Thus Was Born Feminism
Have women always felt oppressed or, if not, when did it begin? During my research in the archives of the Centrum för Näringslivshistoria (The Centre for Business History) I found many women who ran their own businesses or actively participated in the family business. But were they isolated phenomena? Or was the framework simply more conducive to entrepreneurship? Can other sources help us complete this picture of women’s roles in the past – for example through the fiction?
When novel writing became possible after the gradual introduction of press freedom, we begin to encounter environments depicted for women and which were about women and were familiar to the readers. Particularly interesting are the authors with roots in the bourgeoisie and their contemporary depictions. Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866) wanted to give a true picture of entrepreneurial women, and no one seems to have objected to the account he gives in Detgår an (It’s Alright) (1839). The abolition of the guilds had become a drawn-out affair, and their impending abolition created the uncertain prospects for the workers. The 24-year-old Sara Videeck, after her father’s death, takes over the family glass company. She begins a relationship with Albert, and the future opportunities they each have as entrepreneurs seem to set the agenda for their common future. The insecurity that an unmarried Sara would have with Albert caused a fierce debate and was perceived as a general attack on marriage, especially as the rewards of entrepreneurship became more uncertain after the abolition of the guilds, and security for single women became a priority.
Emilie Flygare-Carlén (1807-92) published 31 books that were translated into twelve languages. The success lay in the presentation – how an energetic woman could, if not completely change their situation, at least have an influence on it. In Ettköpmanshus i skärgården (A Merchant’s House in the Archipelago) (1859) the heroine developed into a hands-on merchant’s wife, after many trials. A recurrent theme in Flygare-Carlen’s novels is that women are responsible for taking decisions. The daughter escapes from her family, develops a strong personality, and takes financial responsibility. The novel KamrerLassman (Accountant Lassman) (1842) features an energetic, somewhat wealthy, clothing trader wife, Dora Norman, who has one of the finest shops on Merchant Street in Stockholm. The clothes shop is depicted in detail, as are her colleagues and friends in the industry. Her sister, Neta, is a sausage maker with her own stand at Riddarhustorget and Jakobstorget. That the author was familiar with the characters and the environments is unmistakeable.
August Blanche (1811-68) described life in Stockholm over many episodes, partly based on real human stories. Middle class women appear to be secure and energetic, rarely oppressed by their husbands, except when they were abusing alcohol:
You could see and hear in everything that his wife was the one who had control in this house. In town houses, and even in others, there is an inexhaustible common good that a prudent wife exerts over the master’s empire. Experience shows, and has shown that such households always fare best, and a prudent wife does not henpeck her husband; but she mostly does it in so fine a manner, that neither he nor others are aware of it. (From Flickan i Stadsgården [A Girl in Stadsgarden] 1847).
This refers to Mrs. Brundstrom, the coppersmith’s wife. In the same manner are described friends’ mothers such as the cooper’s wife of Surbrunnsgatan, the liveryman’s widow of RödaBodarna that are continuing the family businesses, and the hauliers’ and clothes-selling wives. Blanche grew up in KlaraSjo, in the Sporrongska yard that had a carriage repair shop, a forge and a carriage builder. The mother, the wife of blacksmith Blanche, as a widow ran herself this large workshop in the period 1830-39. Another real example is given in the story of Madaskan, who owned the milk warehouse at Sibyllegatan-Karlavägen and who became wealthy by these two properties. She lent money, as did other middle class people, not only to family and friends but also to others in need of loans, as the banking industry was not yet sufficiently developed. Perhaps herein lies an explanation for why the working class has usually had broad popular support in its use of the epithet ‘bourgeois’, in the pejorative sense.
After the gild resolution 1846 and the introduction of general economic liberalism in 1864, the possibilities of starting a business increased. Training was organised and extended to the higher levels of society, even to women. It may seem paradoxical that the competition for jobs intensified when the fomer rigid guild- and stall system was liberalised. But it was not only women that were being admitted into all professions, but also the majority of men, who had previously been in subordinate positions in business and agriculture. This trend was reflected in women’s magazines.
Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona started the Journal of the Home in 1859. The guiding principle was that women need to work, and work needs women. Various articles presented ideas supporting women’s professional activities. The aim was that women would be prepared to work independently and become self-employed. The Beehive and Handicraft’s Friends were two such projects. Furthermore, in Sunday- and evening schools for working-class daughters, a reading room for ladies, and an employment agency, and a typing bureau, where many made contacts both as employees and entrepreneurs. Editors took up these new projects and spread knowledge of them through women’s magazine. But what would a woman with extensive training do if she was not welcome in government departments, schools and hospitals? The questions arose in the late 1800s and resulted in the Competence Law of 1925. But, despite this, the resistance to women’s professional work and business grew.
One reason can be traced to the new industrial society’s need for flexible labour. Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), son of a garment manufacturer, spent the 1840s in Manchester and wrote The Position of the Working Class in England (1845) – a strong attack on the factory owners and the exploitation of workers. Men’s position in society had been undermined. He showed the devastating consequences of the use of machinery and above all of the new competition, which was the women’s professional work that had made men unemployed.
When wages were forced down by competition, men lost work to women, who thus became seen as strikebreakers. The negative consequences of women working are more pronounced in Sweden, where the prohibition of the eight-hour day, overtime, and night work for women was discussed in parliament in 1908. Through special arrangements, politicians could limit women’s professional work. Engel’s early works thus laid out unionism’s credo and laid the foundations of feminism, which came to be developed before the turn of the century.
The Communist Manifesto (1848) did not address women’s issues and Marx and Engels did not comment on women’s suffrage. The important link in order to attract women to the socialist movement came almost 40 years later when Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). It spread rapidly and had a huge impact.
The idea was to create a politics for women, not against them, such as in The Position of the Working Class in England. The arguments were shaped so that women would become socialist through its very own description of history. Engels drew from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan’s research on a North American Indian tribe – the Iroquois. Human history is divided into three eras: savagery, barbarism and civilisation. With this development, woman’s social status declined and was particularly low at the start of civilisation and the growth of private property. This causality was brand new; for when private property arose, for it to be inherited monogamy became necessary, and this led to women being enslaved in marriage.
Engels designed this thesis in order to bring women to revolt against men, authorities, and the lingering bourgeois society. Thus was laid the foundation of a masculinity against which equality feminism fought in the second half of the 1900s. What he did not reveal to the historically ignorant audience – the working class – was that women had long been active in production and had contributed to his and his family’s living.
Before Engels, another established view of history was established: the Scottish School. Adam Smith’s teacher, Francis Hutcheson, had in a book on moral philosophy outlined how the responsibilities of marriage should be divided, as well as the rewards. Smith developed the ideas further, but it was his disciple John Millar (1735-1801), professor of civil law in Glasgow, whose description of the role of women during different historical eras became widely accepted. In Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society of 1771, he identified four social periods: the hunting stage, the pastoral society, the farmers’ time and the trading society. He expressed a well-accepted conclusion: that women’s status had been strengthened with progress. Until the 1880s, there was support for women’s strengthened position in the cultural society as in Millar’s work.
Engels thus accomplished a radical change in this perspective, partly because of the workers’ ignorance of Millar and partly because of Engels’ strong position as the father of socialism. In The Originof the Family, Private Property and the State we find the foundations of the liberation theory that attracted women to socialism. In effect this meant, however, subservience and a limiting of life opportunities. The societal development that had gradually strengthened women’s social and economic freedom was now broken. They were seen no longer as individuals but as part of an economic and political system.
In 1905, Hjalmar Branting’s party’s position was summarised in Morgonbris (The Morning Breeze) – a newspaper of the Socialist Women’s Movement – by confirming Engel’s observations of the opposite gender roles in the English textile industry. The goal was not to destroy the family, but to establish new relationships between the sexes with a bond that was not based on economic necessity; in fact, it was just what they did. Economic policy came into practice to support a gender-divided labour market and women’s increasing economic dependence on man. It was considered necessary that married women worked as long as her husband’s salary was too low to support the family. The solution was to raise the man’s salary and relegate women to the home.
Around 1900, women were often engaged in larger networks to improve the social situation of workers conditions, sobriety, health insurance and poverty relief, education, childcare, lone mothers’ status, and morality / prostitution. Their work was groundbreaking and over time it became a basis for political reform. Such pioneering work was carried out within the association White Ribbon, formed in 1901. There was not considered to be a need for enhancing male characteristics in society, but of female. Here grew the notion that women were morally superior and exemplary. The reasoning behind this matriarchal superiority becomes logical when you understand that women, in all other areas, were considered subordinate.
