AP European History

## Learning Outcomes

- Explain how women’s paid work expanded in Europe after 1945
- Identify the difference between **formal equality** and **substantive equality**
- Understand why the **male breadwinner/female homemaker model** remained strong even as more women worked
- Explain how **second-wave feminism** challenged workplace inequality, domestic roles, and reproductive limits
- Compare women’s experiences in Western Europe with those in communist Eastern Europe
- Recall key laws, dates, and national examples from Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany
- Use this topic in AP essays focused on causation, comparison, and continuity and change over time

## AP European History Syllabus

For the AP European History, you are expected to understand women’s changing roles in postwar and contemporary Europe, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that women gained greater access to paid work after **1945**, but family expectations often changed more slowly
- Identify the **male breadwinner/female homemaker model** and explain why it remained influential in many Western European states
- Explain **second-wave feminism** in the **late 1960s to 1980s** as a movement concerned with work, family, sexuality, and reproduction, not just suffrage
- Understand the idea of the **double burden** and why female employment did not automatically bring equality at home
- Know key examples of legal reform, including **Treaty of Rome Article 119 (1957)**, the **British Equal Pay Act (1970)**, the **French Veil Law (1975)**, and **Italian divorce and abortion reforms**
- Compare Western Europe with communist Eastern Europe on women’s labor, childcare, and domestic expectations
- Distinguish between **formal equality** in law and **substantive equality** in actual pay, promotion, and family life

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. What was the **male breadwinner/female homemaker model**?
2. Why did rising female employment after 1945 not automatically create equality?
3. What is meant by the **double burden**?
4. Name two laws or reforms from different European countries that changed women’s family or workplace rights.
5. How did women’s lives in communist Eastern Europe differ from those in Western Europe?

## Introduction

In Unit 9, women’s history is not just about rights on paper. The key issue is the gap between public progress and private life. Across 20th-century Europe, women gained more education, entered paid work in larger numbers, and won legal reforms in marriage, employment, and reproduction. Yet they were still often expected to remain the main carers, housekeepers, and mothers.

That tension matters for AP European History because it fits several big themes at once: **individual and society**, **poverty and prosperity**, and **states and other institutions of power**. It also rewards strong historical reasoning. A good essay will show both change and continuity: women’s opportunities widened, but old gender assumptions survived in new forms.

> **Key Term: second-wave feminism**
> Feminist activism from the late 1960s to the 1980s that focused on workplace equality, family roles, sexuality, and reproductive rights, rather than only voting rights.

### From family economy to postwar gender model

To understand 20th-century women’s lives, start with a longer timeline. In earlier Europe, families often worked as economic units. Women worked in fields, workshops, domestic industry, and family businesses. The 19th century changed this by creating a stronger ideal of separate spheres, especially among the middle class. Men were linked to paid work in public; women were linked to home and morality.

That older 19th-century pattern did not disappear in 1945. In fact, postwar Western Europe often gave it new strength.

> **Key Term: male breadwinner/female homemaker model**
> The social ideal in which the husband earns the family wage and the wife is expected to focus mainly on home and children.

After World War II, many governments wanted stability, rising birth rates, and orderly family life. Welfare states sometimes supported this model through tax systems, family allowances, and school schedules that assumed mothers would be at home. This was especially strong in places like West Germany. Even where women had worked during wartime, many were pushed back toward domestic roles once peace returned.

But the model never matched reality fully. Working-class women had long worked for wages, and postwar growth created more jobs in offices, schools, hospitals, shops, and light industry. Service-sector expansion pulled more married women into employment. So the real postwar pattern was not simple housewife versus worker. Many women were both.

This is where AP students often lose precision. Do not say “women stayed at home until feminism changed everything.” That is too crude. Better: in many countries, governments and culture promoted the homemaker ideal, but economic need and labor demand increased women’s employment anyway.

> **Key Term: occupational segregation**
> The concentration of women and men in different kinds of jobs, often with women placed in lower-paid or lower-status sectors.

Even as women entered paid work, they were clustered in teaching, nursing, clerical work, retail, and part-time posts. This mattered because employment alone did not end dependence. If women were steered into lower-paid work and blocked from promotion, then public participation still sat within an unequal structure.

> **Test Tip:** In a continuity-and-change essay, pair one sentence of change with one sentence of continuity. For example: “More married women entered paid work after 1945, but they remained concentrated in lower-paid sectors and were still expected to manage the home.”

### Why second-wave feminism focused on work, home, and the body

Earlier feminism had focused heavily on suffrage and legal citizenship. By the later 20th century, many of those formal goals had been won. The new problem was that equal citizenship had not produced equal daily life.

Simone de Beauvoir’s **The Second Sex (1949)** helped frame this issue by arguing that women’s subordinate position was socially created, not natural. Her work mattered because it shifted debate from law alone to culture, identity, and expectations. Later, Betty Friedan’s **The Feminine Mystique (1963)**, though American, influenced European arguments about domestic confinement.

> **Key Term: formal equality**
> Equality granted in law, such as equal rights to vote, work, or hold property.
>
> **Key Term: substantive equality**
> Equality in actual lived outcomes, such as similar pay, promotion, opportunity, and sharing of domestic work.

Second-wave feminism argued that formal equality was not enough. A woman could legally be allowed to work, but if childcare was scarce, employers discriminated, and housework remained hers, she was not truly equal in practice.

This led to one of the most important concepts in the topic.

> **Key Term: double burden**
> Women’s simultaneous responsibility for paid employment and most unpaid domestic labor and childcare.

The double burden explains why rising female employment did not automatically solve inequality. A woman might finish a work shift, then begin a second shift at home. This was common in both Western and Eastern Europe, despite very different political systems.

