When you have known someone only as your grandmother, it is surprisingly difficult to imagine that she once existed in a world in which you did not. The woman who remembers your birthday, asks whether you are eating properly and tells stories about relatives whose names you barely recognise once had an entirely different set of worries. She had friendships you know nothing about, ambitions that may have frightened her, people she loved before your family existed, mistakes she may never have told you about and decisions that helped determine the person she eventually became.
She was not born a grandmother. That is simply the version of her life you arrived in time to meet.
Long before that label existed, she was a girl trying to understand what the adults around her expected of her, and later a young woman making choices in a society that often offered women a much narrower definition of a successful life than the one available today. Depending on where and when she grew up, there may have been assumptions about the work she should do, the person she should marry, how she should dress, whether she should continue her education, how independent she ought to be and how much of her own ambition should be surrendered once she became a wife or mother.
Some women accepted much of that life because it genuinely suited them. Others accepted parts of it because the alternatives carried consequences that younger generations can easily underestimate. And some began pushing against those boundaries, sometimes loudly enough to appear in newspapers and history books, but much more often in decisions so ordinary by today’s standards that we have forgotten they were ever acts of defiance.
A woman did not have to attend Woodstock, march through the streets or ride away on a motorcycle to challenge the rules of her generation. She might have been the first woman in her family to attend university, taken a job her parents considered unsuitable, opened a bank account of her own, travelled without a husband, refused to remain in an unhappy marriage, decided not to marry at all, returned to work after having children or simply insisted that there was more than one acceptable way for a woman’s life to unfold.
Many of those decisions would barely attract attention now, and that is precisely what makes them so easy to overlook. Once a social boundary has been pushed far enough, the people who grow up on the other side of it can mistake their freedom for something that was always there.
What looks ordinary to one generation may exist only because the generation before it refused to accept what was once considered normal.
That is why looking at an older person only through the role they occupy today can be so misleading. We see the grandmother but not necessarily the young woman who existed before her; We see the settled life without seeing the arguments, risks, compromises and acts of courage that helped create it.
And there is something else we often miss. The person sitting across from you has lived entire versions of herself that you never met.
It is tempting to tell the story of women who came of age in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s through the most visible symbols of rebellion. There were miniskirts, rock music, anti-war demonstrations, changing attitudes toward sex and relationships, and a counterculture that deliberately challenged many of the assumptions inherited from the generation before it. Those images have become so familiar that rebellion from the period can sometimes look like a costume: put on the boots, play Hendrix, find a photograph from Woodstock and we think we understand what changed.
But the more consequential rebellion was happening far beyond music festivals and fashion.
It was happening in homes, universities, offices, factories and relationships, as millions of women began questioning assumptions that had previously been presented not merely as traditions but as descriptions of how life was supposed to work. The argument was not simply about whether a woman could wear a shorter skirt; it was increasingly about whether she could determine the shape of her own adulthood.
That distinction matters because fashion changes quickly while expectations can survive for generations. A hemline might rise in a few years, but changing assumptions about who should earn the money, who should control it, whose career should take priority, who should raise the children and how much independence a woman could reasonably expect required something much more difficult than adopting a new style.
It required people to behave differently while the old expectations were still considered normal.
Some did that through organised movements and political activism. Others did it privately, by making a choice that disappointed their parents, challenged a husband, surprised their friends or simply contradicted the future everyone had assumed was waiting for them. They may never have thought of themselves as revolutionaries, because from inside a life, a historic social change rarely feels like history. It feels like deciding whether to apply for the job, leave the relationship, take the trip, speak up, earn your own money or refuse to do something simply because everybody expects you to.
Some women changed the rules by marching in the streets. Others changed them simply by living a life their mothers had never been allowed to imagine.
To understand what some of those choices meant, we have to resist looking backwards through the freedoms available today, because rules become remarkably difficult to see once they have disappeared. A young woman growing up now may reasonably assume that choosing a career, opening a bank account, travelling independently, deciding whether to marry or expecting to participate equally in decisions about money are simply ordinary features of adult life. Yet within the lifetime of many women who are grandmothers today, some of those choices were restricted by law while others were constrained just as effectively by expectations about what respectable women were supposed to do.
The precise rules differed enormously between countries, communities and families, and progress did not arrive everywhere at the same time. There was never one universal experience of being a woman in the twentieth century. Wealth mattered, race mattered, class mattered, geography mattered, and a woman raised in a liberal household might have encountered possibilities that another woman of exactly the same age had barely been encouraged to imagine.
