A thousand years of women’s lives that shaped Sweden
Sara Backman Prytz wants to make Swedish women’s history accessible to a wider audience with her new popular science book Kvinnoriket. Photo: Tobias Sterner/Bildbyrån
They worked as rowers, guarded the church silver, printed books and had periods. In Sara Backman Prytz’s new book Kvinnoriket (The Women’s Realm), there is no room for queens or entrepreneurs – instead, she describes what it has meant to be a woman in Sweden over the past thousand years.
Author and suffragette Elin Wägner graces the cover of Sara Backman Prytz’s book Kvinnoriket.
“In the picture, she is standing beside the petition from all the people who signed in support of women’s right to vote. It’s a very fitting picture for the book, as it shows how the women’s collective organised itself and contributed to change,” says Backman Prytz, who is a senior lecturer at the Department of Education and is now making her debut as a non-fiction author.
Although some famous, strong women like Elin Wägner are afforded space in her new book, the emphasis is on depicting what is not included in traditional histories: how women organised themselves, what they worked as and what their conditions were like from the Middle Ages until the 1980s.
“I have been researching gender history for a long time and have written extensively on girls and women in the history of education,” Backman Prytz explains. “For this project, I’ve had to broaden my horizons and read up on many more areas and have then tried to highlight patterns running through history. For example, the fact that women have had a great deal of responsibility, and not just in areas categorised as traditionally female.”
Rowed transport boats in the Stockholm archipelago
In the Middle Ages, for example, female guards were not uncommon. In the church, they were responsible for guarding the church silver and there are even records of them chasing down thieves. They also ran various craft guilds. In the book, this is exemplified by Elsa Fougt, who was a printer and royal court supplier in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the 17th century and for the next 200 years, women outcompeted men as rowers. At the time, this activity was a kind of taxi business that involved rowing boats to order between different islands in the Stockholm archipelago. Working as a rower or ‘oarswife’ became a way for disadvantaged women to earn an income.
Photo: Natur & Kultur
Periods written into history
The aim of the book has been to contribute knowledge that was not previously available to us since older traditional historiography proceeded from a male perspective. This becomes obvious in the section on menstruation. Here we learn that peasant women probably let the blood run down their legs, or wiped themselves with their skirts. Some used moss. But there are not many more facts than that about how women dealt with their periods at this time.
“The fact that the male ethnologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries devoted little or no thought to how women managed their hygiene means that this knowledge has not been preserved for posterity,” Backman Prytz comments.
Wanting to reach a wider audience
Although Backman Prytz has done a great deal of research on the history of education, Kvinnoriket is primarily based on the work of other historians. It is thus a purely popular science book, written during a leave of absence that ran parallel to her job as a senior lecturer at the University.
“Recently, I have become increasingly interested in writing popular science. As I see it, reaching out beyond the university is the third mission of academics. For this reason, the book is written in an accessible way. It would be great if it could be used in schools, for example in years 7 to 9 or in upper secondary school.
Sandra Gunnarsson