This study's purpose is to analyze the Fredrika Bremer-association’s way ofrepresenting women, departing from its own and others’ stories, published byits own magazine Dagny: Månadsblad för sociala och literära intressen during the years 1889, 1894 and 1899. The years picked were when the Fredrika Bremer-association was in sole command of Dagny. The study intends to answer the question on how Fredrika Bremer-association writes and therefore represents their outwardly directed image on women and femininity, based on stories with entertaining purposes and their opinions onother authors' stories that are published in Dagny. The study uses aqualitative text analysis, with selection based on the stories’ content. The content also established seven themes to base the analysis on. The study finds that the image of women, presented by Fredrika Bremer-associations in their magazine Dagny, depending on religious motives is that of a natural subordination to men. They defend women’s rightful freedom, but with the word freedom meaning taking responsibility for their natural tasks as women and therefore stay true to their ideal self.

In the early 1860´s, the author and opinion former Fredrika Bremer made a large donation of books to Högre lärarinneseminariet, which is the first governmental institute for higher education of women in Sweden. The aim of this thesis is to describe the collection of donated books as well as to extract information regarding Bremer's international network of contacts, her views on women's education and her relation to Högre lärarinneseminariet. Furthermore, the aim is to highlight the unique relationship between Fredrika Bremer's private collection of the books and the library of Högre lärarinneseminariet from a gender perspective. A handwritten list of the 321 titles constitutin the donation has been preserved in the seminar archive and three quarters of the books have been re-discovered in a bookcase at Årsta castle. The donation is characterized by its double origin as stamps and personal dedications remain as permanent traces in the books. The archive list of the donation defines the scope of the current thesis. A sub-population of the books was selected for a more thorough investigation which was performed according to a bibliographical form. By considering each individual book as an artefact and the donation as its context, information was derived both from the individual book as well as from the book in relation to the collection as a whole. The investigation shows that the collection reflects Fredrika Bremer's areas of interest, her travels and her contacts with other writers throughout the world. The donation of the books, as well as the Iduna statue which she also donated, confirms that she saw her vision of a college being realized in Högre lärarinneseminariet. She was also aware of her own efforts for women's education and emancipation, and her significance as a role model for future students at the school. There is a high cultural history value in the preservation of Fredrika Bremer's book collection and it is desirable to make the collection more accessible for research.

The Swedish author Fredrika Bremer's novel Grannarne was published in 1837, and the English translation The Neighbours was published in London in 1842. This novel as well as other novels by Bremer which were published in English in the 1840s, were widely read and they were very popular with readers as well as with literary critics. As has been noted formerly, there are certain striking likenesses between The Neighbours and Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, published in 1847. In this essay, a comparative study is made of motifs found in both novels, such as "The Byronic Hero", and "The Strange Woman" as well as structures such as "the acceptance of guilt", followed by "judgement" and the possibility of "mercy", which are also found in both novels. In the last chapter, there is a discussion of the characters' perception of their respective worlds as primarily conditioned by religion, and how this is manifested in the previous chapters of the essay. A connection between Bertha in Jane Eyre and Hagar in The Neighbours is explored and a suggestion is made of a possible connection between Hagar and the ancient poet Sappho.

During the 18th century, the publishing of literature was commercialised in Sweden. The process was intimately connected to the rise of the modern novel and paved the wave for a new type of author. These authors wrote for a large audience and portrayed the everyday life of the ordinary man, not just kings and knights as in the old tales and poems. Historians and literary scholars have recently argued that the 18th century novel can be a productive source of economic knowledge by showing the inner motivations and moral ideas connected to the material world. Previous studies have argued that the 18th century novel can be viewed as moral guidelines for consumption. In this thesis, I argue something more profound: that the novel can be seen as moral guidelines for the whole of the economic life at the dawn of the modern-day economy.  This thesis analyses novels, written between 1839-1860, by three of the most sold and most influential of the new novelists in the form of Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Emilie Flygare-Carlén and Fredrika Bremer. By using Luc Boltanski's and Laurent Thévenot's theory of justification I show how the novels inscribed different moral ideas into economic life. The study shows that the idea of the moral merchant and moral market is prevalent in most of the novels. They speak to a need for moral market actors to counteract immoral and selfish actors.