Women’s supposedly unique ability to care motivated the work with the young, elderly, sick and poor. The woman who did not have her own children could be more robust in focusing on the needs of those for whom society needed to take responsibility. Ellen Key (1849-1926) coined the term social mother when describing the divine origin of the inner light of the woman and their particular conscience to assert themselves in society. Women with children were to be compensated with maternity pay, paid by men to ensure women’s position as a mother. In Morgonbris, the increasingly radical Ellen Key’s theses became the norm in 1925 – only under capitalism would the woman have to work, but under socialism she would not have to. Society, then, was based on the idea that ”in order to create decent economic conditions, it is necessary to allow the mothers to quietly devote themselves to their homes and to their crucial calling as parents”. Besides Elin Wagner, there followed several writers in that vein in the 1930s.
In addition to mainstream family policy, voices were raised in Morgonbris from the opposite perspective: women’s economic independence of men. Frida Steenhoff’s statements and Aleksandra Kollontaj’s book Kvinnansställning i den ekonomiskasamhällsutvecklingen (The Position of women in the Economic Development of Society) (1926) heralded the isolated and sometimes forgotten theses of the era of the equality feminists.
It was a classic Marxist solution that awaited housewives when they went out to participate in public life. Society/state would provide child-rearing and housework; or, in Kollontaj’s words: ”The general obligation to work, supplemented with the protection of women and thus the protection of subsequent generations’ health and strength, is not only the foundation upon which the new production system will be built, but it is also the only means for a thorough solution of women’s issues. At the moment the state’s power is in the workers’ hands, and the woman is again, with irresistible force, being drawn into socially useful production, after her centuries-long dependence … The dictatorship of the proletariat is the way to a woman’s complete emancipation.”
Alva Myrdal sought to bring the socialist utopia of equality to life, with the man as the desirable norm but, in practice, the specific nature of feminism was established, culminating in the large number of housewives in the mid-1900s. ”Today’s society is missing women’s action, and today’s families are missing men’s connection”, she wrote in 1937 in Morgonbris. The year before, in the book The Family, the Woman and Society she had challenged the housewives’ movement with all its courses in rational housework. The political climate was not yet ripe for change.
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From a worker’s perspective, the victories were won, according to Arne Eriksson’s opinion at the Social Democratic Party’s congress of 1972:
I think of the fact that the man has worked within the party and the organisations, municipalities, trade unions, etc., while the woman has had primary responsibility for the home and children. On this basis, we have built up a well-functioning democracy that is rarely matched. Of course, this arrangement has meant sacrifices for both the man and the woman in the family, but there has been a division of labour that has served a purpose. The woman’s role in this regard deserves to go down in history. It has been a heroic deed. She has, through her work, made possible a concentrated effort by the man in organisational life.
It was now that the socialist women – finally – after long agony, were forced to fight the real gender power structure: the union men’s specific version of feminism. New winds had already begun to blow, individual taxation was completed in 1971, Group 8 (1971-96) had been formed, public childcare had been promised and equality became the new watchword in politics.
For a short time in history, we could have imagined the position of Swedish bourgeois women reflected in the historical literature before society moved towards democracy and industrialism. The stories show a de facto relatively equal position of spouses that had income from a business. With the changing business conditions, specificity feminism became the thesis that not only unions but also agitators such as Ellen Key advocated by the late 1800s to the mid-1900s.
Its antithesis – equality feminism – was conceived in Sweden in terms of the ideas of socialists like Steenhoff, Kollontaj and Myrdal and got its breakthrough in the second half of the 1900s. The pendulum swung from one interpretation of the role of women to the other, and must be understood in light of the polarisation that socialism underpinned, based on Engels’ two problem formulations. This feminist dichotomy, specificity versus equality, came to be perceived as settled by younger generations.
Why have women felt more oppressed economically and professionally in a modern democracy than before? The question must be further explained. They got the right to vote at all political levels, but the feminist movement suggests that they were not satisfied with their lot.