The Swedish Middle Way and UN Experiences in Domestic Politics: Exploring International Welfare Feminism during Early Cold War Years

ABSTRACT

This paper distinguishes Swedish feminist internationalists in the early Cold War years appointed to high positions at the United Nations (UN) whose political commitments were connected to pluralism, democracy, and a solidarity with the poor. Alva Myrdal, Agda Rössel, and Ulla Lindström were three Swedish women appointed some of the highest positions attained by women in the UN in the late 1940s and 1950s. Their stance on the interrelatedness of women’s political and economic rights is in this paper read as characteristic of the Swedish Middle Way. A special focus in the paper is on the parliamentarian debates regarding the Swedish Middle Way in which Ulla Lindström expounded on her experiences from her work as delegate to the UN. Human rights actualized by feminist internationalists included equal pay for women supported by working unions, preschool and day-care facilities for working mothers, as well as social security and social services for families in poverty, but the high-ranking positions of these women at the UN were questioned both domestically and within the UN.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• democratic socialism
• Alva Myrdal
• Agda Rössel
• Ulla Lindström

Introduction

Women’s rights and gender equality have been historicized in the early Cold War years alongside ideological divisions of rights in the public and in the private (Laville, 2013). “The status of women” was highly debated in international bodies such as the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR)—from the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and the subsequent work in the CSW to internationalize human rights for women—and was generally narrated along US capitalist and Soviet communist ideas on women’s role in society (Laville, 2013). A new layer of feminist historical lenses on the early Cold War years is needed to recognize the work of non-aligned female political actors who negotiated East–West tensions through domestic politics. Women’s agency in domestic politics adds knowledge to how women’s human rights affect the intertwining levels of private life, domestic politics, and international politics (Leffler & Westad, 2010). The women actors who were in a minority both in domestic politics and in international relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s were pioneers in several regards. The commitments of some of the first women politicians in Sweden appointed to high-profile positions in the United Nations—Ulla Lindström, Alva Myrdal, and Agda Rössel—and their different conditions and constraints connected to stereotypical expectations on them as women, shed light on questions concerning both the difficulties faced by women in realizing political human rights, and also how their rights in the private were fundamentally connected to the political.

The conceptual aim of this paper is to discuss international welfare feminism through a rereading of the meaning of the Swedish Middle Way, when understood through the feminist and socialist international aspirations of three Swedish women delegates in the early Cold War years. The origin of the expression “the Swedish Middle Way” has been debated among scholars, and this paper contributes with a feminist historical lens on its meaning in the late 1940s. This was a historical period when women’s economic, social, and political rights were listed in UN conventions as an international framework of human rights. These public women figures would inspire and advance some of the social democratic reforms we today know as essential social institutions in a welfare state.

The sources used in this paper are Swedish newspaper articles from 1945 to 1956, UN archival material from 1946, and meeting protocols of the Commission on the Status of Women from 1949, as well as motions and debates in the Swedish Parliament in the 1940s.

I will initially sketch the context of the UN regarding women’s international human rights in its founding years, and then discuss the conceptual gap of a division between the two generations of rights that became a result of the Cold War tensions, before moving on to how positions held by women delegates at the time could provide us with an alternative conceptual path of international welfare feminism as bridging this division of human rights. I will then introduce the three Swedish women delegates appointed to the UN, who were friends and colleagues through their activism in women’s movements. Finally, I will expound on the connections that Ulla Lindström drew on in interviews when she was appointed minister in the Social Democratic government, on how political issues are of concern in our daily lives, to then explore her stance on the Swedish Middle Way that she discussed in parliamentarian debates in Sweden when she addressed the lack of compromises at the UN between Eastern and Western blocks in international relations. A political international organization as the UN will reflect in different ways the politics of its Member States, and the challenges women politicians face on a domestic political arena would be of interest when exploring women’s role in the history of international relations.

The United Nations in the early Cold War years

After the Second World War, the UN had been established following what many regarded as a failure of the preceding League of Nations, to provide an international platform for diplomatic negotiations to prevent future world wars. The United Nations was faced with a war-torn Europe, with overseeing the non-self-governing territories aiming to move their status towards autonomy, and with dealing with the hardships of postwar unemployment, rebuilding of infrastructure, and development of economies through increased international trade, travel, and exchange of innovations (on the role of women at the founding of the UN see Adami, 2019).

