Rebecka Göransdotter Lindgren: Vetenskap i rörelse: En kvinnlig vetenskapsrörelses framväxt och villkor i Sverige, 1892–1930

Abstract

This dissertation examines the emergence, development, and conditions of a women’s scientific movement in Sweden between 1892 and 1930. Although women gained formal access to university studies and doctoral degrees from the 1870s onwards, there was still resistance to granting women full access to the spheres that defined scientific practises. The study investigates how academically educated women collectively challenged dominant ideas about who could practise and define science. Through qualitative historical analysis and contextualization, it explores how the movement’s leading actors formulated and enacted ideas about science.

The analysis centres on the first academically educated women in Sweden, especially a selection of those who were among the first to earn doctoral degrees: Ellen Fries, Elsa Eschelsson, Astrid Cleve, Lydia Wahlström, Anna Ahlström, Gulli Petrini, Eva von Bahr-Bergius, and Eva Ramstedt. Nuancing established pioneer narratives about these individual actors or the groups in which they operated, the dissertation interprets their activities as collective action. This movement originated with the founding of the Uppsala Women Students’ Association (UKSF) in 1892 and expanded through associations, publications, reform work, and girls’ schools.

The dissertation develops the concept of a scientific movement as a historical and gendered framework for understanding organised efforts to transform scientific norms, institutions, and practices. By complementing scientific movement theory with historical and gender perspectives, it explains how a marginalised group took collective action to both influence central institutions in the scientific arena, and simultaneously practise its vision in alternative spaces.

The findings show that shared experiences of exclusion within university life were crucial to the movement’s emergence. Equally important was the scientific passion and intellectual self-confidence that the women had developed through intellectually stimulating family environments, which formed a key precondition for their collective action. The movement’s leaders did not simply seek access to existing scientific institutions; they sought to transform scientific culture itself. Through publications, petitions, women’s organisations, and girls’ schools, they sought to reshape the values, norms, and practices governing scientific education, research, and teaching.

The women’s scientific movement challenged assumptions about who could embody science and articulated an alternative vision of scientific practice grounded in intellectual merit rather than sex. The study further demonstrates that the movement linked women’s inclusion to the production of scientific knowledge itself. Its leading actors argued that homogeneous scientific communities restricted both the questions that could be asked and the knowledge that could be produced. They therefore advocated an alternative scientific culture in which the representation of both women and men was essential to scientific truth-seeking. The dissertation argues that this women’s scientific movement sought not only to open science to women but also to redefine the foundations of scientific culture in Sweden.