But across much of the world there was a powerful assumption running beneath many of those differences: adulthood for a woman was expected to lead toward marriage, motherhood and responsibility for the home, while paid work, financial independence and public authority remained more naturally associated with men. A woman could work – and millions did – but there was often an expectation that her employment would fit around the larger role society had already written for her.
That is one reason historical change can be misleading when we reduce it to a list of dates on which laws were passed. A law can change in a day while an expectation survives inside families, workplaces and relationships for decades. Being legally permitted to do something does not necessarily mean being encouraged to do it, taken seriously when you attempt it or protected from the social consequences of choosing differently.
For a woman trying to build a life inside that environment, challenging convention therefore did not always involve standing opposite the establishment with a placard. Sometimes it meant becoming the first person in her family to question an assumption that everyone around her regarded as common sense.
And that is where the story becomes relevant far beyond women’s history, because unwritten rules are most powerful when the people following them no longer experience them as rules at all. They feel like reality. They become the things everybody knows, the choices sensible people make and the boundaries respectable people understand without needing to have them explained.
Until somebody crosses one.
By the 1960s and 1970s, many of those boundaries were being challenged from several directions at once. The women’s movement was demanding greater equality in education, employment, law and family life, while the civil rights movement, anti-war protests and a broader counterculture were encouraging younger people to question institutions that previous generations had often been taught to respect. At the same time, new music, fashion and changing attitudes toward relationships were making that rejection of convention visible in everyday culture.
This is where the familiar images belong.
The miniskirt mattered not because every woman who wore one was making a political statement, but because clothing had become one visible battleground in a much larger argument over who had the right to decide how a woman should present herself. Rock music mattered not because listening to Led Zeppelin automatically made someone rebellious, but because popular culture was increasingly giving young people a language, identity and community that did not depend entirely upon the approval of their parents.
And performers such as Janis Joplin mattered because she did not fit comfortably inside the conventional expectations surrounding female performers. Her voice was rough, vulnerable and ferocious, and the persona she presented was far removed from the carefully controlled femininity that audiences had often been encouraged to expect. Jimi Hendrix was challenging musical conventions from another direction, while artists across rock, soul and folk were helping create a culture in which questioning what had come before increasingly felt possible.
Woodstock eventually became one of the most recognisable symbols of that moment, but its significance was larger than hundreds of thousands of young people standing in mud listening to music. It represented, however imperfectly, the growing belief that the world inherited from one’s parents was not necessarily the world one had to reproduce.
That belief could be exhilarating, naïve, contradictory and sometimes self-destructive. The counterculture was not an enlightened generation arriving to correct everything its parents had done wrong, and romanticizing it that way would simply replace one historical myth with another. Many people who spoke about freedom carried their own prejudices and contradictions, women encountered sexism even inside supposedly progressive movements, and some experiments in rejecting convention produced consequences that were anything but liberating. Yet something fundamental had changed.
A generation was becoming increasingly willing to ask a question that sits at the heart of NoRuleBook :
Just because this is the life we inherited, why must it be the life we reproduce?
For some women, that question became political activism. For others, it became a personal decision made quietly enough that nobody outside the family would ever know it happened. Both could alter what became possible for the people who followed.
This is why the most interesting stories may not belong to the women whose photographs appeared in newspapers.
Your grandmother may never have attended a protest. She may have disliked rock music, considered miniskirts ridiculous and spent the years around Woodstock raising children thousands of kilometres away. If so, that does not make her life less relevant to this story, because social change is not created only by the people who become its symbols.
Perhaps she stayed in a marriage for fifty years and was happy there. Perhaps she wanted children and found enormous meaning in raising them. Perhaps she preferred a conventional life and would laugh at the suggestion that she had ever been a rebel. None of those choices becomes less legitimate simply because other women were fighting for alternatives.
That distinction is essential to the NoRuleBook philosophy.
Freedom is not demonstrated by choosing the unconventional option. It exists when the conventional and unconventional options can both be genuinely chosen.
The achievement of women who challenged earlier expectations was therefore not that they proved marriage, motherhood, domestic life or tradition were wrong. It was that they helped make those things less compulsory as definitions of what a woman’s life had to become.
And change often occurred one ordinary decision at a time. One woman remained in education when people expected her to leave. Another continued working after marriage. Someone else applied for a position where women had rarely been seen, travelled somewhere alone, bought something with money she had earned herself, ended a relationship that everybody expected her to tolerate, or raised a daughter with possibilities she herself had never been offered.
None of those moments necessarily felt historic while they were happening. They were personal decisions made on ordinary days by people who still had bills to pay, families to consider and consequences to live with.
But multiply those decisions across millions of lives and eventually the unusual becomes possible, the possible becomes accepted and the accepted becomes so ordinary that the next generation struggles to imagine it was ever controversial.
