Young Women's Friendships across Three Generations: Insights from Norway

This essay explores the variation in young women's friendships from a temporal and generational perspective: when and why did different features of girls' friendship emerge, what form did they take in different social settings, and what socio-cultural and psychological challenges may they be seen as being a response to or the co-producer of? What significance has tensions between friendship and popularity, competition, and sexuality at different times and in different contexts? How have difficulties between homosocial and heterosexual relations been negotiated among young women who identify as heterosexual? These questions are explored with departure in a three-generational study of young Norwegian women born 1971/72, their mothers born in the 1940s and 50s, and their grandmothers born in the 1910s and 20s. The social forms of girls' friendships are related not only to the norms and discourses of the time, but also to material conditions of life and institutional arrangements in school and family. The tensions between friendship and popularity, competition and sexuality reach their peak in the middle generation, but also seem to have enforced the need for a close best friend to trust. The tension between homosocial bonds and heterosexual relations appear to be different in the three generations, from a self-evident priority to the heterosexual relation in the oldest generation, to a strong tension between them in the middle, and to an efforts to balance them in the youngest.