This book spotlights the trajectories of young women and men navigating the turmoil of the early 20th century. It will be relevant for scholars and students in History, Sociology, Gender Studies and Youth Studies.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.
This book spotlights the trajectories of young women and men navigating the turmoil of the early 20th century.
From the end of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe witnessed fundamental changes in the social regimes that determined power distribution. Against this backdrop of the struggle between democratic and authoritarian projects, amid both war and fragile peace, young people increasingly became a target of state legislation, (mass) organizations and other institutions. The authors of this collective volume approach the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of age and gender as interdependent categories of analysis. In doing so, they reveal how adult perceptions of youth and gender framed young men and women’s lives as well as their roles in society. The authors also explore how these perceptions collided with youth agency, probing the specific age- and gender-related dynamics of empowerment and organization. By focusing on the young actors and the institutional settings that limited their scope of action, the authors contrast processes of wayward agency with institutionalized attempts to control and lead ‘the young’. As such, this book contributes to a global academic discussion on age, gender, the lifecycle and intersectionality.
This book will be relevant for scholars and students in History, Sociology, Gender Studies, and Youth Studies. It will also be of interest to those studying European history, social movements, and 20th-century political transitions.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.
Introduction - Rallying Europe: Young women and men searching for a life
and a future
1. Traces of youth: Reconstructing Hungarian womens lives during the
Holocaust
2. Unreachable youth: Physical education, national mobilization and
intergenerational conflict in interwar Yugoslavia. The case of the Yugoslav
Sokol
3. Fragt denn da ein junger Mensch nach?: Would a young person ask that?
Growing up in the Reichsarbeitsdienst in 1942
4. Una Coscienza Coloniale: forging imperial women in the Fascist Colonial
Institute of Bologna
5. The New Woman of Weimar Germany in the imaginations of young Iranian
intellectuals
6. In this country, women are also soldiers: Interrelations between age and
gender in the womens section of the Romanian Legionary Movement
7. Health, home and hearth: How war nurses negotiated their place at the
table during the dawn of Francoist Spain
Katharina Seibert is PostDoc Researcher at the Department for Contemporary History at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She earned her PhD from the University of Vienna with her thesis Who Cares? Negotiating Gender and Society at Spains Sickbeds during the 1930s and 1940s. She specializes in the European and Spanish history of the twentieth century, gender and queer history, and the history of medicine.
Barnabas Balint completed his doctorate in history at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, where his research explored Jewish life during the Holocaust in Hungary. He is the 2024/ 5 Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Research Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
