Historical, Cultural, and Emotional Meanings: Interviews with Young Girls in Three Generations

People use cultural concepts to organize and construct their social worlds. The question asked in this paper is how such constructions are infused with personal meaning and emotions from specific psychobiographies, and how this may facilitate or impede cultural and social changes, for instance, in the form of what one could call a certain inner psychological readiness for some discourses and not for others, for some structural changes and not for others. With examples from an on-going study of young girls in three generations the paper discusses the relations between historical context, discursive constructions, and emotional reality as they appear in texts of interviews. The interaction between these three levels of meaning is also illustrated by an analysis of the housewife of the 1950s.