The greatest evidence that a rule has been successfully broken may be that the generation which follows no longer realizes the rule existed.
That is how social progress can erase some of the people responsible for creating it. We remember the famous campaigners because history records their names, while the quieter rule breakers disappear into family photographs, until eventually they are known primarily as Mum, Nana or Grandma.
Nothing magical happens at sixty, seventy or eighty that erases all the people someone used to be. Age adds another chapter to a life; it does not retrospectively rewrite the chapters that came before it.
Yet our language encourages us to do exactly that. Once someone becomes a grandmother, the role can become so dominant that we unconsciously begin treating it as an identity rather than a relationship. We see the person in relation to ourselves—the grandmother who attends birthdays, asks questions, gives advice or sits at the end of the family table—without thinking very often about the woman who existed before any of us were there to observe her.
That younger woman may have been more cautious than we imagine, or far less cautious. She may have made decisions she remains proud of and others she would never repeat. There may have been careers abandoned, friendships lost, places visited, opportunities missed, relationships nobody mentions anymore and moments of courage that seem completely inconsistent with the person we think we know.
But there is no inconsistency. They are all the same life.
This is one of the strange consequences of knowing someone across only part of their story. We meet people in the chapter where our own character enters and unconsciously treat everything before that point as backstory.
The person sitting across from you has lived entire versions of herself that you never met.
And unlike the broader history of a generation, those versions of a person are not preserved automatically. Unless somebody asks about them, many disappear when the person who remembers them does.
There is an uncomfortable reason this article matters beyond the history it describes. Many of the people who can tell us what these changes actually felt like are reaching an age when their stories will disappear unless somebody thinks to ask for them.
Family history has a strange tendency to preserve events while losing experiences. We remember where someone lived, whom they married, what work they did and perhaps where they travelled, yet we often know remarkably little about what it felt like to be them before the roles we associate with them had formed. We know Grandma was a nurse, teacher, shop assistant, mother or homemaker, but perhaps nobody has ever asked whether that was the life she originally imagined for herself, what other possibilities she considered, which expectations she resented, what frightened her when she was twenty or which decision changed the direction of everything that followed.
The loss is greater than nostalgia because these stories can reveal something that history books struggle to capture: what an unwritten rule feels like while people are still living inside it. Looking backwards, we can identify social expectations quite easily because we already know which ones eventually changed. Living through them is different. At the time, an expectation may simply have felt like adulthood, respectability, responsibility or common sense.
Your grandmother may remember that difference.
She may remember being told that a particular career was unsuitable for women, or that travelling alone was dangerous, or that getting married was simply what came next. She may remember being expected to leave work when children arrived, watching brothers receive freedoms she did not have, being discouraged from studying something she loved or discovering that financial independence was more complicated than younger generations now assume. Equally, she may tell you that some assumptions we make about her generation are completely wrong, that she had far more freedom than you imagined or that the life younger people might dismiss as conventional was precisely the life she wanted.
That possibility is important, because the purpose of asking is not to turn every older woman into evidence for a story about oppression or rebellion. It is to discover the person underneath the assumptions – including our own.
Before she was your grandmother, she was someone trying to decide what kind of life would be hers.
And perhaps the most revealing question is not whether she considers herself a rule breaker at all. Ask instead what people expected from a young woman when she was growing up, which of those expectations she accepted, which she questioned and which now seem almost impossible to explain to someone born decades later.
You may discover that the most important act of rebellion in her life was something nobody else remembers.
There is a useful way to think about social progress that rarely gets discussed. When a rule is successfully challenged, we tend to celebrate the freedom that replaces it while gradually forgetting how powerful the original rule once was. That is understandable. A young woman who grows up expecting to choose her education, career and partner does not need to wake each morning feeling grateful that previous generations fought over those choices. Freedom becomes useful precisely because it eventually feels normal.
But normality can hide its own history.
A workplace filled with women does not carry labels identifying the people who first entered professions where they were once unwelcome. A woman signing a mortgage does not see the arguments previous generations had about female financial independence. A daughter encouraged to pursue an ambitious career may never know that her grandmother once had to justify wanting something beyond the future everyone had already planned for her.
The old boundary disappears, and eventually even the memory of crossing it begins to disappear with it.
This is one reason NoRuleBook is interested in unwritten rules rather than simply written ones. Written restrictions leave evidence behind: legislation can be dated, court decisions recorded and institutional policies archived. Social expectations are harder to preserve because they often exist in conversations, raised eyebrows, family pressure, jokes, warnings and phrases such as ‘that’s just not something women do.’ Once enough people stop saying those things, it becomes difficult for the generations that follow to understand how influential they once were.
