Grand Narratives

Grand narratives of European welfare and democracy over the twentieth century often place families at the whim and behest of warfare, state politics and demographic and cultural change. Warfare across and beyond Europe is particularly central to these narratives, as a disruptor of family life, but also as moments in which families appear as a symbol of hope and reconstruction. Vast historiographies surround, for example, the evacuation of children during the Second World War across Europe, perceived to protect future families and generations. This research is very much tied to ideas of welfare – in British debates, historians continue to contest and nuance the interpretation of Richard Titmuss that evacuation, revealing the state of working-class children and their health, was a key motivator behind the introduction of the welfare state.Footnote ² These works are significant in connecting historiographies around welfare and warfare but, at the same time, often struggle to centre the experiences of family life or childhood – echoing the critique of Harry Hendrick that the familial issues of separation and emotional adjustment were ‘rarely taken seriously by those who made policy’ and indeed that rather ‘much more important was the influence of political and economic calculations’.Footnote ³ Hendrick argues that the work of ‘social investigators, eugenically inclined pronatalists and, most influentially, child psychiatrists/psychoanalysts and social workers’ all instead propagated a wartime notion of children as ‘social investments’, whose futures must be protected because they determined the future of British society.Footnote ⁴ Within this formulation, the family likewise was a unit to be mobilised or utilised by social policy makers and professions, rather than an independent agent of change.

Further entrenching the prioritisation of the state as the central actor in existing historiographies, significant literatures also consider ways in which European dictatorships have separated families and subjected them to political violence, coercion and control. In an issue of Contemporary European History, Paul Ginsborg described how the regimes of Adolf Hitler, the communists of the Soviet Union and Francisco Franco persecuted and discriminated against families deemed ‘hereditarily unfit’, ‘hostile’, ‘worthless’, ‘foreign’ and ‘disease-ridden’.Footnote ⁵ Fleeing state violence – from their own and nearby governments – refugees moved across Europe: from the Basque Country to the United Kingdom during the Spanish Civil War; or from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland and Poland to Britain, Belgium, Sweden, France and Holland before the Second World War.Footnote ⁶ These movements, Peter Anderson has argued, can be perceived as a lens through which to understand ‘entangled relationship[s]’ between campaigners across borders, as well as ‘battle[s] for control’ of ‘children's minds or souls’.Footnote ⁷ Once more, as in literatures about the recruitment of migrants across Europe for the labour market, the family is presented as an object for government, voluntary or professional visions of recovery, reconstruction and control.Footnote ⁸ Children's and families’ ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ are represented as malleable and available resources in historiography, as well as in historical policies and representations.

States have also mobilised their welfare systems – a central object of interest within this special issue – to manipulate and reshape family life. Previous scholarship has looked to consider, for example, political discussions around whether family life should be protected by the state or shaped by it – a distinction framed by approaching state-family relations ‘from above’.Footnote ⁹ State welfare systems could disrupt family lives – taking children into care – or enrich and support them. This simple dichotomy has been complicated, meanwhile, by the politicisation of welfare systems used to, for example, take children into care if their parents were deemed ‘morally unfit’ because of their ‘religious failings’, or if their families opposed current political systems, for example as in 1920s Spain during the authoritarian governance of General Primo de Rivera, and during the Spanish Civil War.Footnote ¹⁰ The idea of ‘welfare’, likewise, could be used to disenfranchise disadvantaged or migrant groups: Lauren Stokes has outlined how in West Germany, from 1974, representations of child migrants as ‘welfare migrants’ presented family reunification as illegitimate.Footnote ¹¹

