Women and extra-academic social research in Sweden 1900–1950: A sociology of knowledge approach

ABSTRACT

How should we understand the academization of the social sciences around the turn of the twentieth century with regard to gender? In this article I argue in favour of a contextually broadened sociology of knowledge approach which highlights the importance of women’s extra-academic social research as a parallel and interconnected form of social knowledge to the new and male-dominated academic social sciences. Theoretically, the approach combines three perspectives: field theory, social movements research and historical studies of knowledge circulation. Empirically and methodologically, the study is prosopographically centred around nine female social researchers in Sweden 1900–1950 with an analytical focus on their aggregated career patterns, the gender-coded mechanisms of academic exclusion that were at play and three types of alternative arenas that were available for extra-academic social research during the period. It is concluded that we need to take this form of extra-academic social research into account to better understand the dynamics of the field of social knowledge as a whole, including the development of academic social science.

KEYWORDS:

• Extra-academic social research
• gender
• field of social knowledge
• social reform movement
• knowledge circulation

Introduction

The history of the social sciences and their academization around the turn of the twentieth century is marked by a striking gender paradox. On the one hand it is well-documented that women were not only present and active but often also played important and sometimes leading roles in early pre-academic reform-oriented social research. Viola Klein remarked already in 1946 on the ‘peculiar affinity between the fate of women and the origin of social science’, and argued that ‘it is no mere coincidence that the emancipation of women should have started at the same time as the birth of sociology’ when considering that ‘[t]he social history of the nineteenth century is full of women pioneers in all fields of social reform’ (Klein, 1946, p. 17). Since then, Eileen Yeo’s systematic study of the history of British social science from a gender and class perspective has considerably substantiated Klein’s early observation (Yeo, 1996). In Germany, the overlapping histories of sociology and the women’s movement has been analysed by Theresa Wobbe (1997), while in the USA Helen Silverberg has highlighted the impact of the women’s movement on the formation of the social sciences (Silverberg, 1998). Meanwhile, in Sweden women’s engagement in early pre-academic social research was clearly expressed within organizations such as the Lorén Foundation for social science (Lorénska fonden för befrämjande av socialvetenskaper) and the Central Association for Social Work (Centralförbundet för socialt arbete, CSA) where women were involved at all levels and played leading roles (Wisselgren, 2000).

On the other hand, it is even more well-known that once the social sciences acquired their scientific credibility and were institutionalized in the newly established research universities, the pioneering academic positions were without exceptions held by male professors. In Sweden the academic breakthrough generation of the modern social sciences are represented by names such as Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel (in economics), Gustaf Steffen (in sociology), Pontus Fahlbeck and Rudolf Kjellén (in political science), Gustav Sundbärg (in statistics), Bertil Hammer (in pedagogics), Otto Nordenskjöld and Gunnar Andersson (in geography), Ernst Walb and Oskar Sillén (in business studies) – just to mention some of the new professors that were installed during the first years after the turn of the century. The pattern is recurrent in country after country: as pre-academic social research was professionalized, social scientific research became at the same rate increasingly masculinized.

How should we understand this masculinization paradox with its contradictory narratives and images with regard to the role of women in the history of the social sciences as on the one hand important and on the other marginalized? Existing research addressing the question has offered varying approaches and research strategies. Some studies have biographically highlighted the relatively few exceptional women who did after all manage to pursue careers as social scientists (see e.g. Niskanen, 2007; Oakley, 2011; Wobbe, 1997). Others have been more concerned with the different sociological mechanisms of exclusion at play within the academy (Berg et al., 2011; Deegan, 1986; Magdalenic, 2004; Marshall & Witz, 2004). A third group of studies have placed their analytical focus on the historiographical level and problematized the heavily male-dominated accounts in the construction of classics and canon (Connell, 1997; Madoo Lengermann & Niebrugge, 1998; McDonald, 1994; Oakley, 2020; Platt, 1992; Wisselgren, 2000). This broad and multidisciplinary research, involving historians, sociologists, gender researchers and others, has considerably enriched our understanding of the few exceptional women who challenged the male-dominated academic cultures, the discriminatory practices at play and the historiographical aspects. But we still do not know very much about what happened to those women who were engaged in social research but who were for different reasons excluded from the academic sphere. Did they quit researching social issues after the academization and masculinization of social science? If not, were there any alternative extra-academic arenas available? And how should we understand this form of extra-academic social research historically in relation to the new (male-dominated) academic social sciences?

In order to address these specific questions and the more general masculinization paradox, this article proposes a sociology of knowledge approach that draws on the research referred to but argues in favour of a contextually broadened perspective which takes into account academic social science as well as the extra-academic forms of social research. The approach draws theoretically on three strands of research: first, a dynamic form of field theory – not in the strict Bourdieusian sense with its conceptual emphasis on field, capital and habitus and its basic assumptions about autonomy, doxa, conflict over resources, etcetera, but with an accentuation on the formative, processual and inter-related aspects of academic and extra-academic social knowledge (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 94–115; c.f. Swartz, 2013; Stampnitzky, 2011); second, a social movement approach with regard to its cognitive and knowledge-producing roles (Eyerman & Jamison, 1991; Frickel & Gross, 2005); third, a circulation of knowledge perspective as it has been conceptualized within recent history of science and knowledge research (see Östling et al., 2018; Sarasin, 2011; Secord, 2004). Combining the three theoretical strands provides a sociology of knowledge approach, I argue, which helps us to explore and explain how the social reform movement during the nineteenth century evolved into a relatively coherent field of social knowledge during the first half of the twentieth century that was held together by its internal circulation of knowledge. Another point that follows from this perspective is that women’s extra-academic social research should be understood not as peripheral but as central and intermediary for the formation of the social knowledge field, and that this aspect needs to be historiographically reassessed in order to better understand the historical dynamics of the academic social sciences as well as their extra-academic counterparts.

Empirically and methodologically, I will apply this perspective by paying attention to a group or cohort of nine women who were active as social researchers during the first half of the twentieth century in Sweden. Prosopographically I will follow them on a semi-aggregated level, that is with regard to their individual trajectories but with an analytical focus on the more general career patterns that they bear witness to.

Table 1. Three generations of female social researchers.

