europe? Present Challenges and Future Avenues for Doing European History’, Hypotheses, https://europedebate.hypotheses.org/86 (22 Mar. 2021); Sarah Marks, ‘What Difference Has the Opening of the Archives since 1991 Made to the Historiography of Communism and the Cold War?’, in Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan, eds., Researching and Teaching Twentieth Century History (London: The Historical Association, 2020), pp. 34–7.

33 For rich further discussions of this complex area, see also the introductions and contents of the following two special issues: Olszynko-Gryn, Jesse and Rusterholz, Caroline, ‘Reproductive Politics in Twentieth Century France and Britain’, Medical History, 63, 2 (2019), 117–33CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Ignaciuk, Agata and Kelly, Laura, ‘Contraception and Catholicism in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Perspectives on Expert, Activist and Intimate Practices’, Medical History, 64, 2 (2020), 163–72CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See also: Hilevych, Yuliya, ‘Later, if Ever: Family Influences on the Transition from First to Second Birth in Soviet Ukraine’, Continuity and Change, 31, 2 (2016), 275–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 This theme is also explored by two articles, both examining how familial ties inhibited active participation in state systems: John Foot's examination of Comasina, Italy, between the 1950s and 1970s, and R.J.B. Bosworth's analysis of Italians’ focus on daily family life to ‘resist or even ignore the contradictions and oppression of life under a dictatorship’ in fascist Italy (John Foot, ‘The Family and the “Economic Miracle”: Social Transformation, Work, Leisure and Development at Bovisa and Comasina (Milan)’, Contemporary European History, 4, 3 (1995), 329; Bosworth, R.J.B., ‘Everyday Mussolinism: Friends, Family, Locality and Violence in Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History, 14, 1 (2005), 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Paul Ginsborg, ‘Familism’, in Paul Ginsborg, ed., Stato dell'Italia (Milan: Il Saggiatore Burno Mondadori, 1994), as cited in ibid., 330.

36 See also in this area: Sarah Knott, Mother: An Unconventional History (New York: Viking, 2019); the introduction and articles in the following special issue: Sarah Knott and Emma Griffin (eds), ‘Special Issue Supplement 15: Mothering's Many Labours’, Past & Present, 246 (2020).

37 This tension has also been highlighted by Ellen Boucher, who has analysed how the Save the Children Fund sought to cultivate a new vision of internationalism in Britain after the Second World War, while national press and politicians in Britain focused on ‘[h]ostility towards Germany and Austria’: Ellen Boucher, ‘Cultivating Internationalism: Save the Children Fund, Public Opinion and the Meaning of Child Relief, 1919–24’, in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas, eds., Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain Between the Wars (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2011), 174.

38 Anderson, Peter, ‘The Struggle over the Evacuation to the United Kingdom and Repatriation of Basque Refugee Children in the Spanish Civil War: Symbols and Souls’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52, 2 (2017), 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Stokes, ‘An Invasion of Guest Worker Children’, 374–5.

40 Ginsborg, ‘The Politics of the Family’, 444.