Much existing historiography therefore focuses closely on the ideology and ideas of family – on familialism – rather than on the agency and actions of families themselves and the power of their everyday, and indeed at times remarkable, lives. Certainly, existing historiography usefully demonstrates ways in which governments have sought to exploit the potential of the family, creating experimental and interventionist ‘utopian’ schemes. These schemes have sought to reshape society, but also, at times, humanity, for example through selective sterilisation, pronatalism and the provision – or absence – of state childcare and education. Families in this vision may be protectors of future hopes or offer ways to reconcile and recover from violent ideological pasts.Footnote ¹² The family has not always been central to ideological life, and scholars have considered the absence, as well as the presence, of familialism within state apparatus. Elizabeth Waters has argued that the Bolsheviks in Russia did not make the family central, and indeed rather expressed interest in liberating women and creating a more productive society, by supporting community, rather than family or women's, responsibility for childcare, housework and home-making (while still often assuming that women would be the primary providers of such work, merely organised through state-managed public systems).Footnote ¹³

Families are thus often presented in existing historiography as respondents to, or symbolic within, large-scale change. Other strands of historiography still consider the family as a demographic unit, to be analysed and assessed in terms of its quantitative structures. Edward Shorter, John Knodel and Etienne Van de Walle, for example, have argued that between 1880 and 1940, ‘illegitimate’ fertility in Europe – childbirth outside of marriage – fell ‘precipitously’, by 50 per cent or more in most countries. Despite exceptions in terms of, for example, Britain, Switzerland and the Netherlands (where decline started earlier in the century) or Portugal and Sweden (where decline started later), these authors argue that the parallels in timing and pace of decline across Europe was ‘close’ in a large number of countries and provinces.Footnote ¹⁴ After 1940, the authors write, some countries experienced an ‘illegitimacy boom’.Footnote ¹⁵ These types of demographic histories provide analysis of family structure; and yet, this special issue contends, to understand the meanings of these changes – and indeed their causes, and the causes of such national variation – we must simultaneously utilise sources which represent the qualitative experiences and lives of those affected. Analysing families as ‘agents of change’, as in this special issue, enables us to understand the parallels and specificities in national stories, and to see how everyday life interacts dynamically with global change.

Redefining Family

As Alexandra Walsham has argued, ‘working definitions’ are ‘themselves crucial tools for rethinking existing approaches’.Footnote ¹⁶ This special issue argues that we must redefine ‘family’ in a broad, dynamic, expansive way which both requires a shift in definition and, in parallel, a rethinking of this unit's role, relevance and relationships to welfare and democracy, whereby family life is placed centrally as an agent of change, not merely as a passive recipient or bystander. In terms of existing definitions of family, a classic formulation by Raymond Williams tells us that the term ‘family’ only came into English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, emerging from words for ‘household’ and ‘servant’. The idea of the family as ‘the small kin-group, usually living in one house’ became powerful by the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ This kind of narrow definition – that focuses on the shape of families, rather than their meaning – fails to recognise the ways in which family life has been defined in relation to moral and cultural values. Certainly, over the mid-to-late twentieth century, ideas of ‘normality’, ‘stability’ and the ‘natural’ permeated and shaped how families were recognised and rewarded in welfare states, and how individuals themselves constituted and discussed their roles in the household and domestic spaces.

Many of the governmental and bureaucratic categories encountered in this collection operated with tight categories of ‘family’, which often revolved around heteronormative models of masculine leadership in married heterosexual couples. Official inquiries, Lindsey Earner-Bryne argues, ‘generalise[d]’ about the family ‘without due attention to differentials of power and wider structural issues’. Yet, as contributors repeatedly demonstrate, the families which emerged, lived and coped within these systems were not the two-parent and two-child models which the systems assumed. Accordingly, and to recognise the significance of daily life, this special issue takes the broadest possible definition of families. It recognises that ‘families’ have been constructed beyond biological boundaries, and to reflect a series of personal, community and structural settlements and accommodations.Footnote ¹⁸ This broad definition enables the volume to scope out connections between the shape of families and the moral politics which have been formed around their political actions and daily lives.

