Imagining Gendered Adulthood

Tuula Gordon (1) , Janet Holland (2) , Elina Lahelma (3) , Rachel Thomson (4)

1 Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
2 South Bank University
3 Helsingin yliopisto = Helsingfors universitet = University of Helsinki
4 OU - The Open University [Milton Keynes]

In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people's transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality between the genders. The debate is moved beyond ‘pitiful girls' and ‘can-do girls' by exploring how young women in the UK and Finland anticipate and try to avoid being locked into the lives of adult women.

Mots clés: comparative studies; gender; longitudinal; qualitative studies; transitions; young women

Tuula Gordon, Janet Holland, Elina Lahelma, Rachel Thomson. Imagining Gendered Adulthood. European Journal of Women's Studies, 2005, 12 (1), pp.83-103. ⟨10.1177/1350506805048857⟩. ⟨hal-00571235⟩