Feminists therefore linked issues that older politics often separated:

- equal pay
- anti-discrimination law
- access to professions
- childcare
- divorce reform
- contraception
- abortion
- power within marriage

Why connect all of these? Because dependence in one sphere reinforced dependence in another. If a woman could not control reproduction, leaving school or paid work became more likely. If divorce laws trapped her in marriage, workplace pay mattered less. If her husband controlled family decisions or bank access, legal equality remained thin.

National examples are excellent evidence here. In **Britain**, major reforms included the **Abortion Act (1967)**, **Divorce Reform Act (1969)**, **Equal Pay Act (1970)**, and **Sex Discrimination Act (1975)**. In **France**, married women gained the right in **1965** to work and open bank accounts without a husband’s permission; the **Neuwirth Law (1967)** legalized contraception, and the **Veil Law (1975)** legalized abortion under conditions. In **Italy**, divorce was legalized in **1970**, upheld by referendum in **1974**, family law was reformed in **1975**, and abortion was legalized in **1978**. In **West Germany**, the **Basic Law (1949)** promised equality, but family life stayed conservative; the **Equal Rights Act (1957)** reduced male legal dominance, and further marriage and divorce reforms came in **1976–1977**.

These examples show something crucial: reform was uneven. Catholic influence was stronger in some places, conservative family norms stronger in others, and legal change often came in steps rather than one breakthrough.

> **Test Tip:** If an SAQ or LEQ asks about women’s lives, use at least two country examples. That turns a broad claim into historical evidence and helps you earn specificity points.

### Work, welfare states, and European comparison

The postwar welfare state could help women, but it could also lock in older assumptions. This is one of the more subtle points in the topic.

In much of Western Europe, welfare policy helped families but often assumed mothers were secondary earners or homemakers. West Germany is a strong example: formal equality existed, but tax structures, school timetables, and family ideals often encouraged part-time work or career interruption for mothers. Britain also saw rising female employment, but many women were in part-time jobs and faced childcare shortages. France had a stronger long-term tradition of women’s paid work, yet domestic labor still remained heavily gendered.

Some countries moved further toward a **dual-earner** model.

> **Key Term: dual-earner model**
> A family pattern in which both adults are expected to participate in paid employment, usually supported by childcare and welfare provision.

Nordic countries are the clearest example in Europe. Public childcare and broader welfare supports made it easier for women to stay in full-time work. But even there, equality was incomplete. Jobs could still be segregated by gender, and leadership remained male-dominated.

At the European level, integration also mattered. The **Treaty of Rome (1957)** included **Article 119**, which established equal pay for men and women for equal work in the European Economic Community. This was a major shift because it made gender equality not only a national issue but a supranational one.

The European Community later widened this framework:

- **Equal Pay Directive (1975)**
- **Equal Treatment Directive (1976)**

These measures mattered, but again the gap between law and life remained. Equal pay rules could exist while women still earned less because they were crowded into lower-paid occupations, interrupted careers for childcare, or worked part-time.

Eastern Europe under communism offers a powerful comparison. Communist regimes promoted women’s labor-force participation earlier and more aggressively than many Western states. They often provided:

- state childcare
- maternity benefits
- paid leave
- employment guarantees

On paper, this could look more equal than the West. In practice, it often reflected economic need as much as feminist conviction. States needed women as workers. Women entered factories, offices, health care, and schools, but male dominance in leadership stayed strong, and the burden at home remained mostly female.

East Germany is a useful example of high female employment with substantial childcare provision. But even there, women often carried the double burden. Romania shows an even sharper warning against simplistic claims. Under **Decree 770 (1966)**, Nicolae Ceaușescu severely restricted abortion and contraception in a pronatalist attempt to raise birth rates. That meant a state could praise working women while also coercing women’s bodies.

So a strong AP comparison is this:

- **West:** slower movement away from the breadwinner model; feminism and law pushed reform
- **East:** state-driven female employment and childcare came earlier, but home life stayed unequal and reproductive policy could be coercive
- **Both:** women often faced occupational segregation, lower pay, fewer leadership roles, and the double burden

This is why the best judgement is qualified. Women’s lives changed greatly in public life during the 20th century, but private gender norms often changed more slowly than laws and labor markets.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- After **1945**, many Western European societies promoted a **male breadwinner/female homemaker model**
- Rising postwar employment meant many women worked for wages even while the homemaker ideal remained strong
- **Occupational segregation** kept many women in lower-paid sectors such as clerical work, nursing, teaching, and retail
- **Second-wave feminism** in the late **1960s–1980s** focused on work, family, sexuality, and reproductive rights
- The **double burden** meant women often combined paid work with most unpaid domestic labor and childcare
- **Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)** was a major intellectual influence on later feminism
- **Treaty of Rome Article 119 (1957)** made equal pay a European issue, later expanded by EC directives in **1975** and **1976**
- Britain passed major reforms including the **Abortion Act (1967)**, **Equal Pay Act (1970)**, and **Sex Discrimination Act (1975)**
- France, Italy, and West Germany each reformed marriage, divorce, contraception, or abortion law in uneven ways
- Communist Eastern Europe promoted women’s paid work and often childcare, but did not remove domestic inequality
- **Romania’s Decree 770 (1966)** shows that communist policy could be coercive rather than feminist
- The clearest overall pattern is change in women’s public role alongside continuity in household gender expectations

## Key Terms and Concepts

- second-wave feminism
- male breadwinner/female homemaker model
- occupational segregation
- formal equality
- substantive equality
- double burden
- dual-earner model


20th-Century Feminism - Women’s lives balanced family work feminism