Indeed, various moral visions of the family are significant throughout this collection: articles explore how cultural and social norms inflected visions of the family as ‘functional’, ‘new’ and ‘old’, ‘market-conforming’, ‘strong’, ‘civilised’, ‘patriarchal’ and a solution to, or cause of, moral dilemmas. Contributors also analyse a range of family structures, variously brought together by service, generation, duty or payment. Groups have sought out social and economic benefit – from churches, charities and state – by defining themselves as ‘family’, and thus have lived their lives in accordance with this idea, reshaping it accordingly. Families themselves have resisted state and professional categories, as well as having adapted to them. We see in this analysis how individuals whose biological families may not have adequately met their needs sought to readopt this concept to reflect the material conditions of their lives.

Recognising this broad and expansive definition of family life also means recognising the premise that, for individuals and in culture, families negotiate everyday and political meaning. Families are intimately tied to – and defined by – the most fundamental human events: birth and death, as well as by complex and powerful social rituals around marriage, separation and friendship. Families are key providers of individual ‘fulfilment’, social care and formal and informal education, but also, at times, responsible for psychological trauma, frustrated ambition and unhappiness. The family thus has much potential to provide services, and to shape future citizens and their subjectivities as ‘docile’, ‘productive’ or ‘liberated’. Paul Ginsborg and Jane Humphries have also discussed how the family can be ‘subversive’, and, as Humphries writes, ‘resist impositions which force it and its individual members’ into distinct ideological moulds – even those proffered by academic and popular writings.Footnote ¹⁹ ‘The family’ may, we see throughout this collection, operate as a unit in responding to social or political change, even while its members live in significant disagreement and conflict.

Thus, this special issue does not only aim to look at ‘the family’ but seeks to blend large-scale analysis of changing trends – of political and global change – with recognition of the everyday and the ‘small’ in history. In doing so, it extends a recent emergent historiographical trend. Significant here is the landmark work of Elaine Tyler May, whose study of post-war families in America located their thoughts, feelings and emotions ‘within the larger political culture’ of the Cold War, ‘not outside it’, making a persuasive case that Cold War ideology and domestic revival were ‘two sides of the same coin: post-war Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the future’.Footnote ²⁰ Paul Ginsborg has likewise drawn on Hegelian analysis to argue that we must consider relationships between the family, civil society and the state, and the ‘interlocking and conflictual’ relationships between these actors which ‘define the boundaries of politics’.Footnote ²¹ For Ginsborg, such analysis will make a ‘methodological priority’ of connecting family, political and social history.Footnote ²² A recent edited collection by Hester Barron and Claudia Siebrecht, Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, c. 1870–1950 (2017), has also been significant in this trend, showing the benefits of comparing democratic and fascist regimes across Europe, and of centring parents as units of analysis.Footnote ²³ This analysis all looks to subvert and challenge accounts by, for example, Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault or – more recently – Nikolas Rose, which placed families, citizens and children as objects within national, psychological and educational interventions; absorbing and reflecting, rather than reshaping, social and cultural norms.

In particular, this collection is interested in ‘agency’ and the family as ‘agents of change’. This is a fraught concept. In recent years, attempts to find ‘agency’ in women's and children's history have been criticised as inadequate.Footnote ²⁴ Mona Gleason and Lynn M. Thomas have provocatively asked whether historians have made agency an endpoint of study, rather than a beginning.Footnote ²⁵ Making a related critique, Chris Millard has explored whether historians valorise ‘experience’, building on the disciplinary assumptions of psychoanalysis, social history and anthropology, and leave invocations of ‘experience’ as seemingly irrefutable.Footnote ²⁶ This collection takes these lessons seriously, yet argues that agency – like family – can provide a significant lens for analysis. Cutting-edge research, particularly in the history of childhood, has used agency in productive ways. Kathryn Gleadle and Ryan Hanley, for example, have shown that it is productive to read even adult-generated sources through the lens of children's agency, particularly by looking at absences, while Susan A. Miller, Tatek Abebe, Mischa Honeck and Gabriel Rosenberg have unpicked how social contexts shape the boundaries of youthful agency over generations, space and place.Footnote ²⁷ The idea of ‘agency’, in these accounts, enables us to think seriously about the choices that individuals and groups have made, and the paths that they have forged, while also recognising how individual ‘choice’ has been bounded by structure and relationships.

