ABSTRACT
One set of interview questions I prepared yielded a clear cohort contrast regarding the nature of the marriages that surrounded the interviewees. I included questions that asked about the women’s views towards parents’ and peers’ marriages in order to understand their ideas about gender roles. These questions prompted a veritable opening of Pandora’s Box for the boom cohort. Many negative stories were told about their parents’ marriages, sometimes angrily, and contrasted with answers given by the recession cohort. Images of peer marriages held by interviewees also contrasted by cohort, but not necessarily in terms of quality of marriages. This is because peer marriages were largely “invisible” to boom cohort single women, while the recession cohort was exposed to them more openly. According to life course theory, linked lives, or other people’s lives to which individuals are closely connected, have profound impacts on, and consequences for, their life courses.1 Women’s experiences and observations of marriage through their parents and peers may partially explain why some or many of them drifted into unmarried life paths. In this chapter, I present my ndings regarding cohort differences in parents’ and peers’ marriages, and discuss how images of marriage – constructed through lives these women were linked to – may have affected women’s life paths. Note that, for the analysis of parents’ marriages, ve interviews were excluded because, due to a variety of circumstances, they did not generate sufcient data.2
