Agency for European Ladies is a collection of essays that explore the complex ways that women and young girls construct all their lives across Europe https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/secret-annex/landing/. It employs a range of methodological solutions and new archival material to investigate the interplay between gender, society and the ways that girls manage their daily experiences. The chapters in this volume look at women’s encounters from various cultural, societal and financial perspectives: as mothers and wives; as philanthropists; as writers and artists; and as activists. Despite the vastly different source materials, some key themes unite the contributions as a whole. One is the centrality of a notion of female agency. The authors employ micro-studies of individual cases to reveal how women, despite their legal disabilities because of their gender, could assert considerable agency in the pursuit of their interests.
The papers in this size emphasize how crucial it is to take gender into account when describing Europe’s earlier connectivity processes. Maria Pia Di Nonno, for instance, looks at how the people in Malta’s Common Assembly and the forerunner to the European Parliament actively influenced the integration of Europe. In Bernard Capp’s book on Agnes Beaumont, the subject herself wrote a words to demonstrate how disobeying her father was an act of independent organization.
A final contribution discusses how position socialist children’s organizations in Eastern Europe served as both agents on behalf of women and, simultaneously, prevented their company. A closer examination of the institutions and political contexts in which these official organizations operated reveals a more nuanced image, and the artist challenges revisionist female scholars meet german girl‘ assertions that they were “agents on behalf of people.”