	Academic social science	Extra-academic social research
First generation	Elsa Eschelsson (1861)	Emilia Broomé (1866–1925) Kerstin Hesselgren (1872–1962)
Second generation	Karin Kock (1891–1976) Margit Cassel Wohlin (1897–1994)	Karin Kock (1891–1976) Margit Cassel Wohlin (1897–1994)
Third generation	Gerd Enequist (1903–1989)	Alva Myrdal (1902–1986) Brita Åkerman (1906–2006) Carin Boalt (1912–1999)

The argument is developed in five steps. First, we will pay attention to the group of women who managed after all to pursue careers as academic social scientists. In the next step we will discuss some of the gendered obstacles that are usually invoked in order to explain the limited number of women. In the two following sections we will broaden our perspective and recognize some of the women social researchers that were active outside academia and pay attention to the different extra-academic arenas available. The fifth section offers a more concrete example from one of these arenas, namely the emerging sector of research institutes, with a particular focus on the Home Research Institute (Hemmens forskningsinstitut). In the final section we return to the so-called masculinization paradox and draw some tentative conclusions with regard to the role of women and extra-academic social research in Sweden 1900–1950.

Women as academic social science pioneers – an exceptional story

Female students were formally permitted to enter Swedish universities in 1873. The higher education landscape in Sweden at that time consisted of only two traditional universities, in Uppsala and Lund (established in 1477 and 1666, respectively), but would soon be accompanied by two urban university colleges in Stockholm (in 1878) and Gothenburg (in 1891). Nevertheless, it was to take a quarter of a century before Elsa Eschelsson became the first woman to attain a doctorate in a social science subject, another quarter of a century before Margit Cassel Wohlin and Karin Kock completed their dissertations in economics and a total of three quarters of a century before Sweden got its first female full professor in a social science subject. Thus, women’s advancement in the field is characterized by a marked delay. Here, already a relatively brief acquaintance with the few women pioneers of academic social science provides some clues to the different gendered conditions that this exceptional group had to handle.

When Elsa Eschelsson (1861–1911) earned her doctorate in law at Uppsala University in 1897, she became the first woman to pursue a social science doctorate in Sweden. The outstanding quality of her dissertation on the concept of gift according to Swedish law (1897) was generally recognized. Only a year after the dissertation, she was nominated by the Faculty of Law for the chair in civil law. However, her promotion was stopped because of her sex. According to §28 of the Swedish constitution (regeringsformen), it was stipulated that only ‘Swedish men’ were eligible for senior government service appointments (statliga fullmaktstjänster), which included professorships. Admittedly, Sonya Kovalevsky had been appointed Sweden’s first female professor and the world’s first female professor in mathematics at Stockholm University College as early as 1884. But since the University College was at that time officially a private institution it was not covered by the regulation.

As a pioneer in a male-dominated setting, Eschelsson was initially driven by the idea that women’s equal rights should be earned through hard work and that women should not organize separately. Therefore, when the Uppsala Women’s Student Association was set up in 1892, Eschelsson chose not to join. However, with time, and especially after she had become aware of the unfair wages for women school teachers, she changed her mind. When the Academic Women’s Association (Akademiskt bildade kvinnors förening, ABKF) was formed in 1904, Eschelsson became its first chair. One of the principal issues driven by ABKF was precisely access to senior government appointments. Once a constitutional change had taken place in 1909, the newly established chair in civil law appeared to be specially designed for Eschelsson. The only complication was that the constitutional change needed to be followed up by a more precise interpretation of which appointments it related to.

At that time, Eschelsson had been in charge of the teaching of civil law for several years and was also supported by several male professors at the faculty, where there was a great lack of competent lecturers. But she had also been involved in an internal quarrel about the teaching of her subject and was perceived by some colleagues as a competitor. In February 1911 the local faculty and the Academic Senate (Högre akademiska konsistoriet) of Uppsala University issued their decision that the professorship in civil law should be exempted from the constitutional amendment and hence remain eligible for men only. A few days after the Senate’s decision, on 10 March 1911, Elsa Eschelsson died, according to some after a period of illness, according to others through an overdose of sleeping pills (Ohlander, 1987; Strömholm, 1997). Less ambiguous is the handwritten letter she left, in which she underlined with red chalk:

I would no longer, even if given the opportunity, like to belong to this university or collaborate with at least one or a couple of the members of my faculty (quoted from Strömholm, 1997, p. 103; author’s translation).

It was to take about a quarter of a century, until 1925, before the next woman attained a doctorate in a social scientific subject. Now it was Margit Cassel Wohlin’s (1897–1994) turn. She earned her doctorate in economics from Stockholm University College with the dissertation Die Gemeinwirtschaft oder die Gründe einer öffentlichen Haushaltung. Margit was the daughter of the then holder of the chair in economics at the same university, Gustav Cassel. Her mother Johanna Cassel had, like her father, a background in the social reform movement (Wisselgren, 2012). ‘That I should study was self-evident’, Margit Cassel Wohlin said in retrospect (Cassel Wohlin, 1983, p. 159). After having finished the Djursholm co-educational school, one of the few upper-secondary schools open to girls at that time, she first began to study philosophy in Lund but soon switched to economics ‘to learn something about the world’ (ibid, p. 161; author’s transl.). After her dissertation, however, she left the academy and became a teacher. A couple of years later she met and married the professor of statistics and conservative politician Nils Wohlin and decided to quit teaching to fulfil her ‘longing for home and children’ (ibid, p. 162). During the following half-decade, the couple raised four children. In 1935 the spouses separated. After that, she worked as a writer and became involved politically at the municipal, regional and parliamentary levels for the Liberal party. But she never returned to the academy after her disputation in 1925.

