As I thought about the role of women in Europe in the 20th Century, I tried to make comparisons and put that information into the context of my own life. I thought of women from history who had influenced my opinions, and then began to think of the women in my family who had molded and influenced my character. Although some of the things I researched about the roles of women from this time in history would suggest that they were largely relegated to the background, that they were an after-thought and found mostly in their kitchens, this was certainly not their entire experience. For example, photographs and television commercials from the 1950?s, in Europe and elsewhere, portray women as happy in the kitchen and their home as a place where they found their singular fulfillment. I was born in 1969 in Texas, so my impressions of this image are from personal memories of my mother in shirtwaist dresses, pearls and pumps that looked just like what June Cleaver wore on our black and white television, and what Jacqueline Kennedy wore in LIFE magazine photographs. However, in addition to performing all the regular homemaker duties most women of the time performed, my mother was also a secretary and a dispatcher for the Houston Police Department (the predecessor to the 911 Operator of today). This combination role was common for the mothers of my neighbors and friends, so even at the midpoint of the 20th Century, my mother’s role had begun to evolve, not unlike the roles of women elsewhere. With Mother’s Day approaching, my thoughts have turned to my favorite aunt, Lucie, who was born in 1947, my own mother, Landa, who was born in 1938, and my grandmother, Maurine, who was born in 1920, and the roles of their contemporaries. These women are from my mother’s family, they were the most influential in my life, and they represent the typical 20th Century women of the United States. All of them, and several generations before them, were born in Texas. However, my great-grandmother, Fannie Alecia, was my father’s grandmother; she was born in 1886, and her life was different from the other women in my family. She raised my father, and she influenced my early life tremendously, as well as that of our everyday family life until her death in 1973. She was an incredible teacher when we were young, our family benefitted from her influence, and the women in our family benefitted from what she shared with us about how she emerged from the expectations of women from the late 19th Century. She was quite an example of the evolution of women into the 20th Century, as well as the influence of European immigrants on American life and American women, and how that changed their families. My great-grandmother’s family immigrated to the United States from Wurttemberg, Prussia, an area that is today a German state bordered by Baden-Wurttemberg on the north, west, south, and Bavaria on the east. She married my great-grandfather in 1902 and they had fourteen children before his death in 1958. Four of her sons served in Europe in the US Army during World War II and, although the only ‘job’ she ever had was running a household and the business end of the family farm, all of her daughters had jobs outside the home, as well as raising their own families. Because of these influences, I view the women in my family as a small-scale version of all the examples of the 20th Century Woman. The roles of women in Europe during the 20th Century were many times dictated to them in propaganda that was designed to further political and military interests. Mussolini encouraged women to “accept their traditional roles as wives and, especially, mothers” (Shubert, 2012), and Hitler “encouraged women to lead healthy lives so that they could bear healthy, happy, and Aryan children" (Baxa, 2007). In Europe, China and Japan, two world wars were fought in the cities and countrysides where women lived with their families. Women there had to try to raise children, conduct a normal home life, and sometimes work outside the home while dealing with the ravages of war. Food shortages, shelter damage from attacks, living under martial law and the other difficulties of war were only part of their lives; social activities, religion, education, work, finances, politics and even fashion were also part of their lives. My grandmother was alone during the early years of World War II while my grandfather was away in the Army. My mother was born in 1938, so she was a child during the war. Grandmother worked for the City of Houston as a secretary at first, then a city construction estimator when most of the men in her office left for the war. Her pay never changed with these additional duties, so she lived in a boarding house with several other mothers with small children, and she supported herself and my mother during the long years my grandfather was away. Similar to my grandmother’s experience, when Japan conscripted male workers from indust