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- Sköld, Johanna, 1976-
(författare)
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Fosterbarnsindustri eller människokärlek : Barn, familjer och utackorderingsbyrån i Stockholm 1890-1925
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many Swedish children grew up in foster homes at the turn of the twentieth century. Contemporary medical professionals described foster care as an economic business: a foster child industry. The aim of this study is to analyze whether fostering could be seen as a market, which circumstances that gave rise to such market, and what happened to fostering in Stockholm when foster care was regulated in 1890–1925. Generation, gender and class are key concepts for this analysis. The study deals with approximately 400 children and 800 potential foster homes that were in contact with the Out-placement Bureau in Stockholm, run by the city’s Poor Relief Committee. Sources from the bureau is combined with material from Stockholm’s historical database. The thesis addresses questions on how and why children became foster children, what motivated people to be foster parents, how foster parents were selected and how the foster stay turned out from the child’s perspective. The placement of children could be done in various ways at this time in history. Previous research has mainly focused on state and philanthropic institutions which arranged formal foster homes. Individual persons who arranged informal foster homes for their children, have been less visible. It is concluded from this study that many children already lived in foster homes when the poor relief authorities got involved. It is argued that informal fostering was a form of child care used by single working class mothers. A reciprocal system, where children were placed within their mothers’ social network, was common. The Poor Relief was used to uphold this reciprocal system. This system limited the supply of children in need for fostering with strangers. At the same time there was a great demand for non-familiar foster children amongst potential foster parents outside Stockholm. Economic and demographic factors as well as norms, values and morals constituted and regulated the foster child market.
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| 2. |
- Carlsson, Karin, 1973-
(författare)
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Den tillfälliga husmodern : Hemvårdarinnekåren i Sverige 1940-1960
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines the history of the Swedish public home help service. The public provision of home help is taken as an empirical example of the state’s relationship with the private sphere. Housework and care work are discussed as political issues and as the objects of a professionalization project. The study addresses the creation and distribution of welfare in the form of public services that are delivered in private homes and analyses how visionary government policies worked in practice. In the broadest sense, the thesis aims to increase understanding of the difficult and deeply-rooted problem of how housework and care work can be made ‘real work’.Those who started the public home help service argued that it would relieve the shortage of domestic servants, increase the birth rate, reduce poverty and improve public health. In addition, it was believed that paid domestic work, when performed by public home help workers, would be transformed into a respectable occupation through education, selective recruitment and regulated pay and conditions. This ambition, however, was doomed from the start in part because, as this study shows, central actors in the public home help service took an ambivalent approach concerning educational requirements. Professional care work in the household found itself in a paradoxical situation because its central tasks were the same as those all women and mothers were expected to be able to carry out in the private sphere.The public home help service had a surprisingly short life span. After sixteen years the state subsidy for public home help workers was withdrawn, and new societal problems and political questions took priority. At the same time, the gender discourse underwent significant changes. The necessary preconditions for the existence of the home help had disappeared. Nevertheless, the significance of the public home help service is greater than its own short existence. Seen in a wider historical perspective, the home help service represents an important example of how paid housework constantly takes on new forms and how difficult raising the status and value of household labor is, even when it is publicly supported and regulated.
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| 3. |
- Kling, Sofia, 1975-
(författare)
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Vi våga ej helt leva : barnbegränsning, sexualitet och genus under den svenska fertilitetstransitionen
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about birth control, gender and sexuality during the Swedish fertility transition (1880-1940). The aim is to study birth control at both an ideational and a practical level, as well as to analyse the ways in which birth control was constructed and realised through different notions of gender. The ideational level includes studies of the Swedish morality debates, norms and ideals concerning both gender and birth control, and the radical socialist propaganda for birth control. The practical level analyses how ordinary people experienced birth control and how they motivated their decision to limit childbearing.The thesis is grounded in post-structuralist gender theory. Gender is seen as a process with separate implications for men and women. Respectable women were supposed to demonstrate shyness, humility and sexual passivity while respectable men demonstrated responsibility, attentiveness and sexual knowledge. A respectable man should also protect his wife from pregnancy by abstaining from sex. These norms were to some extent challenged by radical propagandists who promoted mechanical birth control, rather than abstention, as a means to control fertility. In doing this they also recognised that women’s sexual needs were similar to those of men.The second half of the thesis studies birth control at the individual level. Through a collection of letters, written by ordinary men and women and sent to the Swedish Association of Sexual Education, individual experiences and attitudes to birth control are analysed. It is concluded that preventive birth control was a male responsibility. Prevention of pregnancy intervened with sexuality and was therefore an area difficult for women to enter. The most commonly used contraceptive methods during the 1930s were withdrawal and condoms – two methods which required male responsibility. The only birth controlling method that did not intervene with sexuality was abortion. This was a traditionally female responsibility and remained within a female sphere throughout the fertility transition.When people motivated their decision to apply birth control they referred to either the economic situation of the family, the reproductive health of the mother or the fact that they were not yet married. An overriding motive for the two first was a wish among the correspondents to remain respectable. Having a small family was in itself considered respectable by the end of the fertility transition. Acting responsibly in relation to ones children was another sign of respectability. For fathers this meant being able to support the family financially while mothers’ claim to respectability depended on the time they spent at home, with the children, as well as the appearance of both the children and the home.The thesis concludes that the perceptions and experiences of individual men and women are of great importance when the fertility transition is studied. Reproductive decisions were made by individuals, and changes in fertility are therefore the consequence of many people deciding to alter ther sexual life in order to control reproduction. Research on the fertility transition would therefore gain credibility from integrating sources of a more qualitative character into the study.
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