A Swedish dilemma : Aging during the search for a national insurance, 1884-1913

Sammanfattning: Non-wage holders made up a significant portion of Sweden’s population in 1900. Yet, there are surprisingly few studies covering their formative role in the universal coverage of Sweden’s Pension Act of 1913. Yet, how are historians to discern nostalgic rhetoric of reformers from normative rural elderly household structures without contextual evidence? The greatest challenge to defining what was normative has been the search for singular, national household narrative despite the local and regional nature of earlier welfare and the processes of monetarization used to innovate it.This study lifts uneven monetarization as an underlying national insurance dilemma. This dilemma shifted focus from workers to a universal system due to elderly incomes remaining divided between wage-labor and intergenerational household-based forms. It supports and expands on prior literature suggesting that the variation in family and household income that altered the formation of a single state workers insurance, likely prevented a poor-relief crisis prior to state reforms. Yet this study claims that families did not address household shortcomings through traditional means but collaborating with the Swedish state, which was actively nationalizing financial services through the postal service extended to municipalities. Until the financial innovations of the postal services, money-exchange and formal banking was slow to integrate beyond central places, thus limiting life-cycle strategies to land based.In addressing Gräsmark, Värmland as a “best-case” smallholder-dominated municipality, the study reverses earlier persistent beliefs that emigration and aging were national problems -and not solutions. Gräsmark shows evidence of the transitional effects of adult-child mass migration and household adaptions to life-cycle income strategies though expanding debt. Likewise, the results highlight the need for income flexibility dependent on age cohorts as well as spatial-temporal variation in order to avoid a local poor-relief crisis during the late 19th and early 20th century.