The focus in this study is gender roles in Swedish agrarian history. Traditionally peasant farming in Sweden was gender complementarity ruled: men worked in the fields, in the forest and with horses, while women managed the households, and cared for small animals and cows. The traditional “agrarian femininity” – the capacity to perform physical labour- male and female, took a turn during the Interwar years when a new agrarian femininity was created on a discursive level where women would no longer participate in agricultural labor. This limited their work to the reproductive sector as professional housewives, concurrently with mechanization and commercialization of production. In the 1960s women began demanding day care, individual taxation which led to a turning-point in the gender relations. I have chosen to study how gender roles were created on a discursive level in a national professional journal for commercial farmers, Lantarbetaren, owned by Svenska Lantarbetareförbundet, a farm workers union, during the years of 1962-1967. The survey is based on the method of discourse analysis and the material is processed from a gender perspective. To sum up: males are mainly depicted as entrepreneurial, commercial farmers and women as professional housewives who yearn to acquire more information about the mechanization of household work. He is depicted as working in the productive sector and she in the reproductive. When it comes to the farmer union- the pictures and texts are all male dominated. These images fitted into the image of the modernized farm labor- as created during the Interwar years. These results also indicate that the political debate regarding gender roles in the Swedish labour movement did not have a huge impact on the Swedish agrarian society during these years.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-229469 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Mårtensson, Ann-Sophie |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Historiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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