<p>Ulla Isaksson (1916 – 2000) wrote many novels, often with a woman or several women as protagonists. In <em>Dit du icke vill</em> (“Where Thou Willst Not”) from 1956 she depicts a crisis of faith in a woman, which would not have been successful had she chosen a contemporary setting. She uses an adequate historical framework, the prosecution of witches in Sweden in the 17^th century, well documented in reliable sources. Her novel includes a message about oppression of women, manifest in patriarchal ambition to control ancient wisdom about healing and herbs and the denial of pre-Christian habits that include knowledge about female fertility, earlier exercised by midwives and wise women and men.</p><p>In “The Root of Evil” the novel is placed in a feminist tradition, where the author, like older writers like Fredrika Bremer, Ellen Key and Elin Wägner, pleads for “social mothering”.  A major difference is that, in her own life, Ulla Isaksson has experienced pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding which none of the pioneering Swedish feminist writers had. Emilia Fogelklou, pioneering theologian, wrote about witches as wise women, a study that influenced Ulla Isaksson. The witches are described as mirroring Hanna “the Good Mother”. Their fantasies about life at “Blåkulla” are similar to the everyday life at a wealthy farmstead. This kind of mirroring reminds of the theories of Gilbert and Gubar, who assume that female writers in the 19^th Century hid their revolt against patriarchy in mad women, like “The Madwoman in the Attic” in Jane Eyre. In the 1950s, golden age of the Swedish housewife, a female writer might well hide her anger at the circumscribed role model dedicated to women in a similar use of Anti-Women. The real witches clearly contrast the obedient protagonist, a true “Angel in the house”.</p><p>The villagers´ struggle to clear the ground from the ensnaring roots that hinder the male prosecution of witches imply a symbolic reading: this evil root is ancient matriarchal knowledge of childbearing and birth control. A theory on the original causes for the witch hunts in western Europe is introduced: the population sank in the 15^th century and one reason, beside plagues, starvation and warfare, was that women aware of how to prevent childbearing and giving birth to a lot of children were killed during the witch hunt. Churches and kings introduced the prosecution of witches and wise women, including midwives.</p>

Ulla Isaksson (1916 – 2000) wrote many novels, often with a woman or several women as protagonists. In Dit du icke vill (“Where Thou Willst Not”) from 1956 she depicts a crisis of faith in a woman, which would not have been successful had she chosen a contemporary setting. She uses an adequate historical framework, the prosecution of witches in Sweden in the 17th century, well documented in reliable sources. Her novel includes a message about oppression of women, manifest in patriarchal ambition to control ancient wisdom about healing and herbs and the denial of pre-Christian habits that include knowledge about female fertility, earlier exercised by midwives and wise women and men. In “The Root of Evil” the novel is placed in a feminist tradition, where the author, like older writers like Fredrika Bremer, Ellen Key and Elin Wägner, pleads for “social mothering”.  A major difference is that, in her own life, Ulla Isaksson has experienced pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding which none of the pioneering Swedish feminist writers had. Emilia Fogelklou, pioneering theologian, wrote about witches as wise women, a study that influenced Ulla Isaksson. The witches are described as mirroring Hanna “the Good Mother”. Their fantasies about life at “Blåkulla” are similar to the everyday life at a wealthy farmstead. This kind of mirroring reminds of the theories of Gilbert and Gubar, who assume that female writers in the 19th Century hid their revolt against patriarchy in mad women, like “The Madwoman in the Attic” in Jane Eyre. In the 1950s, golden age of the Swedish housewife, a female writer might well hide her anger at the circumscribed role model dedicated to women in a similar use of Anti-Women. The real witches clearly contrast the obedient protagonist, a true “Angel in the house”. The villagers´ struggle to clear the ground from the ensnaring roots that hinder the male prosecution of witches imply a symbolic reading: this evil root is ancient matriarchal knowledge of childbearing and birth control. A theory on the original causes for the witch hunts in western Europe is introduced: the population sank in the 15th century and one reason, beside plagues, starvation and warfare, was that women aware of how to prevent childbearing and giving birth to a lot of children were killed during the witch hunt. Churches and kings introduced the prosecution of witches and wise women, including midwives.

Uppsatsen syftar till att undersöka om en nära läsning av Moa Martinsons Kvinnor och äppelträd med fokus på de manliga karaktärerna förmår öppna texten för tolkning på något nytt sätt, huvudsakligen i ett självbiografiskt perspektiv. Även den omtvistade frågan om Kvinnor och äppelträds strukturella uppbyggnad behandlas i uppsatsen.       Skildringarna av männen - Förskinnsbonden, Gamlingen, Liter-Olle med sin hund och Videbonden – visar sig leda mot en undertext, som inte frilagts i tidigare analyser. Martinsons sorg efter sina två drunknade söner tränger oupphörligt fram. Hennes kamp för att komma undan sina minnen och gå vidare avspeglas i romanen. Den svåra och kvardröjande sorgen och andra traumatiska, undanträngda händelser från det första äktenskapet kan vara en anledning till att Martinson ständigt återkom till självbiografiska skildringar i sitt författarskap. Inte mindre än nio av hennes romaner är självbiografiska.      En jämförelse av hur mor Sofi och Sally i boken behandlar de män som kommer till deras innersta rum visar sig kasta ljus över diskussionen om romanens struktur - om denna är litterärt, medvetet uppbyggd eller om de ingående berättelserna är sammanfogade mindre planmässigt, mer fristående gentemot varandra. Den figura som Ebba Witt-Brattström ser som en bekräftelse på romanens stränga, medvetna uppbyggnad, att mor Sofi förebådar sin ättling Sallys öde genom sin moderlighet ställd mot Sallys revolutionära inställning, vänds i uppsatsens perspektiv till sin motsats. Mor Sofi och hennes väninna Fredrika vänder upproriskt upp och ner på hela världen då Förskinnsbonden vågar sig fram till badstugans dörr. I motsvarande situation kapitulerar Sally och gifter sig med inkräktaren, Videbonden. Innebörden är rimligen att Witt-Brattströms tolkning av figuran faller och därmed inte kan användas som argument för något planerat samband mellan det inledande kapitlet om Sofi och de senare berättelserna om Ellen och Sally.