The thesis considers three women conferences arranged by the National Council of Women of Sweden (NCWS) in Stockholm at the turn of the 20th century. NCWS was a branch of the International Council of Women and at its height it was an umbrella-organisation for about forty Swedish women organisations. The focus is on the role of the conferences as arenas for women who wanted to prove their ability and competence in society. The content, the form and the function of the conferences are analysed.
The question whether the conferences arranged by the NCWS reflected the ideas, dilemmas and strategies of the bourgeois women’s movement is addressed. A larger historical development is illuminated – the formation of the bourgeois women movements for the public sphere in the process of modernity. The thesis explores different theories and shows how the concepts of class, gender, public sphere, modernity and trans-nationalism were dealt with at the conferences.
The women conferences have been treated as manifestations; as a quintessence of the ideas and ambitions of the movement. The thesis asserts that the ideology of the movements was formulated and expressed not only in spoken words, but also in festivities, symbols and sisterhood. The class identity was manifested in the form of which the conferences were conducted. On the one hand, the conference women showed loyalty to the conservative society and the rigid class position. On the other hand, the conference initiators wanted to improve women’s opportunities of becoming citizens and to move the boarders between the public and the private. Ideologies such as Internationalism and Scandinavism became important in creating a collective identity.
This article studies the historical shift in societal understandings of gender and security in Finland that led to the introduction of women's voluntary military service and the opening of the military professions to women in 1995. With a focus on how the gendered division of defence and military labour was conceptualized at various stages, the study analyses what caused Finland to lag behind its Scandinavian neighbours in this respect, and what caused a sweeping reform process to come about in the early 1990s. Drawing on press materials, parliamentary records and policymaking documents, it traces public debates and policymaking over two decades. It shows that women's defence work was a controversial issue, for both historical and political reasons. This caused an emphasis being placed on women's non-military tasks within a broad understanding of societal security during the 1980s. Around the end of the Cold War, a surge of neo-patriotism coincided with the normalization of formal gender equality to effect a significant shift in notions of female citizenship towards military participation. Positive Scandinavian examples of women's military integration were decisive at this point, as was the political impact of Finland acquiring its first female minister of defence.
Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities explores how, and to what extent, fascist ultranationalism elicited an anti-fascist response among ethnic minority communities in Eastern and Central Europe.The edited volume analyses how identities related to class, ethnicity, gender and political ideologies were negotiated within and between minorities through confrontations with domestic and international fascism. By developing and expanding the study of Jewish anti-fascism and resistance to other minority responses, the book opens the field of anti-fascism studies for a broader comparative approach. The volume is thematically located in Central and Eastern Europe, cutting right across the continent from Finland in the North to Albania in the Southeast. The case studies in the 14 research chapters are divided into five thematic sections, dealing with the issues of (1) minorities in borderlands and cross-border anti-fascism, (2) minorities navigating the ideological squeeze between communism and fascism, (3) the role of intellectuals in the defence of minority rights, (4) the anti-fascist resistance against fascist and Nazi occupation during World War II, and (5) the conflictual role ascribed to ethnicity in post-war memory politics and com-memorations. The editors describe their intersectional approach to the analysis ofethnicity as a crucial category of analysis with regard to anti-fascist histories andmemories.The book offers scholars and students valuable historical and comparative per-spectives on minority studies, Jewish studies, borderland studies, and memory studies. It will appeal to those with an interest in the history of race and racism, fascism and anti-fascism, and Central and Eastern Europe.
Completed military service as a condition for suffrage – a matter of course that was reversed?
As a condition for male suffrage in Sweden between 1909 and 1922 citizens were required to have completed military service. This article investigates how this restriction on voting rights, introduced more orless unanimously, was abolished equally unanimously and with little debate only 13 years later. Two main reasons are pointed out. Firstly, since women were given suffrage in 1921, this restriction affected men only and was therefore suddenly perceived to be an unjust discrimination against the latter. Secondly, this restriction was closely linked to the particular political situation in Sweden around the turn of the twentieth century. For decades the twin issues of military and suffrage reform had been interlinked and thus blocked each other until they were resolved in 1901 and 1909 respectively. Once they had been resolved, the political connection between them rapidly became redundant, as did the symbolic and practical expression of this connection, namely completed military service as a condition for suffrage.
This article traces the political process towards full formal integration of women in the military professions in Scandinavia and Finland, investigating the shifting roles played by military labour demands and politics of gender equality. It provides the first comparative overview of these developments in the Nordic region. The analysis demonstrates the importance of historical continuity in women’s military participation. Due to military labour demands, women were throughout the post-war decades recruited into a range of auxiliary, voluntary and hybrid capacities in the Scandinavian armed forces. The reforms opening the military professions to women in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the 1970s were the outcome of a double crisis, as military needs for the regulation of these women’s organisational status coincided with new political demands for gender equality in the labour market. Corresponding reforms in Finland were delayed by the country’s lack of continuity in women’s military participation as well as its sufficient supply of male military personnel. A common Nordic model of gender and military work nonetheless emerged in the 1990s, marked by equal rights to military participation for women on a voluntary basis, combined with mandatory military conscription for men.
Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.
In 1964, the Swedish parliament decided on a reformed student finance system with a combination of student grants and student loans. In this paper, the creation of two specific parts of the student finance system are analyzed using the gender contract model of Yvonne Hirdman. The regulations for the payment and repayment of student loans were first formulated in line with the gender equality contract, but were later adapted to the housewife contract. After another turnaround, the committee Studiesociala utredningen favored the gender equality contract in principle, but not fully in practice. The committee proposed and the parliament approved a system based on “Women’s Two Roles”: married women with academic degrees were expected to be housewives during the children’s upbringing, but should thereafter be encouraged to return to professional work.
Latinet i tiden är en festskrift till Hans Aili, profesor i latin vid Stockholms universitet 1999-2013. För sina många och betydelsefulla insatser rörande forskning och undervisning i latin hyllas han här av sina kollegor med en samling artiklar.
De tjugonio artiklarna i Latinet i tiden ger tillsammans en bild av dagsaktuell forskning inom klassisk filologi. Bidragen behandlar en mängd skiftande ämnen och spänner över latinets tre huvudperioder – den klassiska, den medeltida och den nylatinska – som samtliga varit föremål för Hans Ailis forskning. Även studier rörande antik grekiska och och den klassiska traditionen ingår. Författarna anlägger olika metodologiska perspektiv och vi möter här textkritik, lingvistik, litteraturvetenskap, historia, receptionshistoria och pedagogik. Artiklarnas ämnen speglar dessutom en universitetsprofessors tre uppfgifter: forskning, undervisning och den så kallade tredje uppgiften, vilket innebär förmedling av forskningsresultat till världen utanför akademin.
När vi möter konspiratoriska tolkningar baserade på lösryckta citat ur vår forskning är det vårt ansvar att protestera. Det skriver några av de historiker som menar att deras resultat missbrukats i SD:s valfilm. Här ger de exempel på när användning av forskningsresultat övergår i missbruk.