A small literature at the intersection of anthropology, sociology and demography has examined how individuals draw on conflicting cultural models, or schemas, in making sense of key socio-demographic junctures in the life course (see, e.g., Quinn 1996; Blair-Loy 2003; Johnson-Hanks 2006). In this paper, I draw on qualitative interviews with 24 mother-daughter pairs in popular neighborhoods of Cairo to extend this perspective to an analysis of how women make sense of rapid social change, and how they position their own life choices within that understanding of change. Among the interviewed families, rural to urban migration and dramatic increases in education across the two generations led to very different perceptions of the potential life outcomes for mothers and their daughters. Despite their low socioeconomic status by contemporary Cairo standards, respondents saw the factors of urbanization and education as sources of social mobility among women. Education in particular was seen by both generations as having completely altered the life outlook of younger women. Schemas surrounding women’s education articulated education as an investment in becoming a good wife, a better mother, and a more modern person. Closely related was the schema that young women today work in order to “realize themselves” by developing independent lives and personalities, whereas women of the older generation worked out of material necessity. Despite the fact that a number of the mothers worked, respondents associated the traditional schema of a ‘sit al bayt’ (housewife) with the older generation, and contrasted this with the greater freedom and progress of the younger generation. I argue that tensions between the different schemas that respondents evoked to explain change in their societies, and between those schemas and the courses of their own lives, highlight the adaptation of conflicting cultural trends to aspirational identities of the younger generation that did not always match with the material realities of their lives.