Women for the Unification of Europe
When discussing the history of European integration, it is often the prominent male figures that come to mind. For decades, the central figures in historical research and in the institutional narrative put forward by the European Community were generally men. As historian Mauve Carbonnel has pointed out, just two women were mentioned in the 900 pages dedicated to the history of the administration of the High Authority by the former Member Dirk Spierenburg and historian Raymond Poidevin, published in 1993. Their appraisal obscured the contributions of the hundreds of women in the early European administration. Notably, in 1958, the High Authority comprised 371 female civil servants out of a total of 832: around 45 per cent of people working in the European Commission's predecessor institution were women. While during the first decades women were only offered lower-ranking roles in the administration, women such as Renée van Hoof and Hélène Isnard climbed the administrative ladder to reach the top. On the political scene, women such as Simone Veil or Fabrizia Baduel Glorioso played ground-breaking roles in the history of European integration and could be called the ‘founding mothers’ whose rightful place in our historical memory is alongside the ‘founding fathers’.
The European institutions have since taken steps to bring the contributions of certain women, such as Louise Weiss—whose name graces a building in the European Parliament—to the forefront of their historical narratives. On the European Union website, the page dedicated to the ‘founding fathers’ has been renamed EU pioneers to include the contributions of women. The gender bias also has been addressed considerably in the research agenda. Until the 2000s, women received little attention from researchers working on the history of the European Community. To reconsider the role of women in the study of European integration history and to incorporate a gender perspective more broadly, historians Anne-Laure Briatte, Eliane Gubin, and Françoise Thébaud edited a collective work published in 2019 titled L'Europe, une chance pour les femmes? , which serves as both an inventory of existing knowledge and a call to further exploration. In 2023, the University of Luxembourg organised a conference titled “Women’s Narratives and European Integration History”, which sought to explore women's roles in the European project launched after the Second World War.
The Historical Archives of the European Union created this online exhibition to celebrate International Women’s Day and Women's History Month. It is pleased to contribute to the growing wave of European integration history in which the contributions of women are properly credited.
The exhibition starts by honouring the contributions of a few women who can be described as pioneers in the project of a united Europe. It also highlights the work of women working in the European Commission, rendering visible the important contributions of the interpreters, translators and secretaries employed there. Women who played an important role in the European Parliament are remembered to illustrate their role in representative politics on the European level.
The exhibition’s last chapter examines the contributions of two female faculty members to early women's studies at the European University Institute. When the EUI was established in the mid-1970s, its faculty reflected the male-dominated academia at the time. The imbalance persisted in time: even during the 1990s only 10 per cent of professors appointed at the Institute were women, a disappointing and inferior result compared to figures demonstrated by other universities in the member states. Nevertheless, women on the EUI faculty did manage to insert women's studies onto the Institute's research agenda. The history of subsequent developments, such as the establishment of the Gender Studies Programme and the myriad new research areas introduced by feminist scholars at the EUI, is a topic for future research.
This exhibition, which aims to highlight some of the women that have shaped the history of a united Europe, is based on an exploration of historical sources held the Historical Archives of the European Union. It was researched by Aude Foucoin, Ruth Ingeborg Meyer, and Anastasia Remes.