Drömmen om kamratsamhället : Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på Fogelstad 1925-35

Sammanfattning: The dissertation deals with ideas and visions of female citizenship at the time when Swedish women obtained the right to vote.Sources used are school archive material, school diaries, newspaper articles, letters, autobiographies, personal records, lecture manuscripts and notes etc.The main aim is to show how a group ofradical liberal women, "Fogelstadgruppen" - Elisabeth Tamm, landowner, farmer and one of the first female members of the Swedish Parliament, Kerstin Hesselgren, Sweden’s very first woman MP, also social politician, factory- and house inspector, Ada Nilsson, physician, Elin Wagner, author and Honorine Hermelin, teacher and headmistress oft he School - tried to find new ways of improving societal development.Ideals connected with liberalism, individualism, feminism - women’s experience and knowledge of private life - were fundamental.The major issues discussed at Fogelstad and aived at ”Tidevarvet”, The Epoch, a weekly radical magazine for women started 1923 by the group, are still topical today: women’s rights - in education, employment and family - as well as pacifism, environmental questions and the political implications of women’s protests over these and other topics.”Fogelstadgruppen” based their activities primarily on the view that women had special qualities, which society should nurture. This particularity of women was based on social and cultural circumstances rather than biological. All women, they considered, have deep and genuine experience of the morality ofthe private life, of kindship and friendship, moral standards and values that society needed to develop true democracy for all its citizens. Some aspects of this idea had their roots in the Swedish somen’s movement with Fredrika Bremer, Ellen Key and later Elin Wagner as leading figures.In the 1930s, at the time of what was to become the famous ”Swedish model”, with it’s large-scale, rational, collective solutionsto societal problems, the female alternative offered by ”Fogelstadgruppen”, the Women Citizens’ school and ”Tidevarvet” - a decentralized, organic society, organised in small, informal groups - did not attract enough women citizens to become an influential force in society. But it was an interesting and brave attempt.