This collection – because of its ambitious scope across time and space – looks to further expand the idea of agency as relational, in two ways. First, the case studies in this collection show how the capacity of families to act as ‘agents of change’ has been contingent on the structural conditions of authoritarian, liberal democratic, communist or fascistic societies, and on families’ identities of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religions and disability. Not all families have been equally able to exercise ‘agency’ in lobbying for change, despite employing similar mechanisms of campaigning and resistance. Second, the collection shows how the agency of ‘the family’ has been itself fundamentally shaped by familial discord and conflict. Articles in this collection frequently show moments in particular where women's interests in the family came into conflict with those of men. Yet the collection also discusses when extended family members had different priorities to biological parents, and when children were not necessarily best represented by their parents. As mentioned, internally, families have been repressive, patriarchal and abusive as well as moral, supportive and caring. Looking to ‘agency’ as relational makes this clearer and helps us to pay attention to distinctions within ‘the family’, while also taking seriously the ways in which individuals have, nonetheless, used this construct to mobilise for change. The collection thus argues that analysing the family as an ‘agent’ in social change makes clear the power of this construct in policy, welfare systems and daily life across time and space. The idea of ‘agency’ also affords space to analyse the multiple relationships – by and within families – that shape action.

So rather than consider how nation-states looked to control families across this period, which has so far been a dominant trend in writing about families in history, this special issue breaks with prevailing interpretations to prioritise families themselves as historical actors, as subjects and agents in historical change. Furthermore, putting families – not merely citizens, children or ‘members of the public’ – at the centre of our examination is critical, not least for the political symbolism of this unit. Focused discussion of the family can easily be missed in scholarship, when constructions of family are both highly contested but also mundane: difficult to define and yet also eternally present, in political campaigning, daily life and cultural representation. By making the family central, this special issue looks beyond the individual case studies provided and rather seeks to challenge ongoing scholarship to make the agency of this significant social grouping a central focus. Furthermore, this collection demonstrates that despite the complexities of the term ‘family’, placing this unit centrally can lead to dynamic and important scholarship, which interweaves across and between existing literatures on international, national and daily life, and throws new light on ideas of citizenship, solidarity and inclusion.

New Themes

This special issue thus extends and applies a significant, emergent methodological approach. Notably, it offers case studies of families who have not typically been subject to historiographical attention: military families facing reunification; families of ‘gifted’ or ‘autistic’ children; mothers in Ireland, Spain and Czechoslovakia and ‘foreign’ families settling in West Germany. The articles look to analyse the agency of these families from their own perspectives. For Jennifer Crane and Lauren Stokes, family perspectives are revealed through analysis of voluntary papers, diaries and letters. Articles by Grace Huxford, Elisa Chuliá and Radka Šustrová make use of rich oral histories to uncover and explore family views. Other authors, however, given the sources available, must read ‘against the grain’ of professional and expert documents to consider the spaces within which families could act, resist or conform. Lindsey Earner-Bryne, for example, carefully pieces together limited newspaper coverage of unmarried Irish mothers, looking to restore their dignity. Jonathyne Briggs reflects on contemporary criticism by autistic people of historic campaigning, enabling him to critically assess the nature of family dynamics in late twentieth-century France.

Furthermore, analysis of the family as agents of change can disrupt our existing thinking about the overarching chronologies of the mid-to-late twentieth century. A classic chronology of this period in Western Europe has been laid out by Paul Ginsborg, who suggests that there was: a ‘major expansion’ of welfare services from 1945; further attention paid to issues of social and gender inequality in the family from 1960 to 1974; policy fixation on falling birth-rates and single-parent families after 1985; and ‘major battles over efficiency, privatisation and residualisation’ in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote ²⁸ Further historiographies place heavy framing on the 1960s as a moment of sexual revolution, and the 1970s as a feminist revival.Footnote ²⁹ As Ginsborg acknowledges, however, these types of broad chronology require ‘heavy qualifications’, as distinct regional models have emerged.Footnote ³⁰ In particular, Ginsborg highlights the Scandinavian focus on universalism; Britain and Ireland's focus on low-income families, a ‘corporatist continental model which traces its origins to a Bismarckian tradition’; and the Southern European focus on combining universal health care with ‘a deep-rooted clientelist tradition’.Footnote ³¹ This model, furthermore, does not account for changes in Eastern Europe, which must be viewed as entwined with, shaping and shaped by, those in ‘the West’.

