Abstrakt
A large collection of autobiographical life story material available in oral-history data is used to examine how women and men of different socio-political groups (workers, intelligentsia, dissidents, and communist functionaries) narrate their lives in the time of state-socialist Czechoslovakia. Of particular interest is what these narratives imply for an understanding of the state-socialist gender order.
The analysis combines quantitative (the fre- quency of word co-occurrences) and qualitative (a hermeneutic reading of text fragments) approaches. The results provide evidence that empirically supports what has previously been suggested in the literature: there was an interdependence of private and public spheres, with the family sphere differ- ing in importance for women and men.
Additionally, the discursive density and arrangement of these spheres in the life stories differs according to socio- political groups, and a third sphere, which we have labelled 'politics', emerges for some groups. The findings reveal insights into the relationship between the gender order and the life course through a narrative articulation of life stories of different social groups in Czech state-socialist society.