ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of how the three generations of women in this study were brought up as girls in distinct social and cultural environments. These experiences are considered to be crucial for understanding their mothering practices later in their lives. The main part of the chapter consists of a detailed description of each generation’s historical context and an analysis of their accounts of childhood. The historical contexts transform from the great-grandmothers who grew up in a patriarchal and agricultural society interrupted by wars, to the grandmothers who grew up in a communist society with many siblings, busy parents and equalitarian ideologies, to the mothers who grew up in a materials rich but single-child and competitive schooling, modern, industrialised society. The women’s accounts of their experiences are connected to these changing contexts. Discussing their childhood was a way to connect women’s later motherhood with their early life experiences. However, this does not suggest that such early experiences determined the women’s later childrearing practices. Rather, by studying what happened as they grew up, the ‘linked or interdependent life’ within families was highlighted. Furthermore, as childhood is the starting point of someone’s biographical trajectory, focusing on these memories in this chapter and then moving on to later life phases (in Chapters 5 and 6) can help us to see the intersection effect of the individual biographical life trajectory, family context and historical time.