By taking the family as the central agent of change, this collection offers new, and more complex, chronologies and boundaries. First, looking through this narrow lens – the family – reveals the kinds of complex partnerships which were forged around ‘family issues’ and ‘family life’, which cross-cut any unitary narratives of power. Lauren Stokes’ article, for example, shows how, in the 1970s in West Germany, debate about family migration in the context of welfare opened up the ‘possibility for radical alliances between ordoliberals and neoliberals who prefer a limited welfare state and conservative Catholic thinkers’. This kind of uneasy coalition, mobilising around one key issue, breaks down any idea of the 1970s as simply a moment of a liberal ‘new’ society, or as a regressive ‘backlash’ against the 1960s revolution. The limitations of these historical ‘changes’ are emphasised also by Radka Šustrová's consideration of post-war Czechoslovakia. Here, she argues, political and rhetorical shifts around increased childcare and female emancipation did not clearly lead to changes in women's daily lives. Informatively, Šustrová describes how feminist texts – such as The Second Sex and The Art of Loving – were available to people in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s. Nonetheless, she writes, during Beauvoir's visit to Prague and Bratislava in the autumn of 1963, press primarily focused on questioning her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Looking through the lens of the family also breaks down the presumed historiographical separation between ‘East’ and ‘West’ Europe in the mid-to-late twentieth century, building on Margaret E. Peacock's comparison of childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States and a recent study of ‘authenticity’ collated by Joachim C. Häberlen, Mark Keck-Szajbel and Kate Mahoney.Footnote ³² Grace Huxford and Jennifer Crane's articles both show how families were seen in policy as a bastion in building links between East and West, while families themselves often rejected this apparent distinction in ‘ways of life’. Lindsey Earner-Bryne argues that the purported liberal values of ‘the West’ did not extend to 1960s Ireland, where the cultural significance of religion created significant shaming and stigma around birth control and family planning. Radka Šustrová, relatedly, argues that the ‘lived experience of Czechoslovak women’ in these areas was very similar to those in Britain. Despite an apparent ‘sexual revolution’, then, women across the East and West of Europe alike at times continued to have low levels of knowledge about family planning and were not always comfortable discussing it.Footnote ³³

Approaching the family as an agent, rather than as a subject or recipient, of state systems also helps us to think broadly about how families’ everyday lives comprise forms of activism. In this special issue, we see a range of voluntary associations forged by families: loose and generational social movements relating to permissiveness; charities and non-governmental organisations providing services neglected by the state, whether due to war or moral and religious politics; and small parents’ groups, which took one-off or sustained legal and media action. These types of overt action position the late twentieth century as a moment in which small groups – often acting as or for families – were able to attract media and public policy attention to a new degree, effectively utilising their experiential and professional expertise and mobilising new forms of media and communication technology to demand and create change. These organisations utilised ideas of ‘the family’ in ways which could represent a traditional notion of the family that did not recognise childhood voices or experience. This point is central to Jonathyne Briggs’ article about autistic families in contemporary France, where he shows that parents came to represent the ‘autistic family’ instead of autistic young people themselves.

