Aims and scope
This edited volume arose from the international conference Women’s Narratives and
European Integration History held at the University of Luxembourg on 20–21 April
2023, organised by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
(C²DH) with the support of Europe Direct at the University of Luxembourg (2021–2025),
a competitive public history project co-funded by the European Union. It contains a
series of original peer-reviewed chapters, including revised and expanded versions of
selected papers, as well as previously unpublished accounts from pioneering women in
international relations in Luxembourg.
The conference was part of the multiannual research project The Role of Women in
European and International Relations in Luxembourg (after the Second World
War), developed by the University of Luxembourg and the C²DH. In this related volume,
scholars from universities and advanced research centres across Austria, Germany,
France, Norway, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Poland, the United Kingdom and
Luxembourg, as well as the European University Institute and the Historical Archives of
the European Union in Florence, bring a broad range of perspectives, providing new
inter- and multidisciplinary insights into the history of women in Europe in the 20th and
21st centuries. Gendered approaches recast understandings of European democracy,
rights, policies, institutions and actors, while digital practices offer new ways of
developing and sharing knowledge of the past. Emerging sources, especially oral
history interviews and multimedia storytelling, lend a new focus on the biographies of
individual women and their engagement with the European project as both an evolving
idea and a lived reality.
The volume illuminates a variety of individual and collective dynamics and
interconnections, highlighting the emergence of pioneering figures and the networks
through which influence, presence and visibility were progressively established across
Europe and crystallised in the “female lobby”, alongside contributions to East-West
intercultural dialogue and EU enlargement that also open up the question of
euroscepticism.