In this latter respect, Karin Kock (1891–1976) deviated from Cassel Wohlin’s pattern. Kock also gained her doctorate in economics at Stockholm University College just four years later. Her thesis A study of interest rates (1929) dealt with interest rate fluctuations in English, American and Swedish loan markets and offered a theoretical analysis of their varying causes. After her dissertation, Kock continued to work as an independent researcher and completed one book on the Swedish banking system (1930) and two other case studies on banking and economic affairs (1931, 1932). In 1933 she was appointed associate professor and during the following four-year period she led the completion of the large Rockefeller-funded project ‘National Income of Sweden’. In parallel with this, she published another major work on Swedish trade (1934) and was acting chair in economics at the University College for several years. However, she never gained any permanent academic position. Kirsti Niskanen has thoroughly analysed the many subtle situations that Kock had to deal with as a female social scientist in a male world. In 1940, Karin Kock left the academic world for various political and extra-academic assignments. It was not until 1945 that she received the title of professor to honour her contributions to economics (Niskanen, 2007, pp. 43–73).

Not until 1949 – three quarters of a century after the university system was opened to female students and half a century after the award of a doctorate to Eschelsson – did Sweden get its first female chair in a social science subject. It was then that Gerd Enequist (1903–1989) became professor of geography at Uppsala University. The trajectory leading up to Enequist’s professorship encompassed a move from her hometown Luleå in northern Sweden to Gothenburg where she graduated from upper-secondary school. She then went on to study for a teaching qualification in Luleå, was awarded a master’s degree in language, history and literature by Uppsala University in 1929, which was followed by a licentiate and a doctorate in geography in 1935 and 1937, respectively. The latter qualified her for an associate professorship, and after the publication of two more books in 1944 and 1946 she became deputy professor in 1947. Two years later, she was appointed to the newly established chair in geography with a special focus on cultural geography with economic geography. Unlike Eschelsson and Kock, Enequist stated that she ‘never felt discriminated against in Uppsala and she had always felt great appreciation from her colleagues, both in the faculty and at other universities’ (Aldskogius, 2000, p. 97). Nevertheless, as a female researcher in a male world, she sometimes found herself excluded from certain social events, such as informal social gatherings in relation to international conferences (ibid, p. 95), and even if she was perceived as a role model, it would take almost fifty years before a second female professor was appointed in geography (Forsberg, 2003, p. 4), while the neighbouring discipline of sociology had to wait until 1985 before Rita Liljeström became its first female professor (Ekerwald, 2014, p. 81).

This strongly delayed advancement of women social scientists within the academic system may seem to reinforce the traditional accounts of the history of the social sciences as a predominantly male concern. The few women who nevertheless managed to break the pattern – sometimes, as in Eschelsson’s case, at extreme human cost – appear in that light as special cases and marginal ‘exceptions’ in the sense outlined by Margaret Rossiter (1982, pp. 30–31). These circumstances make it justifiable to draw attention to and examine the prevailing power structures within the academy with regard to gender.

The academy as a gender-coded machinery

The attempts to explain the delay or indeed lack of advancement for women in academia, as well as in other professional sectors, have been – and are – numerous. Three different and complementary commonly used explanatory models are expressed by the metaphors ‘closed doors’, ‘glass ceilings’ and ‘leaky pipelines’. It is noteworthy that all three metaphors can be derived from the root metaphor of the academic world as a building, a kind of palace or home of free and unbiased knowledge (Swedberg, 2020). But unlike this ideal image, the aforementioned metaphors can be said to shed light on its restricted accessibility, invisible obstacles and infrastructural flaws, with the underlying meaning that in practice the place is less welcoming, encouraging and secure than it may appear from the outside – and not least depending on if you are a man or a woman.

In this respect, the metaphor of ‘closed doors’ illustrates the explicit, formal and legal restrictions that prevented women from entering universities or some of its inner regions. As the literature on professions has shown, exclusion mechanisms of this kind – in terms of social closure and jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988) – are not unique to the academic world, but, on the contrary, a commonly used strategy for privileged groups to maintain control over a knowledge area. Thus, when the Swedish universities were formally opened to women in 1873 it was indeed a milestone in the history of education (Rönnholm, 1999). But just because the main entrances were opened did not automatically mean that women could move freely and advance under the same conditions as men in the inner regions of the academy, or as Rossiter so aptly elaborates the meaning of the metaphor: ‘even though women could claim […] that they had “opened the doors of science”, it was quite clear that they would be limited to positions just inside the entryway’ (Rossiter, 1982, p. xvii). This is illustrated not least by the constitutional obstacles that put an end to Eschelsson’s promotion.

To fully understand the low number of female students well into the twentieth century – by the time of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, after four decades, still only 435 women had been awarded academic degrees – we need to look more broadly and consider the Swedish education system as a whole and recall that the preparatory upper-secondary level remained closed to women in principle until 1927 (Florin, 2009). Thus, even if the gates of the universities had been thrown open, most female students remained ineligible, unless they succeeded in circumventing the gender obstacles in the prevailing school system either through private teaching or attending one of the few private girls’ and co-educational schools at the time (Broady & Ullman, 2001). It is thus no coincidence that Eschelsson, Cassel Wohlin and Kock had all attended schools of this kind, and that Enequist had to move across the country to Gothenburg to attain the qualifications needed for matriculation.

However, equally as important as the pre-academic level are the post-academic restrictions that applied to women in the labour market as a whole. Here, too, there were explicit legal obstacles with clearly structuring effects on the future career opportunities of female university students. Until the establishment of the so-called Competence Law (behörighetslagen) in 1925, public professions and positions in general were exclusively reserved for men. In practice, however, some professions had already been opened to women, including teaching, nursing, librarianship and journalism. With the Competence Law, public appointments became at least formally more gender neutral – though with several exceptions until the law was abolished in 1945. These formal regulations that structured the labour market with regard to gender – as well as women’s legal and political rights more generally – naturally influenced the career choices of women students or whether it seemed at all meaningful to begin higher education (Markusson Winkvist, 2003).

