Monica Rudberg

Gender, Love and Education in Three Generations The Way Out and Up

The paths to adulthood for the last three generations of young Norwegian women have been accompanied by significant geographical and social changes. How has this process of modernization been experienced from ‘below’: from the perspective of everyday life and through the eyes of the young women themselves? This article presents results from a three-generational study consisting of interviews with a sample of 18-year-old Norwegian girls, their mothers and grandmothers. The significance of upbringing, parental identification and management of gender for young womens processes of modernization is analysed. These issues affect choices made in education and romantic relationships – choices crucial to social mobility. The study looks at how the processes of socialmobility and culturalmodernization have been associated with the psychologicalproject of becoming adults for these young women.

Potential Spaces - Subjectivities and Gender in a Generational Perspective

Most social and cultural researchers emphasize the way people use cultural concepts to organize their social world and to constitute themselves and others in meaningful ways. In this article, this is taken one step further through taking into account the way that such cultural constructions are animated and loaded with personal meaning and emotions that stem from specific psycho-biographies. Making use of object-relational theory in general, and Chodorow’s theory of ‘power of feeling’ in particular, the authors analyse the self-talk of two young women, positioning themselves in a ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ discourse respectively, relating these discursive positions to the generational context in which they seem to have evolved. The aim is to contribute to a more concrete and historically situated understanding of subjectivities as ongoing processes interweaving both cultural demands and personal constructions, which always involve emotional meaning.

Fun in Gender—Youth and Sexuality, Class and Generation

Is the norm of love as a prerequisite for sexual relations becoming less prominent among girls today? The article looks into the changing cultural framing of young, heterosexual, female desire during the last three generations, and how class differentiation among women was established in new ways in these processes. The analysis draws on a study of young Norwegian women over three generations (born in the 1910s and 1920s, the 1940s and early 1950s, and in 1971–72). Throughout all generations young women have been looking for the fun in gender—for the grandmothers connected to innocent infatuations, for the mothers to romantic love, while the daughters seem to be on their way to discover the fun of sex. It is argued that this quest for fun in gender has been a progressive force of social change, however often neglected both by feminists and in discourses on gender equality. The aspects that are highlighted, to different degrees in the different generations, seem to circulate around three themes: firstly, the relation between sexuality and reproduction; secondly, the relation between sexuality and love; and thirdly, the relation between sexuality and independence. The grandmothers had to navigate between being seen as nice or cheap, the mothers between cheap and prim, the daughters between liberated and exposed. In all generations, however, there is a specially designed category for young girls who have too much sex or sex under the wrong circumstances, and this category has almost inextricably been connected to working‐class girls and in this way simultaneously worked as a double threat for middle‐class girls.

A bloody story? On construction of bodily gender among girls

Abstract Many studies assert that there are new gender constructions among young Scandinavian girls, who seem to be more individualized than earlier generations. In this article questions are raised as to what effect these girls’ newly won status as subjects might have on their construction of bodily gender, especially the part referred to as generative femininity. A “loss” of the generative body is argued to be a general tendency in postmodern discourse, as well as a dilemma in the individual girls striving for being both individual and gender. This dilemma and its tentative solution is illustrated through the analysis of an 18‐year‐old Norwegian girl, who was the subject of an in‐depth interview in a three‐generational study of gender in change.

Gender recipes among young girls

Interviewed in connection with her fiftieth birthday, the well-known feminist pioneer Germaine Greer said that she had but one hope for the future, namely that she would grow up before growing old. Women’s access to modernity has in fact been understood as just that, as a sort of arrival at the kind of independence and individuality which will finally give them the status of grown-ups. There have been two main discourses two stories of awakening (Johnson, 1993) in this modern feminist project: one says that a woman should grow up by becoming an individual resembling a man, thus implying that femininity is a burden (cf de Beauvoir, 1972, about women lacking transcendence). This view has been criticized for mimicking the male discourse on femininity as the deficient ’other’. The reaction has been to say that there are alternative ways of development: one can become a grown-up in a feminine way, through listening to the ’different voice’ of women (Gilligan, 1982; Irigaray, 1993, against de Beauvoir). However, questions about the relationship between such discourses and the desires of women are rarely asked: why are these discourses accepted by women, and why do they work in a given historical context, while at the same time as they are rejected as extremely old-fashioned in another? How does the discourse fulfil the needs and tastes of the subjects, whose needs the discourse also formulates and partly produces? In our project Girls and Boys in Change? ‘ we see that these discourses are in fact quite vital as ’recipes’2 for the way that gender is constructed among young girls of today. In this article we shall take a closer look at the ways in which these discourses are lived, and the reasons that they become psychologically potent for certain girls.

Gender, body and beauty in adolescence: Three psychological portraits:

two grannies will begin by telling us in a rather moralizing tone of voice that they had neither the time nor the money to engage in such futile activities. Nevertheless, they have quite vivid and detailed recollections of their own development, their physical assets and flaws just as they can give us entrancing descriptions of the lovely dresses and hats that were made for them. Thus, it seems that body and beauty are themes with

Paradoxes in schooling gender — a messy story

The fact that girls on the average seem to do better than boys at all levels of schooling has triggered off a debate on ‘feminization of schools’ as a problem in many Western countries. In this article, a competing hypothesis is proposed, namely the ‘new girl hypothesis’, relating the academic success to the change of cultural as well as psychological positions among young girls of today. The story of schooling gender is told on the basis of data from a three-generational study of girls and their mothers and grandmothers in Norway, interviewed in 1991–92, and with a follow up for the girls ten years later. This story proves to be a rather ‘messy’ one, showing both ruptures and continuities between the generations. To understand this ‘messy story’ the article explores some paradoxes in schooling gender: Firstly, the paradoxes of pedagogy wavering between gender neutrality and gender reproduction, secondly the paradox of the welfare state wavering between individualizing policy and reproductive family orientation, and finally the paradoxes of knowledge-seeking itself, which can be seen as both gendered as well as transgressing gender boundaries.

Gender, knowledge and desire

That different areas of knowledge (both academic and professional) have different gender appeal is a well known fact. This is also the true of the educational profiles of the professions in the ProLearn project, which are more or less gendered and have not experienced noticeable change in this regard over the last few years.