Home, Women and Children. Norms and Knowledge Acquisition in Social Services Home Visits in Post-war Sweden

• This article deals with how Swedish welfare authorities, governmental as well as municipal, performed personal case studies during the period 1940 to 1970. The visits at home are focused, as a mean of the authorities to generate truth of the inquired woman. The home visit was part of a personal case inquiry, perhaps initiated from the authorities to create basic data for decision-making. The examples are collected from inquiries before decisions concerning sterilisations, abortions and adoptions as well as municipal child-welfare officers’ surveillance of extramarital born children. After conversations with the inquired woman and perhaps with her employer and relatives, a home visit both served as a complement to the inquiry generating new facts of the woman and her living conditions and to guarantee the authenticity of the prior accumulated knowledge. The article underlines the close connections between the flat/house and the woman living in it. The home, and the people living there, seemed to express the character and quality of the inquired woman. In the perspective of the welfare officer the unannounced visit was preferable. The officer wanted to see the home as it really ”was”, in its daily shape, to be able to validate the woman living in it. The concluding remarks deals with how the individuals in the modern society are the objective of the authorities knowledge and power. This focus on the individual leads the inquiring officer to the threshold of the home, which rather than a private sphere appears as an arena of general interest and action.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Etnologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Ethnology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Sweden

welfare state.

governmentality

power

Social welfare

children

women

home

inquiry

surveillance

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)