However, the aforementioned formal aspects contained in the metaphor of ‘closed doors’ are not enough to enable us to understand the diversity of obstacles and resistance encountered by the female pioneers. Even after the explicit regulations were changed, there was often considerable scope for interpretation where informal social and cultural conventions played in. Here, the ‘glass ceiling’ metaphor helps us to identify the more subtle and ‘invisible’ factors that hindered women’s advancement in the academic system. The limited number of women who succeeded in overcoming the barriers to matriculation by finding private solutions and entered the academic sphere after 1873 often experienced the academy’s ‘sticky floor’ or hidden ‘glass ceilings’ that kept them at the lower levels or suddenly made them experience obstacles to their advancement upwards, while they could see some of their male colleagues advancing in the career system, seemingly effortlessly, on similarly invisible ‘glass escalators’. Again, this can be illustrated by Eschelsson, who saw her younger and less qualified male colleagues being promoted to professorships, and then sharing their views on women’s inferior nature in general and lack of suitability for science in particular (Ohlander, 1987, pp. 17–19). However, Eschelsson was far from alone. When Sonya Kovalevsky had been proposed for election to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1889, this was opposed with the argument: ‘If the academy starts allowing females in, where on the scale of created creatures will it end?’ (Stubhaug, 2010, p. 328). In Britain in the same year, when Beatrice Webb, then Potter, sought out Alfred Marshall to present her plans for a social study, the Cambridge professor, according to Webb’s autobiographical notes, ‘shrugged his shoulders and became satirical on the subject of a woman dealing with scientific generalizations’ (Webb, 1938, p. 399). The underlying message that was repeated in these and many other similar examples was that science and women belonged to two separate spheres, where a ‘female scientist’ was almost viewed as an anomaly, a contradiction in terms (Rossiter, 1982, p. xv; see also Lewis, 1991, p. 11, 17).

A third complementary metaphor that, like the glass ceiling metaphor, emphasizes a relatively hidden mechanism, but which can be said to shift our focus towards the effects of the glass ceiling is ‘leaky pipelines’. This metaphor is frequently used in gender studies of professional career systems with emphasis on the drop-out and brain-drain effects of the systems (see e.g. Dubois-Shaik & Fusulier, 2015). Translated into the young social science career system, the leaky pipelines metaphor can be said to prompt us to pay attention to the partially invisible – that is, informal and cultural – aspects of the underlying infrastructures, but also to note that the female students who left or ‘leaked’ out of the academy did so partly – consciously or unwillingly – just because they were women. However, in extension, the metaphor also implies that the women – depending on the gender-structured surroundings – tended to leak in certain given directions and gather in certain given areas. As mentioned, the teaching and nursing professions were two of the areas that formally welcomed women. To this can be added an important cultural aspect, in that it was just those professions that required some form of teaching, nurturing and caring qualities that had been legitimized by, in Sweden, the influential public intellectual Ellen Key’s arguments about social motherhood (Ambjörnsson, 2012). It is therefore no coincidence that Margit Cassel Wohlin took a job as teacher after her dissertation and later came to engage in questions about home, family and upbringing, or that Enequist had initially adopted the same educational path when she took her teaching qualification and – like so many other female students – chose to study language, history and literature, subjects that pointed to a future career in teaching (Dalberg, 2018, p. 75).

All in all, the three metaphorical explanatory models – with their emphasis on the formal as well as informal mechanisms of exclusion – emphasize the image of an advanced gender-coded sorting machine. This contributes to our understanding of women’s delayed advancement. But it does not help us to explain the more precise relationship between academic social science and extra-academic social research. After all, Elsa Eschelsson was more or less unique in her generation to aspire to a professorship, as Ohlander points out: ‘The other women researchers chose, or were obliged to choose, other strategies, above all in the form of research and creative work outside the university setting’ (Ohlander, 1987, p. 20; author’s translation). An important implication of the leaky pipelines metaphor is, therefore, that we should not stop at the university walls but, on the contrary, pay attention to the women who left the academy and continue to follow their trajectories.

Three generations of female extra-academic social researchers

If we turn our attention towards social research outside academia during the same period, we will soon find a considerably higher number of women than inside it. In this context I have chosen to recognize only seven of these female social researchers in order to give empirical substance to the general argument. The seven individuals belonged to three different generations (Table 1). In the first generation, born in the 1860s, we find Emilia Broomé and Kerstin Hesselgren, who were therefore about the same age as Eschelsson. In the second generation, born in the 1890s, we have reason to return to Margit Cassel Wohlin and Karin Kock, but this time with a focus on their extra-academic research activities. The third generation, like Enequist born in the early twentieth century, is represented by Alva Myrdal, Brita Åkerman and Carin Boalt.

Characteristic of the extra-academic social scientists of the 1860s is that they largely acted within or in the direct wake of the broad social reform movement of the late nineteenth century, that is, the wide array of individual actors, smaller groups, and often informally organized associations – mainly from within the educated, urban middle classes – which were discursively centred on the pressing, and hotly debated, ‘social question’, and equally on the opinion that these identified social problems should be handled politically through social reform, preferably based on social research (Wisselgren, 2012, 2013, p. 41). Here we find a number of organizations that in various ways promoted scientific, political and practical initiatives in the field of social knowledge, including the Lorén Foundation and the Central Association for Social Work (CSA), as well as an even greater diversity of women who in various ways actively contributed to the continued vivid extra-academic social research of the early 1900s (Wisselgren, 2000, pp. 274–278). Two of these women were Emilia Broomé and Kerstin Hesselgren. Emilia Broomé (1866–1925) was five years younger than Eschelsson. Like her, Broomé had matriculated from the progressive co-educational Wallin school and belonged to the pioneer generation of female students at Uppsala University, and like Ellen Key, she came to play a leading role in the women’s movement. While Key became involved in the Lorén Foundation, Broomé was one of the initiators and key agents behind CSA, as well as its bureau director. When a commission was created to consider the Competence Law, Broomé became its chairman – and thus also the first woman ever to chair a royal commission. She subsequently participated in several other royal commissions (Hedin, 2002).

Kerstin Hesselgren (1872–1962) has in the latter regard several similarities with her mentor Broomé through her diverse involvement in the women’s movement and the royal commissions system. Among other things, she taught at the Social Institute (Socialinstitutet), which was initiated by the CSA (Thörn, 2017). After graduating from Bedford College in England as a sanitary inspector, a profession that in Sweden was not yet open to women, Hesselgren was recruited to the newly established service as a housing inspector in Stockholm and then as a school kitchen inspector. In 1913 she became head of the Women’s Labour Inspectorate (Kvinnliga yrkesinspektionen, a forerunner to the Swedish Work Environment Authority), a position she came to retain until her retirement in 1934. In addition to the inspections, she also conducted a number of studies within the royal commissions system, including one on female emigrants as part of the huge Emigration Survey (Emigrationsutredningen), and was designated chairperson of the Women’s Work Committee (Kvinnoarbetskommittén, SOU 1938:47), which came to be a milestone in the history of Swedish women in the twentieth century. In addition, she was one of Sweden’s first female MPs after universal suffrage had been introduced in Sweden in 1921 (Frangeur, 2013; Heyman, 2017; Wisselgren, 2009, pp. 228–231). In this sense, Broomé and Hesselgren prepared the ground in more than one way for the second generation of female extra-academic social researchers.

