Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze the way women over 60 years old talk about their childhood to women could be their granddaughters. The paper will look at the temporality of the narratives to show their "errant" granddaughters what it really means to be a daughter of the republic.

Paper long abstract:

The issue of the role of emotions in constructing national identity will be discussed in this paper through a study of the life stories of twenty women who at the time of the interview were about sixty years old. Drawing on these interviews, I shall concentrate on the issue of temporality and show how a binary time structure, then and now, serves to differentiate between authentic sentiments and false ones. I shall argue that it is usually through such simple temporal structures that sentiment can become public and therefore part of the process of politics.