Families have always been vulnerable. They have long been torn apart by the mass migrations of warfare, the oppression of minority groups, the closure of international borders and the refugee crises governed ‘from above’. Families have also always been powerful symbols. Nationalist–populist movements have capitalised on fears about familial decline and liberal democracies have built moralistic views of the family into their welfare systems. Yet, this special issue aims to demonstrate that families have not merely been objects or subjects buffeted by political and social change. Rather, families have also consistently acted as ‘agents of change’. This is not to valorise the family – families have been patriarchal, damaging and oppressive as well as supportive, empowering and caring. However, this is to say that historical work must take ‘the family’ seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change.

This article focuses on how middle-class families created during the second half of the Francoist dictatorship in Spain decisively contributed to improving the educational level of the biggest generation in Spanish society, born between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. Mothers played a particularly important role in this ‘educational shift’. Even though under Francoism legislation and moral habits implied female subordination in virtually all spheres of life, many of those mothers were willing and able to promote their children's education irrespective of their gender. Making use of oral history, the article offers an account of how mothers of the Spanish baby boom generation entered into marriage, organised their daily lives at home and took decisions regarding their children's welfare and education. Today in their old age, these women deserve to be considered important agents of the remarkable social change Spain has experienced during the last decades.

Family reunion had a deeply practical and symbolic significance in post-war Europe. Through the case study of British military families living in Germany, this article examines both official discourse and families’ own experiences of reunion and life overseas in the first decades of the Cold War, through the three national but also international visions of the family: as emblems of familial and domestic stability, as ‘unofficial ambassadors’ promoting European unity and as friendly faces of Western democracy. In all cases, the article shows the ways that official messages were embraced, subverted or ignored by families, highlighting the value of exploring context-specific agency. Military families seemingly lived in a world of limited choices, but a range of life narratives show how they came to see aspects of their family life as resolutely theirs.

Foreigners’ right to family migration in West Germany was grounded on the idea that said migration could unburden the welfare state. The state actively recruited both foreign men and women as guest workers, often as married couples, creating the problem of providing childcare within a welfare state that assumed that families could provide their own childcare. Some migrant workers responded to these expectations by bringing extended family members, such as the family that brought a ‘Spanish grandmother’ and subsequently fought for her residence permit in court. When the Federal Administrative Court heard her case in 1973, it concluded that extended family members had a right to migrate if they made the family more ‘functional’, which the grandmother in question did by caring for her grandchildren. The conservative welfare state incorporated foreigners according to a logic of ‘market conformity’ that guided its migration policy and shaped its approach to social welfare.

Policy, voluntary, psychological and educational interest in gifted children emerged across Europe in the early twentieth century but surged dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores the transnational voluntary circles hoping that gifted youth would bring peace and liberal democracy across Europe in these years. It analyses, also, how such work came into conflict with the expectations of conservative press in Britain: that gifted children would in fact bolster national economic progress. Critically, the article demonstrates that parents and children, drawing on professional and cultural capital, resisted ideas of gifted youth as global assets. Interest in giftedness revealed the growing ‘agency’ of articulate, affluent, middle-class families within the contexts of individualism and neoliberalism, but also its limits. Further, we can and must centre the experiences of young people in our scholarship, to truly understand how ‘agency’ operates within families and beyond.

The divergence concerning the treatment of autism in France developed out of the different narratives within autism literature. Psychoanalytic texts defined the treatment of autism beginning in the 1950s, with the participation of parents in the treatment of their children a central aspect of the narrative. These examples identified the parents as culprits in the appearance of autism, which was an accepted convention. However, by the late 1960s, new examples of autism literature reformulated assumptions, putting parents at odds with the medical establishment. The parent-centred examples inaugurated a new era of conflict between families and the French medical establishment, manifest in a changed approach of advocacy from associations. In each of these examples, the role of parents in their children's disability came into question, with analysts emphasising their participation in its origins and parents suggesting their role in mitigating the impact of disability for their children. This article examines the development of autism literature to show a shift in the role of families, from one of collaboration with medical professionals, to one of resistance against them.

The recent Final Report of the Commission into Mother and Baby Homes (January 2021) has received considerable criticism for suggesting that the Irish family was as responsible as the churches and state for the mistreatment of single mothers and their children. This article explores a case of two dead babies in mid-1980s Ireland, one single mother, and a rural family that found itself at the centre of an official inquiry. This case provides a prism through which to explore family agency and the official framing of the Irish family as culpable of moral erosion and social destabilisation. In this analysis agency in the familial context emerges as a complex mix of individual and relational exertions comprising conformity and resistance.

The ideology of Europeanism – defined as a commitment to the political, economic, and cultural consolidation of the European continent – has undergone major transformations during the twentieth century. Yet the study of Europeanism has not as yet systematically examined the range of conceptual meanings that the various strands of the Europeanist ideological family exhibit. Instead, Europeanism has typically been treated either ahistorically as a set of desirable social ideals and values, or reductively as a quality exclusively associated with European institutions in their current form. Both obscure the fundamental, wide-ranging debates over the nature of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanness’ that have shaped the substantive development of Europeanist ideologies over the last century. This article maps out the key areas of conceptual contestation that are consistently shared by all Europeanisms regarding the boundaries of Europe, the degree of European consolidation, and how ‘Europeanisation’ is to be realised.

Recent historiography pertaining to the International Red Cross has generally emphasised the transnational scale as best suited for analysing this global movement. Using the French Red Cross as a case study, this article suggests that focusing on the national scale, or even on the national-imperial scale, does not exclude transnational approaches but enriches them. In doing so, it highlights the dialectic between scales of humanitarian activity and complicates our understanding of the Red Cross movement in the early twentieth century. The article examines how the French Red Cross strived for its independence within the broader Red Cross world in a postwar humanitarian context increasingly dominated by transnational organisations. It also argues that in the 1920s the French Red Cross, a traditional auxiliary of the French army, became an arm of the French Foreign Office, advancing French diplomacy and sovereignty.