Margit Cassel Wohlin’s and Karin Kock’s academic commitments have already been introduced. Here, it can be added with focus on the extra-academic aspects that Margit Cassel Wohlin (1897–1994) had prior to her dissertation, already conducted an investigation commissioned by the National Board of Social Affairs (Socialstyrelsen) about the 8-hour working day, given lectures for local Housewives’ Associations (husmodersföreningar) around the country, written on financial issues in women’s magazines such as Tidevarvet and published a book on toddlers and upbringing (Småbarn: Sju gyllene regler för uppfostran, 1932) which subsequently came to be used at the Institute for Pre-school Teachers Education (Socialpedagogiska seminariet) under Alva Myrdal’s direction ([Cassel] Wohlin, 1983, p. 163). After defending her thesis and her divorce, Cassel Wohlin continued to take a similar course. Among other things, she conducted a national survey on women’s housework on behalf of the National Housewives’ Association in 1937. A few years later, another book about the family and child rearing followed (1943), which was intended as a contribution to the still ongoing domestic and widely-debated population question that had already been initiated by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in 1934 (more below).

Karin Kock’s (1891–1976) extra-academic engagements include, like Hesselgren’s, a high commitment to women’s right to work. Among other things, she was chairman of the Swedish Women’s Association’s Cooperation Committee (Svenska kvinnoföreningars samarbetskommitté) and then of the Professional Women’s Cooperative Association (Yrkeskvinnors samarbetsförbund) as well. She also acted as an expert in several royal commissions, including the Women’s Work Committee chaired by Hesselgren, where she conducted the first quantitative survey on the development of ‘Women’s Work in Sweden’ (SOU 1938:47, pp. 351–434). Theoretically, the study was based on a combination of neoclassical labour market analysis and institutional economic theory. Kock’s analysis showed that the labour markets were horizontally and vertically segregated and that women and men rarely competed for the same job. In doing so, she was able to dismiss the commonly held notion that married women pushed men out of attractive jobs. She also contributed to Sweden becoming the first country in Europe to prohibit employers from dismissing women because of marriage, betrothal or pregnancy. After that she became Secretary of the Post-war Economic Planning Committee (Kommissionen för ekonomisk efterkrigsplanering), a government delegate at the first conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Paris 1945, consultative minister on economic issues in 1947–48, Minister of Public Finance 1948–49 and Director of Statistics Sweden (SCB) 1950–57 (Niskanen, 2007).

Alva Myrdal, Brita Åkerman and Carin Boalt followed partly in the footsteps of the two previous generations, but also trod new paths. Alva Myrdal’s (1902–1986) original plan when she began her studies in literature at Stockholm University College was to become a librarian. Soon however the direction of her plans changed. In Uppsala, she began a PhD project under Bertil Hammer’s supervision in pedagogics. In 1929 she and her husband Gunnar went abroad to the United States on two separate Rockefeller stipends, Alva with the explicit purpose, as formulated in her application, to ‘prove competent to hold an academic lectureship in psychology and theoretical pedagogics’ (Myrdal, 1929). Back in Sweden, however, Hammer’s sudden death turned out to put an end to her academic career. Instead, she – like so many other female social researchers – chose to channel her interest in an extra-academic direction. In 1934, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal published their co-authored and hugely influential book Crisis in the Population Question (Kris i befolkningsfrågan), which immediately turned Alva Myrdal into a domestic public intellectual and a central voice in the current debates on the family, children and housing, and the more general need for welfare state reforms based on social research. As chair of the Women’s Workers’ Organization (Yrkeskvinnors Klubb) and initiator together with Kock of the Women’s Association’s Cooperation Committee, she became a central and unifying force within the contemporary women’s movement. In parallel with this, she participated in some of the most central royal commissions of the time, including the Social Housing Commission (Bostadssociala utredningen), the Population Commission (Befolkningskommissionen, with Nils Wohlin as chair and Gunnar Myrdal as Secretary) and as Secretary of the Women’s Work Committee together with Hesselgren and Kock (Hirdman, 2008). In the 1930s and 1940s alone, Myrdal published a total of more than 400 texts (Terling, 1987, p. 97).

Brita Åkerman (1906–2006) was four years younger than Alva Myrdal. Their partly parallel trajectories crossed each other several times in different contexts. Like Myrdal, Åkerman’s early schooling was private; she matriculated from the New Elementary School in Stockholm. After that, she studied literature, initially with the intention of becoming a teacher, first in Uppsala and then in Stockholm. In 1932 she met her future husband, the economist Alf Johansson and was thus drawn into his young radical circles of economists, architects, journalists and other intellectuals who soon became involved in the social reform program which the Social Democratic Party launched after coming to power in the same year (Wisselgren, 2006a, p. 136). Another important, partly overlapping network for Åkerman was the contemporary women’s movement with the women student’s association at Stockholm University College and the Fredrika Bremer Association (Fredrika Bremer Förbundet), Sweden’s oldest women’s rights organization. After having attended one of Stockholm University College’s first sociology courses in 1935–36, Åkerman began working on what was to become one of Sweden’s first studies in family sociology with a policy-oriented edge towards the need for housing reforms (Åkerman, 1941). The study, which was inspired by Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown study (1929), attracted great attention and opened up the doorways for Åkerman into the contemporary royal commission system. There, Åkerman first served as Secretary of the Women’s Delegation (Kvinnodelegationen) and main author of its report on family life and housework (SOU 1947:46). In parallel with this, she was appointed by Karin Kock as Head of the Wartime Consumer Information Agency (Aktiv hushållning), and subsequently co-founded the Home Research Institute (Hemmens forskningsinstitut, HFI) in 1944. Later she remained active as an independent scholar and writer well into the 1980s (Åkerman, 1994).

