One area of significant change in postwar European society
was the role of women. Although women were found
in professional careers and a number of other vocations in
the 1920s and 1930s, the place for most women was still
in the home. Half a century later, there were almost as
many women as men in the workplace, many of them employed
in professions hitherto reserved for men.
One consequence of the trend toward greater employment
outside the home for women was a drop in the
birthrate. The percentage of married women in the female
labor force in Sweden, for example, increased from
47 to 66 percent between 1963 and 1975. In many European
countries, zero population growth was reached in
the 1960s, and increases since then have been due solely
to immigration. In Italy and Spain, the flood of women
into the workplace resulted in a dramatic reduction in the
number of children born annually, leading to fears of an
absolute decline in total population. In newly united
Germany, it has been estimated that nearly half a million
immigrants will be required annually to maintain the current
level of economic growth in the country.
But the increased number of women in the workforce
has not changed some old patterns. Working-class
women in particular still earn salaries lower than those
paid to men for equal work. Women still tend to enter traditionally
female jobs. A 1980 study of twenty-five European
nations revealed that women still made up more
than 80 percent of typists, nurses, tailors, and dressmakers
in those countries. Many European women also still
faced the double burden of earning income on the one
hand and raising a family and maintaining the household
on the other. Such inequalities led increasing numbers of
women to rebel against their conditions.
The participation of women in World Wars I and II
helped them achieve one of the major aims of the nine-
teenth-century feminist movement—the right to vote.
After World War I, many governments acknowledged the
contributions of women to the war effort by granting
them the vote—Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, Poland,
Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Women in
France and Italy finally gained the right to vote in 1945.
After World War II, European women tended to fall
back into the traditional roles expected of them, and
little was heard of feminist concerns. But with the student
upheavals of the late 1960s came a renewed interest
in feminism, or the women’s liberation movement, as it
was now called. Increasingly, women protested that the
acquisition of political and legal equality had not brought
true equality with men.
A leading role in the movement was played by French
writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). Born into a
middle-class Catholic family and educated at the Sorbonne
in Paris, she joined the existentialist movement,
which was the leading intellectual movement of its time
in Western Europe, and became active in political causes.
In 1949, she published The Second Sex, in which she argued
that living in male-dominated societies, women had
been defined by their differences from men and consequently
received second-class status. “What particularly
signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free autonomous
being like all human creatures—nevertheless
finds herself in a world where men compel her to assume
the status of the Other.” De Beauvoir played an active
role in the women’s movement during the 1970s, and her
book was a major influence on women in both Western
Europe and the United States.
Feminists in Europe came to believe that women must
transform the fundamental conditions of their lives. They
did so in a variety of ways, forming numerous “consciousness-
raising” groups to further awareness of women’s issues
and working to legalize both contraception and abortion.
A French law passed in 1968 legalized the sale of
contraceptive devices. In 1979, abortion became legal in
France. Even in countries where the Catholic church remained
strongly opposed to contraception and legalized
abortion, legislation allowing them passed in the 1970s
and 1980s.
World History
