Floor scrubs, electric heaters, Danish magazines, and other revolutionary items. A qualitative research into the lives of three modern Icelandic women.

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Abstract This research focuses on the lives of three Icelandic women born early in the 20th century. The aim of this study was to try to understand how these women viewed their life and how they experienced the changes that Icelandic society has undergone in the 20th century. The women are viewed as active agents that shaped their own lives but also had to live within material and social constraints. The narratives in this project are not meant to represent the lives of all Icelandic women from this period, but rather to provide accounts of women?s experiences of everyday life in the beginning of the 20th century. The concepts, space, modernity and technological change, are used as guidelines for analyzing the interviews and are also the stepping stones in building a theoretical base for this research. The concept of social space points to the space these women had to act, work and live in. How these women negotiated their living space is of special interest in the analysis. Modernity is an important issue in the study because these women?s lives span almost the entire 20th century which was a time of rapid modernization in Iceland. The analysis focuses on how the women participated in Iceland?s modernization and how they became modern. The third theme of this study, technological change, is also interconnected with Iceland?s modernization. The study?s focus is mainly on domestic technology because that is the type of technology that has most affected women?s daily lives and work environment. The subjects were all very different characters and had diverse views of their lives. Poor living standards and the subordination of wom...