Carin Boalt (1912–1999) was Brita Åkerman’s six-year younger sister. She also studied at Stockholm University College, initially though with a natural scientific focus in her master’s degree in 1935. In the same year she married Gunnar Boalt, from 1953 Stockholm University College’s first professor of sociology, a marriage that lasted until 1957. In 1936 Carin was already carrying out a major study on dietary habits on behalf of the National Cooperative Association (Kooperativa förbundet, KF) which was subsequently published under the title 27,000 Meals (1939). During the following decade, she worked at the newly established National Institute of Public Health (Statens institut för folkhälsan). In 1944 she joined forces with her sister and set up the Home Research Institute, which made it possible for Boalt ‘to link up her interests in technical and social research’ (Åkerman, 1994, p. 129, author’s transl.). In the late 1950s she continued her studies, took a licentiate degree in sociology in 1962, and conducted sociological surveys, one on housewives (1964) and another one on family work (SOU 1965:65). After that she moved on to the National Institute of Building Research (Statens institut för byggnadsforskning), where she investigated housing conditions in Stockholm (1968), and then became Sweden’s first female professor at a technical university, in architecture (byggnadsfunktionslära) at the Technical University of Lund (Åkerman, 1984, p. 239; Eriksson, 2005).

If we now analyse the individual trajectories of these three generations of extra-academic female social researchers on an aggregated level, certain patterns emerge. One is that the early generations partly prepared the ground for their successors. Another common denominator is that their social research activities were in most cases related to either the contemporary women’s movement or to more general social reform measures and hence illustrate the continuity of the social reform movement from the late nineteenth century and how it branched off in a number of directions during the first half of the twentieth century (Åkerman, 1983a, pp. 13–38; Åkerman, 1983b, pp. 177–184; c.f. Eyerman & Jamison, 1991, pp. 55–59). A third observation is that several of the women also knew each other privately and collaborated in several different settings. In this way, the aggregated career pattern of the seven individuals helps us to identify some of the most important meeting places and arenas of extra-academic social research, which we shall now consider in some detail.

Arenas of extra-academic social research

Roughly speaking, three different types of arenas for early twentieth-century extra-academic social research can be discerned. These, I suggest, can be placed in the spectrum between the private and the public. Some of them were directly family-related, others may be described as semi-private and based in social movements or the civil sphere, while the third category of arenas can be located in the state sphere.

The first, private and family-related, type may seem insignificant. Nevertheless, these played a central role. As we have seen, several of the female social researchers were active for shorter or longer periods of their lives as independent freelance researchers. For the women of the pioneer generation who left the academy, private platforms of this kind offered an important alternative opportunity to continue their research, and if they married indeed became a necessity. As Ann-Sofie Ohlander has pointed out, it was almost an axiom that married middle-class women could not continue working and that academic women therefore were expected to remain unmarried (Ohlander, 1987, p. 12). It is also against this background that we have to understand Eschelsson’s disappointment when she heard about the engagements of her friends Gulli Rossander-Petrini and Astrid Cleve, both of whom had PhD’s, since this in Eschelsson’s eyes meant that they were lost for science (ibid, p. 14). In Cleve’s case, however, the marriage (with the associate professor and future professor of chemistry Hans von Euler-Chelpin) appears at the same time to have been a deliberate strategy to be able to continue doing research – a strategy that was not at all uncommon among the scientifically-minded women at that time (Bergwik, 2016; Espmark & Nordlund, 2012). In practice, significant elements of their research work was conducted within the family, almost as a family business and not infrequently at home, which gives an indication of the more general scientific-historical significance of the private arena as a knowledge site (Louis & Neidhöfer, 2015; Opitz et al., 2016). The frequent number of social science couples throughout the period is also striking, from the academic breakthrough generation around the turn of the century to the couples instanced here with Margit Cassel and Nils Wohlin, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, Brita Åkerman and Alf Johansson, Carin and Gunnar Boalt (Berg et al., 2011; Wisselgren, 2012; Yeo, 2012).

The second type of extra-academic meeting places comprises the social movement-based associations, societies, organizations and semi-private foundations and institutions. Here, too, there is a continuity back to the beginning of the century with the Lorén Foundation for social science and the Central Association for Social Work (CSA), understood as two organizations that carved out new cognitive spaces in dynamic interaction with other groups and organizations within the larger social reform movement. In the Lorén Foundation, women were active at all levels, as members of its board, as social researchers, and as assistants, while Emilia Broomé and Kerstin Hesselgren were only two of the many female key members of the CSA (Wisselgren, 2000, pp. 274–278). But we have also met a number of women’s movement-based associations, such as the Women’s Workers’ Club (Kock and Myrdal), the Housewives’ Associations (Cassel Wohlin), and the Fredrika Bremer Association (Åkerman). Furthermore it is revealing that CSA’s work was likened to ‘a voluntary Ministry of Social Affairs’ and that the Fredrika Bremer Association was called ‘The National Bureau of the Women’s Movement’ (den svenska kvinnorörelsens centrala ämbetsverk) due to their unifying ambition to work for knowledge-based reforms (Åkerman, 1994, p. 66; Wirén, 1980, p. 101). In these respects, the social reform movement and the partially overlapping women’s movement can indeed be understood, I argue, as knowledge-producing social movements in Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison’s sense (1991, pp. 55–59).

The third type of knowledge site is located in the state-governed sphere, with its strongly expanding structure of knowledge institutions that were either set up or renewed during the period, often in parallel and in dialogue with the social reform movement initiatives, with for example Statistics Sweden (Kock), the National Board and the Ministry of Social Affairs (Cassel Wohlin, Boalt, Åkerman), the Women’s Labour Inspectorate (Hesselgren) and, not at least, the royal commissions system as a crucial arena for extra-academic social research (Dalberg, 2021; Wisselgren, 2008). The royal commissions and public investigations that were made within the royal commissions system include the Emigration Survey (Hesselgren), the Competence Law (Broomé), the Social Housing Commission (Myrdal, Åkerman, Johansson), the Women’s Labour Committee (Hesselgren and Myrdal), the Population Commission (Myrdal) and the Population Survey (Kock, Åkerman). These public arenas were gradually opened up for women’s participation during the period, usually through friendship contacts.