This special issue also shows how the inaction of families, or their refusal to comply with state systems, could also drive significant change. For instance, Lauren Stokes’ article discusses how foreign couples, invited to West Germany to solve perceived issues from employment to sexual relations, could undermine the guest workers programme simply by bringing their children with them – an action which the programme had failed to account or plan for.Footnote ³⁴ Elisa Chuliá's interviews with Spanish women demonstrate that while, for some, education was a ‘space for opposition to the dictatorship’ of General Franco, other women in hindsight consider themselves ‘dumb, blind and deaf’ to the political changes of this moment. Women also drove change by covertly gaining hold of contraceptives, the prescription, sale or advertisement of which were banned in Spain until 1978. Families were therefore agents of change, but that change was at times demanded and led consciously over this period, through longer-standing forms of activism, whereas at other times it was driven by new moves towards individualism and privacy, driving and reflecting internalist models of family life.Footnote ³⁵ Hence, looking at families in this way, we begin to see how they are leaders of change, as well as followers, whether driving change through inactivity, demographic shifts, everyday life or conscious efforts at resistance and activism. As Elisa Chuliá argues, the very creation of one's own family can be a ‘personal project’.

While illuminating changes in national and family lives, this collection positions these as entwined, not separate. Indeed, the themes of gender and nationhood emerge as key throughout this special issue in cross-cutting the politics of family and state. In terms of gender, the collection shows the consistency across national and chronological borders, from families, policy makers and voluntary experts alike, with which fathers were seen as key for the ‘appropriate’ psychological development of children, the maintenance of family life and the priority figure for family reunification. Mothers, meanwhile, were heralded as producing future leaders, but typically only supported if reproducing within moral frameworks such as the two-parent patriarchal family. Mothers were also blamed for conditions such as autism, as Jonathyne Briggs shows, or praised for raising ‘gifted children’, as Jennifer Crane discusses. The parenting of mothers, rather than that of the father or other childcare providers, was centrally analysed and criticised in all case studies.Footnote ³⁶

Indeed, multiple case studies in this collection demonstrate that despite the purported rise of feminism, women's reproductive labour was built into, and remained integral within, the various ‘welfare states’ of Britain, Ireland, West Germany and Czechoslovakia alike over the late twentieth century. Rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal gendered ideas were also used by states to place new demands on family life, displacing identities of ‘mother’ or ‘father’ with illegal migrant or tax-dodging citizen, or, indeed, soldier. The special issue finds cases where families were able to resist gendered assumptions. The oral history studies in the collection, in particular, make clear the variety of strategies of communication and shared work within all family structures. Nonetheless, gendered assumptions remained relatively rigid, powerful and present across Europe and throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, particularly when emboldened by religious cultural beliefs. Families could also use their agency to further ingrain, as well as to challenge and discredit, existing structural dynamics of power, further adding to our understandings of ‘family’ as a destructive, as well as supportive, social space.

Ideas of the nation also cross-cut state and family politics throughout this collection, which chronicles decades in which national conflicts and new transnational alliances were forged, alongside the rise of nationalist-populist movements and a growing sense of national exceptionalism in many countries.Footnote ³⁷ Articles by Grace Huxford and Lauren Stokes analyse family reunification, which was premised on, and governed by, state-led expectations of national divides, whereby certain families, deemed ‘foreign’ or members of the military, were excluded or included in national configurations. Family reunification schemes, seen in this special issue, were intended to solve perceived local issues of, for example, men's sexual aggression or to offer specific exemplars of family life. Yet the invocation of ‘Europe’ also became a powerful one over this period, with politicians and press alike critically framing their countries as ‘the most backward nation in Europe’, for example.Footnote ³⁸ Families in this collection, and across borders of place and time, were at times affected by, ignorant of, or resistant to such national and transnational visions. Families with a so-called ‘gifted’ child, for example, studied in Jennifer Crane's article, were called upon by conservative press looking to mobilise these children to reverse economic decline yet, themselves, often worked in co-operation with European voluntary associations looking to share knowledge and resources around children's intellectual resources. Looking to the family, furthermore, shows how ideas of nation were broken down by distinct regional identities and stereotypes operating across, for example, Spain and Italy.

