Born around The First World War: Refining Gender Complementarity

Abstract

This chapter explores the feeling of gender of women and men born in the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s in different social classes in Norway. It connects their perceptions of the men’s and women’s work in their childhood families, the feelings of gender that grew out of their idealisation and ambivalence towards their parents, and of their experiences of gendered bodies and gendered sexuality. Furthermore, it examines the ways in which these feelings of gender found their way into articulated reflections of gender, the choices made about their own families as young adults and, finally, how all these experiences are reflected in their thinking about gender equality as a dilemma between justice and equity. The experience of the hardships of their mothers made it a life project for the men in this generation to refine gender complementarity, something that matched the policies of the post-war years. The women tacitly complied, but without enthusiasm.