An important subpoint at this stage of the argument is that there were no watertight barriers between the various private, social and public arenas. As we have seen, those involved in the field moved relatively freely between them, and private relationships sometimes overlapped with the public roles, as in the 1935 Population Commission (in which both Gunnar and Alva Myrdal participated) and the 1941 Population Survey (where both Brita Åkerman and her husband Alf Johansson were involved). In order to exemplify the overlapping arenas and personal networks, we will now elucidate this in more detail with one of the institutions situated at the intersection of the private and public sphere, the Home Research Institute. In doing so, we will also find reason to pay special attention to the sisters Brita Åkerman and Carin Boalt.

The Home Research Institute – ‘a women’s own institute’

The Home Research Institute (HFI) was established in 1944 and remained active until 1957, when it was transformed into the Swedish Council for Consumer Affairs (Statens råd för konsumentfrågor, since 1973 Konsumentverket). Social research was a core activity of HFI’s mission. The original charter of the HFI laid down that:

the institute shall work for a systematic rationalization of the working conditions in Swedish homes through research on the technical and financial problems associated with tasks in the home as a consumption centre and workplace, taking into account the psychological, hygienic and social problems in connection with the home’s general tasks (quoted from Boalt, 1984, p. 141; author’s translation).

One background to the setting up of the Institute can be found in the extensive policy reforms and investigations that had been carried out from the 1930s, with a particular focus on issues of home, family and women’s work, in the form of extra-academic policy-relevant social research on people’s living conditions (Åkerman, 1984, p. 132; c.f. Boalt, 1984, p. 145). Another context of similar importance was the contemporary research institute sector that was emerging at the time. Leading in this regard were the newly formed Technical Research Council (Tekniska forskningsrådet) and the State Committee for Building Research (Statens kommitté för byggnadsforskning) which provided organizational models for specialized research institutes co-funded by the industry and the state (Åkerman, 1984, p. 133; c.f. Pettersson, 2012).

However, the concrete initiative was taken by a small informal group of women with similar interests from different backgrounds and with complementary expertise. To a large extent, explains HFI’s primus motor Brita Åkerman, ‘Up to a point […] it was the same women who had been involved in the Women’s Delegation of the Population Survey’ (Åkerman, 1982, p. 134; author’s translation). Besides Åkerman and Carin Boalt these included one woman from the Housewives’ Cooperation Committee, and two from the Domestic Crafts Teachers’ Joint Organization (Hushållslärarnas samorganisation). Over time the group expanded with at most some twenty people on its staff. A board was appointed, which included Karin Kock. In addition, experts in specific areas were enrolled, among them Margit Cassel Wohlin. Funding was arranged through the cooperative housing association HSB and the national cooperative association KF, and additional support was secured by government grants and contributions from industry (Boalt, 1984, p. 146). Although its activities enjoyed widespread support and involved a number of men as well, Åkerman herself emphasized that ‘from the outset [it was clear] that this was intended as a women’s own institute’ (Åkerman, 1984, p. 138).

In practice, the everyday activities of the Institute were led by a working committee with Brita Åkerman as chairman and Carin Boalt as research leader (Boalt, 1984, p. 141). At the core of its activities lay the institute’s own research. The design and methods of the studies were developed over time. Inspiration was partly drawn from American home economics research at Cornell University, and its British equivalent at the King’s College of Household and Social Science in London, as well as from corresponding initiatives and institutes in the Nordic countries (Boalt, 1984, pp. 148–151; Waern Bugge, 1947, p. 309). An explicit strategy from the beginning was that the studies should take their point of departure in the concrete and tangible with a limited focus. The approach was described as ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘user-oriented’, ‘focused on the micro level’ but ‘with a holistic perspective’ and ‘future-oriented’ (Boalt, 1984, p. 160). The three first studies examined time management and physical exertion in housework, washing up and food distribution. Over time, the surveys were expanded to other and wider areas, including kitchen fittings, home care, food preparation, laundry, childcare and working conditions in households. The results were summarized and disseminated through the Institute’s own publication series HFI-meddelanden as well as through exhibitions and courses. The reception in the press and radio was generally very positive. This was partly due to HFI’s network, which included several female journalists (Boalt, 1984, pp. 152–188).

However, the impact was not only through the media. HFI’s whole basic idea was, as Åkerman points out, ‘to build up knowledge to develop homes in a positive direction’ (Åkerman, 1994, p. 128). To succeed in this, extensive and far-reaching cooperation with industrial stakeholders on both the production and the consumption side was developed (Åkerman, 1994, p. 192). The close collaboration could go so far that HFI formulated suggestions for improvement based on its careful studies, for example regarding the placement of saucepan handles, and worked out prototypes in direct cooperation with the manufacturers, which thus changed the design of saucepans accordingly (Åkerman, 1994, pp. 134–136). At other times they worked with standardization so that the general standard for sink heights was changed to 90 cm (Åkerman, 1984, pp. 190–191). Overall, HFI helped develop rational methods for household work, standardizing the requirements for utensils and improving the design of homes and kitchens, and, not least, creating new social knowledge about the role of housework (Ibid, p. 193; c.f. Lövgren, 1993; Eriksson, 2005; Kaijser & Sax, 2013; Torell et al., 2018). As an extra-academic social research institute, HFI thereby also offers one example of the kind of intermediary knowledge-producing sites that were instrumental for women’s social research but are typically excluded from the traditional history of social science narratives.

Reassessing women’s extra-academic social research in Sweden 1900–1950

If we now return to the initial masculinization paradox, a number of tentative conclusions can be drawn. First, we recognized some of the female pioneers who did, after all, manage to make a career as social scientists during the first half of the twentieth century. This gave us reason, in the second part, to highlight some of the many gender-coded formal and informal obstacles they had to deal with. However, this intra-academic delay only impacts on one side of the coin. From a contextually broadened sociology of knowledge perspective it was argued that it is equally important to highlight the actors and arenas of extra-academic social research as in the ensuing sections, with the Home Research Institute as a concluding example. All in all, this means that we can now determine that women continued to be active in extra-academic social research throughout the whole period – despite the academicization and masculinization of social science.