Hence, the comparative approach of this collection enables us to consider how nations have been constructed and formed and their relationships with shifting family life, across vastly different geographical contexts and in a rapidly changing period of history. Existing historiography has positioned the family as assumed yet also absent within European politics over this period. Lauren Stokes highlights that the European Coal and Steel Community, formed by six European countries in 1952, discussed child allowances for working migrants in 1955, in analyses which encompassed ideas of residency, family stability and entitlement.Footnote ³⁹ Nonetheless, Ginsborg has argued that the European Union has rarely ‘elaborated a vision of family politics’, but rather that policies relating to the family spun out indirectly from other social policy questions.Footnote ⁴⁰ This collection, by taking an expansive view of politics and policy makers, shows how a range of voluntary and professional experts hoped that families would be ambassadors in a new Europe, displaying the ‘moral superiority’ or ‘value’ of liberal democratic sentiments as ambassadors and icons, or driving economic prosperity for imagined futures. British military families, policy makers hoped, would display the failures of social policy in Soviet-occupied East Germany and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, psychologists in Britain looked to draw on lessons from these states to guide how best to identify and mobilise their so-called ‘gifted’ youth.

Concluding Remarks

Thus, this special issue focuses historians’ attention on the European family, in all its varied forms, but also contends that ideas of family, democracy, welfare, professions and civil society must be seen in constant conversation. By looking at these areas in tandem, with the family as a key lens, this special issue looks at the very nature of power itself in a critical period of modern history, and how it is exchanged, realised, lived and enacted between nation-states, voluntary organisations and family units. The special issue raises key historiographical and contemporary questions. When do professions think that families need ‘support’ and when do they need ‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’? Who defines family rights, and which social groups are included and excluded from discussion of ‘needs’, rights and responsibilities? Which organisations provide for families over time, and what are their ethical assumptions, priorities and foundations? What is the changing role of the state? Do shifts towards ‘informal’ family structures place increasing burdens on state welfare, and how do states respond, in moments of fiscal austerity, ideological change or total war?

The collection develops an emergent strand of historiography which looks to examine the family simultaneously as an agent, not a subject or object, of change within national imaginaries and in everyday life. It looks across Europe, specifically with case studies of Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, East and West Germany and Czechoslovakia. This is, of course, far from a ‘complete’ portrait of all families across all of Europe. Nonetheless, these specific case studies can offer new analyses of liberal democratic, fascistic, communist and authoritarian states. They can provide some assessment, also, of how religion, generation and national histories complicated the politics of ongoing government regimes, and their effects on family life. These case studies also enable us to better understand how European internationalism co-existed with new strands of nationalism over the mid-to-late twentieth century. Far more significant work must continue to be done in this area, and this special issue is intended as a contribution to an ongoing and new conversation, with the hope that rich new case studies from new research will continue, in subsequent years, to challenge and nuance its findings.

In framing its analysis around the ‘mid-to-late twentieth century’, this collection emphasises that the post-war period did not appear without precedent. Rather, the changes of this period were gradual, and with a continuous history dating back towards the early twentieth century. Military families, as Grace Huxford's article suggests, experienced ‘the cycle of reunion and separation’ long before 1945, and military memories of the ‘poor reception’ for soldiers after the First World War fuelled anxieties following the Second. As Elisa Chuliá explains, legal restrictions on Spanish women's lives preceded the entwined work of Franco and the Catholic Church, and, rather, the male dominance in household finances had been included in civil legislation since at least 1889. Lindsey Earner-Bryne's article, likewise, shows how significant events from the 1930s – notably papal warnings about the family – continued to exert influence over debates into the late twentieth century. As Radka Šustrová and Elisa Chuliá mention, such long-term analysis is especially significant for considering families: family dynamics, in particular, were shaped by intergenerational discussion and social and class inheritance. In family life, also, the influence of ‘war’ has lived on long beyond the ‘wartime’ period and into ‘peacetime’, while the influence of sudden ‘permissiveness’, for example, has often not had an impact for many decades.

