ABSTRACT
After the creation of the European Union (EU), an economic and political partnership that began in 1993 and now encompasses 27 democratic nations, it is easy to think of Europe as a homogenous “developed” region, but this group of countries represents a greater degree of diversity than it might appear when viewed from a U.S. perspective. Notable changes have occurred in the social, political, and economic organization of these nations since the middle of the twentieth century, all or which inevitably affected women’s lives and thus, the issues that they want to study. Among those that had the most impact are the obliteration of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (better known as the Nazi Party or Third Reich, a fascist regime) in Germany in 1944 and the decline of Francisco Franco’s authoritarian rule in Spain, even before his death in 1975; the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and the unification of many European countries under a single regional government of the European Union.
