La generación femenina de 1950 y el cambio social (1950-2000)

Abstract

When it comes to reconstructing or telling about their personal biography, people tend to magnify myths, perceptions and the pieces of their memories that are time and again told of as the undisputable truth. When memory is the basis for interpreting the past, sometimes we include and mix events that are thought to have been common to a particular generation. For example, despite the fact that by 1968 only a few women could have university education, the perception is just the opposite as “there were a lot of us” in college; and the same accounts for the allegedly wide use of contraception pills at the time.

Both Galician and Spanish women born in the fifties – whose grandmothers had been born early in the XX century and whose mothers were born in the first quarter, themselves being mothers of children born in the last – were part of a generation influenced by such aspects as authoritarianism, religion, rapid emancipation, rural to urban move, industrial modernization, political centralism, birth rate fall, the welfare state expansion , mass consumerism and so on.

We aim to analyse how women in the fifties were affected by both socioeconomic and cultural changes developed between 1950 and 2000 in regard to schooling, emancipation, marriage, work, maternity, children bringing up, family cooperation, political participation, etc. Magnitudes are contextualized in order to show the impact of those transformations on women.