If they only could speak

By Jane Friis Bohl

[In Danish]

Age is an awkward dimension. My great grandmother lived to be 98 and experienced two world wars. My father’s mother lived to be only 68 and my mother’s mother 77. In that way, I did not have grandmothers to share opinions and experiences with in the last part of my adult life. Existential questions I wish I could have asked them such as: “What did a young woman hope life would bring her?” “How did the world develop in their eyes?” In the age of 25 I must state that I did not know my grandmothers as women. If they only could speak to me today about their lives and ways I could, as a young woman, perhaps reach a broader and better understanding of them as women and as grandmothers.

The consequences of confirmation - then

The world has changed a lot. Thinking about the contents of this essay, I found my thoughts wandering through generations and awakening memories. Because I have been lucky. I have had a “substitute grandmother” and she is an eternal source of inspiration. The stories about her life both good and bad make our world appear endless. Endless, despite of the fact that she thinks everything happens too fast, parents have no time for their children and technology has got out of control. “I see children and youth with mobile phones on the trains and street corners and wonder if it really is necessary to call all the time”. My substitute grandmother can tell me about the time she was confirmed in church and where the words “becoming part of the adult world” really meant that one was treated as an adult. From then on one was usually, if you were a girl, working as the “girl of the house” on a barnyard where you got a little bedchamber and where you could have your chest, which girls usually brought with them.

This was also the case with my “substitute grandmother”. She drew a funny picture of a particular date, 1 May in this case, that we are approaching soon, which might as well have been called the “big moving day” for the young barnyard girls. This day meant a lot of moving around. If the young girls found another barnyard to work on they had to move everything they owned before noon, including their chests. As she says “it meant a lot of chests on the roads that day”. How was it then to go out into the big world and earn money at such a young age? It was fine for her because that is what all the other youths did in those days and that is just “how it was”. It meant a lot of work of course and long days, but it also meant new friends from neighbouring barnyards where she ended up working.

The consequences of confirmation – today

If you wanted to draw parallels between the newly confirmed, who has almost ”become part of the adult world”, there would be a world of a difference. For them, as it was for me, becoming confirmed meant a church session, a party and many presents. Besides that, it never changed my world or the world of the newly confirmed. School continued as it always has and confirmation did not at all mean that one should start working, but on the contrary, it meant you were still together with your friends and the world prior to was the same as the world after confirmation.

The world of opportunities

The world then makes young people like me today to think: “Good it was not me who had to get out and work as a 13-year-old”, cause that must have been a hard life. But my “substitute grandmother” chooses to express it differently “well yes, that is just how it was in those days. We had our free time, where we had fun together. Not everything was about work. In that way my world and yours are not that different”.

Later on in her life she became a telephone operator at a telephone company and after that a bookkeeper at her husband’s auto shop. Life with 4 children and 3-4 apprentices became busy since all the housework had to be done manually. “Cause that is how it was then”. Is she then “envious” of the youth’s lives today? No, no because we have some other things to struggle with today that she did not have then. Longer school hours, more opportunities and thereby more frustration and desperation with regards to the choices in life. And as far as women are concerned, the choice between career and children or children vs. career is a difficult one. Most women today choose to have both a career and children, which means that every day life for most children typically consists of longer hours in day care, youth centres and extra curricular activities. The consequence in most cases is a troublesome existence for the parents and a minimal contact with their children. Or is that also a coincidence?

It is true that children a few generations back spent more time with their parents, particularly in the country, but is that really true? Because according to my “substitute mother” being with ones parents often meant hard physical labour and long days in the field. Perhaps the “parent-child” relationship was different then? Concurrent with Denmark becoming more wealthy and moving from an agricultural to an industrialised society, now an information society, our world is set up in such a way that “parent-child” relationship is described with a “fashion word”, characterised by the so called quality concept. When parents are home with their children it is understood that they are spending time together. By becoming wealthier than our grandparents’ generation we have also gained the opportunity to prioritise. Prioritising for the purpose of working does not force today’s parents to work all the time and thereby gives the opportunity to know their children in a different way.

Is it better then than in the olden days? The answers will most certainly vary according to whom you choose to ask, but I think the answer is yes. Mostly because I have through conversations with my parents often heard the sentence “we never spoke of such things with our parents”. Openness about basic things such as wishes about the kind of work one wanted to do, love and period were just not subjects of conversation. It was just something that was there. And what about women in today’s parent “circus”? Do we have the opportunity to get what we want or wish for? We must note that every choice we make has its consequences. That is how it is for us women in today’s Denmark, and that is how it was for our grandmothers then. Globally, women’s opportunities vary enormously. Women’s living conditions differ from country to country. Women in Denmark have from our “grandmothers’ generation” up until now gone through a long liberation process from those sets of rules that dominated throughout time. Women got the right to vote and the opportunity to chose abortion; the list is long and is evident of how long we have come on behalf of our gender.

Are we ready for the new Millennium? I, as a 25-year-old woman today, am very aware of what the world can offer me and what I can offer the world. The opportunities are many. I can only think with joy of those women who paved the way for me and of their struggle for equality and of those women who have given me the opportunity to look at the world with different eyes.

Translated from Chinese to Danish by Hatla Thelle
Translated from Danish to English by Seila Redzepi