European Women’s Agency is a collection of essays that explore the complex ways that women and young girls construct all their lives across Europe. 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 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/18/online-dating-10-rules-partner-profile. 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 reports in this size emphasize how crucial it is to take gender into account when describing Europe’s earlier inclusion processes. Maria Pia Di Nonno, for instance, looks at how the people in Malta’s Common Assembly and the predecessor to the European Parliament actively influenced the integration of Europe. In Bernard Capp’s section on Agnes Beaumont, the subject herself wrote a text to demonstrate how disobeying her father hot mature swedish women was an act of agency unto itself.

A final contribution discusses how status communist women’s organizations in Eastern Europe served as both brokers on behalf of women and, simultaneously, prevented their company. A closer examination of the buildings and political contexts in which these formal organizations operated reveals a more nuanced picture, the author suggests, casting doubt on revisionist female scholars’ assertions that they were “agents on behalf of people.”