Freedom can become so normal that we forget it was once an act of defiance.
And there is a lesson here that reaches beyond the freedoms women gained during the twentieth century. If previous generations lived inside assumptions that seemed completely normal until somebody challenged them, it would be extraordinarily arrogant to assume that our generation has somehow escaped the same process.
We have our own rules that do not look like rules.
We have ideas about what a successful career should look like, when adulthood should begin, how much money is enough, when someone is too old to start again, what education is supposed to achieve, what retirement should look like, how relationships should develop and which ambitions are sensible enough to pursue. Some of those conventions exist for good reasons and will survive scrutiny. Others may eventually appear as peculiar to future generations as some of the expectations we now struggle to imagine imposing on our grandmothers. The difficult part is that we do not yet know which are which.
That is why the grandmother in this story is more than a symbol of an earlier generation. Her life offers evidence that normal is temporary. The boundaries surrounding a life can feel permanent right up until enough people begin crossing them.
Imagine, for a moment, reversing the perspective.
Decades from now, somebody much younger may look at a photograph of you and struggle to understand why people of your generation organised their lives the way they did. They may find it extraordinary that so many people spent years doing work they disliked because that was considered the responsible path, or that education, careers, relationships, housing and retirement were arranged around assumptions that seemed too obvious to question.
Perhaps they will be baffled by something entirely different that we cannot yet see because we are standing too close to it.
They may ask why you followed a particular rule. And you may find yourself giving exactly the explanation that previous generations have given countless times:
“That was simply how things were.”
There is nothing shameful about that answer. Every generation inherits a world before it has the opportunity to examine it, and nobody has the time or wisdom to question every convention surrounding them. But there is an enormous difference between inheriting a rule and consciously deciding to keep it.
That difference is where NoRuleBook begins.
The lesson from the women who came before us is therefore not that rebellion is automatically courageous or that convention is automatically weak. It is that the range of lives available to us today was expanded by people willing to examine boundaries that others regarded as settled. Sometimes they discovered that the boundary served a useful purpose. Sometimes they discovered that it had outlived one. And sometimes they discovered that there had never been much behind it except the accumulated weight of people saying, ‘This is how things are done.’
The responsibility of the next generation is not to reject everything those people built. It is to keep asking the question that made change possible in the first place.
"Which of the rules that feel completely normal today will the next generation wonder why we ever followed?"
If you are fortunate enough to still have a grandmother, mother, aunt or another older woman in your life, have a conversation with her that you have never had before. Ask what she imagined her future would look like when she was twenty, what choices women around her were expected to make, which expectations she questioned and whether there was anything she wanted that once seemed unavailable simply because of who she was or the time in which she was born.
Then ask what she thinks your generation takes for granted.
The conversation may not produce a dramatic story. There may be no protest march, motorcycle, forbidden romance or moment of cinematic rebellion, and that is precisely why it is worth having. The most revealing answer might concern an ordinary decision whose significance disappeared once the freedom to make it became ordinary too.
And while you are listening, resist the temptation to turn her story immediately into a lesson about your own life. Let her be more than evidence for an argument. Let her be the young woman you never had the chance to meet.
Because one day the stories will exist only if somebody remembered to ask.
Every generation receives freedoms it did not create and rules it did not choose. Over time, the freedoms become normal and the rules become difficult to see, until somebody begins asking why one should be protected and the other obeyed.
The women who came before us did not all rebel in the same way, nor did they all want the same kind of life. Some marched, some fought institutions, some transformed workplaces and professions, while others made private decisions that changed little beyond the boundaries of their own families. What connects their stories is not rebellion for its own sake, but the gradual expansion of what a woman could reasonably choose her life to become.
That is the inheritance worth recognizing. Not an obligation to reject convention, but the freedom to examine it.
And perhaps the best way to honour people who expanded that freedom is not to imitate the choices they made in a different world, but to bring the same curiosity to the rules shaping ours.
She didn't break the rules so you would have to live differently. She helped make it possible for you to choose.
Once you have had that conversation, turn the question toward your own life. Think about one choice you currently regard as almost automatic—not because you have examined it carefully and decided it is right for you, but because it is simply what people at your age, in your career, family or circumstances are expected to do.
You do not need to reject it. Instead, ask where the expectation came from, what purpose it serves and whether you would still choose it if nobody around you expected anything at all. The answer may confirm that the conventional path is exactly the one you want, or it may reveal that you have been treating somebody else’s assumption as though it were a fact of life.
That is how unwritten rules become visible.
And once a rule becomes visible, following it becomes a choice.
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