Nonetheless, certain features of the ‘mid-to-late twentieth century’ were distinct and make it particularly ripe for analysis with regard to ideas of family, democracy and welfare. The mid-to-late twentieth century marked an unprecedented era of family separation through war, migration, evacuation, incarceration and genocide. For some families, this period also marked new periods of reunion. Because of this, families were constantly being mobilised and rethought, internally and externally, as political and social units. In this time, policy makers analysed throughout this collection pinned new hopes on subsequent generations of children to embody a distinctly ‘new’ or ‘modern’ sense of selfhood or leadership. Families were also continually renegotiating and redefining their own family systems, obligations and lives. In the context of family reunification for soldiers, Grace Huxford argues, they were ‘learning familial dynamics anew’. Families had new opportunities for collective action together. Women and young people, also, had new opportunities to make visible the ways in which ‘families’ had wrought injustices upon their lives.

This collection proceeds with a broadly chronological structure, looking across different national case studies. Opening, Radka Šustrová examines the family in state-socialist Czechoslovakia. She shows how the post-1945 and mid-1960s governments alike sought to frame their policies around ideas of gender equality and a strong welfare state. Yet, they remained ambivalent about family and women's rights, and significant gender inequalities remained. Next, using oral history testimony, Elisa Chuliá's article analyses the everyday resistance of Spanish families in Francoist Spain. Chuliá argues that families were spaces of nurture and care, and also of resistance: mothers, in particular, used systems of education to empower their daughters for ‘the future’. The third article is Grace Huxford's analysis of British military families in Cold War Germany. Focusing again on the 1950s, this piece highlights the ways in which these families resisted their projected roles as diplomats or models for a ‘British way of life’, mixing in complex and varied ways with new local communities. As such, the opening articles grapple with the aftermaths for family life and civil society following the Second World War. While war remains a significant spectre in Chuliá and Huxford's chapters, having increased the role of the state in family life and civil development, the chapters also show the role of family resistance to new professions and voluntary groups, organised around developing frameworks of nation such as national populism and the East-West divide.

In the fourth article, Lauren Stokes considers emergent concerns in West Germany in the 1970s that a Spanish grandparent may not be a ‘functional’ and thus ‘legitimate’ family member. Spanish families in Stokes’ account demonstrated ‘agency’ through voluntary action, although their actions were limited and oppressed by the political, legal and cultural systems they lived within. Jennifer Crane, meanwhile, considers the ways in which families of so-called intellectually ‘gifted’ children in Britain were able to resist intervention from national conservative press and European voluntary agencies, particularly from the 1980s through the formation of activist groups and in everyday life – though activisms remained shaped by broad visions of what precocity and childhood should mean. In these types of activism from the 1970s and 1980s, consumerist models of living across Western Europe led to new economic and neoliberal definitions of the family, but families simultaneously used this new interest in individual rights to reassert the significance of their own models of happiness and well-being.

In the next article, Jonathyne Briggs traces the changing activism of families with autistic children in contemporary France. He pinpoints a shift, from the 1960s until the 1990s, in the nature of this activism, with parents moving from resistance to professionals towards collaboration. For Briggs, this case study reveals the power of ‘the family’ as an ‘agent’, but also the fragmented nature of its internal agency, as the preferences of parents have consistently overridden those of the young. In the final full article, Lindsey Earner-Bryne analyses agency in the Irish family. She argues that until the 1980s the Irish family was ‘still regarded as vital in shoring up the moral and social status quo’. From this decade, she states, ‘the age of the inquiry’, the family was made ‘culpable for the moral cowardice of the nation’, with unmarried mothers in particular a target of sustained professional violence. The collection is closed by Laura Lee Downs, who explores the broad themes across the collection and poses challenging new questions for historiography and contemporary life.

Overall then, while looking across Europe, at diverse national contexts across a broad span of time, this special issue teases out the contested and changing relationships between family, democracy and welfare in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Notably, it shows that families were not only objects of state governance and welfare, organised ‘from above’ in authoritarian, fascist and democratic states alike; rather, families renegotiated, reformed and reshaped the running of nation-states, their provision of welfare and their visions of equality and governance. Recognition of the family as an agent of change must be made central to our historical work. The growing power of the family tells new stories about the shifting power of social collectives, the changing cultural norms of generations and the relationships between economic and political structure and individual life: these stories are, we hope, of central interest to readers of Contemporary European History.