But how should we then understand the relationship between academic social science and extra-academic social research? I have argued that the three identified realms of extra-academic social research – in the private, the social and the public spheres – often overlapped and were interconnected. My argument is that this last observation can be extended and applied to the more general relationship between academic social science and extra-academic social research. This is also what justifies the notion of a relatively coherent ‘field of social knowledge production’. Important changes evidently took place during the five decades studied here, where not least academization can be understood as a partial professionalization of the field. For this reason, it is important to emphasize that this was a field under formation and in its loose sense – similar to what has been described as an interstitial space oriented towards multiple sites and arenas of knowledge production (Stampnitzky, 2011, p. 3) – rather than in the strict Bourdieusian sense (c.f. Wisselgren, 2006b, pp. 47–48).

The heuristic benefit of conceptualizing the field of social knowledge production as a field is that this allows us to see the diverse connections between its male-dominated academic segments and its extra-academic counterparts, which allowed considerably more scope for initiatives by women. Another point is that it draws our attention to the broader socio-historical background and highlights the formative and cognitive role of the social reform movement (Eyerman & Jamison, 1991). But it does not answer the follow-up question on what actually gave the field coherence. Here I would argue, from a circulation of knowledge perspective (see Secord, 2004; Sarasin, 2011; Östling et al., 2018) that it was the internal dynamics with the lively traffic of participants and ideas that kept this expanding field with its related knowledge institutions and its academic and extra-academic, private, social and public arenas together. An important subpoint from this circulation of knowledge perspective is that it helps us to better understand the dynamics of the field as a whole, but also to more correctly evaluate the historical importance of the extra-academic women and their role as knowledge producers and intermediate agents within the field as such. In one sense, I would even like to suggest that it would be difficult to understand the dynamics of the otherwise numerically limited and relatively low-intensive academic social science during the interwar period – with the Stockholm School of Economics as the important and telling exception – unless we take the contemporary and rapidly expanding extra-academic social research into account (Wisselgren, 2000, 2006b).

But the perspective also helps us to assess the historical significance of the extra-academic social research in a more concrete sense. Ann-Sofie Ohlander adopts an important approach when she observes that the first generation of female academic pioneers were often more conventional in their academic research while they strove for scientific approval from their male peers. Instead, it was in most cases after they had left the university and were outside the academy that they produced their most original and significant works (Ohlander, 1987, p. 11). In similar vein Kirsti Niskanen has suggested that one of Karin Kock’s most important and most influential works was her report on Women’s Work in Sweden, which was typically produced outside the academic career system as a royal commission report (Niskanen, 2007, p. 102).

There has been repeated recognition and citation of the royal commissions and the extra-academic research institutes as meeting places and sites for policy-relevant social knowledge production. This gives us reason to refer back to Gerd Enequist as a representative of the academic aspect of the social knowledge field, and point out that she also had frequent and multiple extra-academic commitments. As a member of the scientific council of Statistics Sweden (Statistiska centralbyrån, SCB), the planning committee of the National Board of Public Buildings (Byggnadstyrelsens Planråd) and various royal commissions, Enequist and her generation of geographers were instrumental within Swedish urban planning during the decades after the Second World War. ‘Neither before nor since has our profession had such a strong influence on the development of the state’s infrastructure’, as one of her colleagues summarized the importance of her extra-academic engagements (Boseaus, 2000, p. 93, author’s transl.).

Although these extra-academic arenas provided scope and were open to women in a different way than the academic institutions, it is just as important not to get caught up in a simplistic golden age narrative and believe that they should be idealistically understood as havens or free zones for women’s knowledge production during the period. These extra-academic sites were of course also influenced by the prevailing gender norms and power structures of their time. This applied, as I have shown in earlier studies, to the Lorén Foundation, to the CSA, to the private contexts of the social science married couples and the social reform movement as a whole (Wisselgren, 2000, 2006a, 2012). The Home Research Institute, for instance, underwent a reorganization in two steps, in 1953 and 1956, which placed the Institute under the control of a corporate assembly of state representatives, commercial organizations and stakeholders. Boalt summarized the effects of the reorganization:

From having been a body for women themselves through which they could exert influence on economic activities, it now became a body behind which stood the state, popular movements and the business world with a generally benevolent aim of promoting consumer interest, but without the aim of ‘research to change’. (Boalt et al., 1984, p. 217; author’s transl.)

A recurring fate of many intellectuals in the female movement of the period, who often transformed their engagement and innovative ideas into cognitive practice rather than canonized texts is, as Ronny Ambjörnsson and Sverker Sörlin observe, that their independent status was often diminished and their pioneering achievements forgotten as new government agencies and institutions took over responsibility from the voluntary associations (Ambjörnsson & Sörlin, 1995, p. 12). In that respect, the Home Research Institute as well as women’s extra-academic social research of the kind highlighted in this article, fits into a more general pattern with regard to the Swedish case. Although similar observations regarding the marginalization of women social researchers have been made in other national contexts (see e.g. Silverberg, 1998; Yeo, 1996), a more systematic comparative approach would be needed to specify to what degree these patterns can be generalized. However, already by now I would like to argue that from a sociology of knowledge approach there are many good reasons for including women’s extra-academic social research in the history of the social sciences.

Acknowledgements

A first draft of this paper was originally presented to the Network for the History of Empirical Social Research in Lisbon in June 2019. I am grateful for the many constructive comments delivered at that occasion as well as to the anonymous reviewer of this journal. An earlier, shorter and less theoretically elaborated version of the paper has been published in Swedish (Wisselgren, 2021).

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Per Wisselgren

Per Wisselgren is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests revolve around the history and sociology of the social sciences. He is the author of The Social Scientific Gaze: The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in Sweden (2015) and has co-edited Social Science in Context: Historical, Sociological, and Global Perspectives (2013), History of Participatory Media: Politics and Publics, 1750–2000 (2011) and Par i vetenskap och politik: Intellektuella äktenskap i moderniteten (Couples in Science and Politics: Intellectual Marriages in Modernity) (2011).