Women's varying life careers and shifting life-patterns : a study of Swedish women born in 1948

Abstract: This study is about a generation of Swedish women's varying life-careers and shifting lifepatterns. As empirical base for the study is used a longitudinal data material collected at the two main time-points, in 1961 and in 1980. The purpose of the study is twofold. One purpose has been to study and make visible the variation and the differences in women lifecareers and related life-patterns. Interacting with this purpose is the other main purpose, represented by the 'how-to-question' and the methodological interest in the question of representation. The quantitative material is largely used, and metaphorically thought of, as a specific type of text to read from rather than as representing coding in numbers to be used in a series of calculations. The outcome product is a story developed in words and not one built up by statistical representations in tables and graphs. The theoretical context for the readings into these women's lives involve the perspective developed by Pierre Bourdieu. His focus on the complexities and multirelational patterns of social reality has formed bridge over to post-structural theories where the perspective of deconstruction has informed the strategies reading these women's lives through a quantitative text. Reading within feminism the question of difference is focused and the study is positioned in this question. The stories produced are organized in three themes, focusing variation in social background, in working life as different professionals and in strategies of study and education for these women. The various readings into these women's lives display both the larger structural patterns as well as individual variation.