1 Framing Equality: The Politics of Race, Class, Gender in the US, Germany, and the Expanding European Union Myra Marx Ferree University of Wisconsin-Madison mferree@ssc.wisc.edu Paper for EU Gender Politics, Silke Roth (ed), forthcoming 2007. The European Union is an unprecedented effort to reshape political relations within as well as across national boundaries. By setting out the acquis communitaire, a common set of principles of governance, as the guideline for membership, the EU formulates a certain ideal for a modern, democratic member state. Strikingly, these principles include a significant emphasis on more egalitarian gender relations. This paper explores the notions of gender relations expressed in modern nation-states, using a comparative look at how two modern nation-states, Germany and the United States, define the specific principles of equity in two contrasting ways, and applies this comparative schema to analyze the framework of EU gender relations. While there are clearly other types, such as the secular social democracy of Sweden (see Hobson and Hellgren in this volume) or the communitarian liberalism of Japan, the contrast between the ways that gender has been understood and women incorporated into the polity in Germany and the United States may be especially illuminating. The German model is more typical of most (but not all) member states of the EU in that social democratic principles are more significant than those of classical liberalism and class relations have played an important role in shaping both feminist movements and state policy. The United States is a helpful model to understand because