Children, Feminism, and Power: Alva Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929-1956

DIALOGUE: CHILDREN, FEMINISM, AND POWER Alva Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929-1956 Sondra R. Herman Alva Myrdal (1902-86), a pioneer of Sweden's farrdly poUcies, has become a controversial figure. As historians of the weUare state evaluate her proposals, feminists ponder the persistence of gender inequaUty. Did Myrdal help open doors for women or demand too Uttle of the male-dominated society? In offering parental education did she support a valuable transition to modern child rearing or disparage mothers' abilities? Was she a social engineer who weakened farrdly pride and invaded privacy ? Most sensitive of aU is the question of Alva Myrdal's part in Sweden's 1930s population poUcy. If she was pronataUst, can she be caUed a feminist? The recent debate about her reforms resonates with emotion. In a smaU nation with a powerful central government, farrdly poUcies can feel very personal. Questions about Alva Myrdal's career are important for feminists beyond Sweden as weU. Her beUefs do not mesh perfectly with any of the current definitions of ferninisrn or maternaUsm debated in America. She was an activist, not a theoretician, and used academic research for poUtical effect. To some degree she was what Sonya Michel and Seth Koven have called maternalist. She legitimated "woman's pubUc relationships to poUtics and the state, to community and marketplace," and certainly "challenged the constructed boundaries between pubUc and private, women and men, state and civü society." However she did not extol the virtues of domesticity or exalt women's capacity to nurture, the essential qualities of maternalists.1 Her attitudes toward motherhood were more ambivalent than that. Myrdal never sentimentalized mothers whose limitations she believed were socially constructed. Neither physical nor apparent psychological differences between the sexes justified barriers against women. A radical Social Democrat, Myrdal wanted women to enter poUtics to create social institutions that would enhance their independence. Instead of considering the state a replacement patriarchy, Myrdal viewed it as an instrument for women wresting control of their Uves from male-dominated famities. At the same time she was a reaUst who recognized the necessity of working with both men and women. She remained married to and frequently worked with the temperamental, brilUant economist, Gunnar Myrdal. They raised three successful chüdren, albeit with domestic help © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) 1992 DIALOGUE: SONDRA R. HERMAN 83 and considerable conflict. Both her experiences and ideology led her to ask: If chUd rearing were socialized, would not mothers be free? Even without accentuating female differences, Myrdal resembled those feminists Karen Offen has caUed relational. Like them she made poUcies by and for women the center of the nation's domestic concerns and caUed for communal support for motherhood.2 Above aU, she beUeved that the parental relationship to chüdren was the feminist issue for Sweden. Yet she also fought for women's equal opportunity in the labor market. That was the core of her feminism. The real weU-being and happiness of chüdren and the opportunities of their mothers could be fully reconciled ii men and women created the right institutions to support child rearing. By 1932, when Alva and Gunnar Myrdal joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party ["Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti"], the SAP had left their earlier suffrage alUance with the Liberals and independent feminists to link up with the powerful, sociaUy conservative Agrarians. This initiated forty-one years of party rule, singly or in coaUtions. Alva Myrdal's socialism reflected her father's loyalties, her response to the Great Depression, and her perception of poUtical opportunity. Although an ambitious feminist , she could not identify with independent feminists (e.g., the Fredrika Bremer Society, founded in 1884), believing that such women were "too fine" to consider the economic pUght of Sweden's chüdren or working mothers. They were her primary political concern. "We thought about the chüdren first of aU," she recaUed in 1977. "Poverty hits chüdren the hardest."3 Social Democrats agreed, all the more reason to avoid a movement dominated by single women. The male factory workers and intellectuals who dominated the SAP believed feminists—"kvinnosakskvinnor" [women's-cause women]—represented the bourgeois class enemy...