At the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, 17 women delegates to the General Assembly signed an “Open Letter to the Women of the World”; amongst them was Eleanor Roosevelt (US), Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux (France), Minerva Bernardino (the Dominican Republic), Bodil Begtrup (Denmark), Ellen Wilkinson (UK), Eydokia Uralova (Byelorussian SSR), and Jeane McKenzie (New Zealand), who called upon women to take a more active role in politics and government (see further Adami, 2019). In this letter, they wrote,

We hope their [women’s] participation in the work of the United Nations Organization may grow and increase insight and in skill. To this end we call on the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more active part in national and international affairs, and on women who are conscious of their opportunities to come forward and share in the work for peace and reconstruction as they did in war and resistance. (Roosevelt et al., 1946)

The role of women in resistance movements, women’s international peace organizations, and in the independence movements of former colonies such as India served to motivate the increasing number of Member States to the UN to also appoint women in their delegations in the late 1940s (on UN history concerning women delegates in the process of adopting the UN Charter and the UDHR 1946–48 see Adami, 2019). Key UN documents in the founding years of the UN included the adoption of the UN Charter which laid down the mandate of the new organization, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which listed universal human rights in its 30 articles.

The challenge in the UN in the early Cold War years was that of developing an international legal framework through binding conventions amidst an increased polemic atmosphere in international negotiations and debates. Women were in a minority in these debates and negotiations (these debates and negotiations are studied in Adami, 2019). The creation of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 was an initiative by women delegates to join efforts in an all-women commission, and to call on Member States to report on the political and legal status of women in different parts of the world. Through this commission, women from diverse political, cultural, and religious contexts succeeded in placing on the agenda of the UN General Assembly the need to increase women’s rights and their participation at the UN (for the role of the CSW in the drafting of the UDHR see Adami, 2019).

During the initial debates of the UDHR (1946–47), there had been only two women delegates in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR). Eleanor Roosevelt had been appointed chair by suggestion of the other woman delegate in the CHR, Hansa Mehta, India, who was also member of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The CHR was pressured by representatives from the CSW—who attended its meetings on the human rights declaration—to include equality of women in the text. Eleanor Roosevelt had initially been sceptical of the CSW, viewing it as a segregating strategy at the UN, but was later inspired by its efforts.¹ Eleanor Roosevelt and Hansa Mehta would in 1949 work jointly to transform the rights mentioned in the UDHR into a convention that would be binding for Member States upon ratification. The CSW managed to draft in the early Cold War years the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, and later the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages.

Such international declarations and conventions constitute an international human rights framework supposed to ignite national reforms and legislation in Member States of the UN, and the possible realization of gender equality and non-discrimination.

Women collaborations at the UN across an East and West divide

Through my earlier work on the founding years of the UN (Adami, 2019), and the role played by Indian and Pakistani suffragettes, I elucidate how women’s right to education and employment were pushed for as constitutive of realizing female suffrage (Adami, 2019; see Mukherjee, 2018; Singh Rathore, 2022). In this previous work on the drafting processes of the UN Charter and the UDHR in 1945–48, I studied the cooperation regarding women’s human rights in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) between, amongst others, Scandinavian women delegates and Indian and Pakistani women delegates. An example of such solidarities was the support found in UN General Assembly meetings between Shaista Ikramullah (Pakistan) and Bodil Begtrup (Denmark) on a more inclusive right to education and women’s rights in marriage as included in human rights (see Adami, 2019). In this earlier work, the agency of women in the history of international norm-setting on gender equality was brought to the fore through archival studies of UN meeting protocols between 1945 and 1948, and through biographies by the women. Women from Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East argued already in the 1940s for women’s human rights as being indivisible (see Adami & Plesch, 2022).

When the first UN Declaration listing human rights in 1946–48 was debated in the UN Commission on Human Rights, women delegates from newly independent states of India and Pakistan argued for the importance of understanding how suffrage and combating child marriages were interrelated with women’s right to education and the right to take active part in the public (Adami, 2018). They reminded Western feminists from the UK and US that economic rights for women (to own property, to inherit, to equal pay) and women’s cultural rights (to define traditions harmful for the realization of women’s human rights) were closely connected to women’s suffrage in their countries (Adami, 2019, chap. 4–7).

The work in the UN on an International Convention on Human Rights began already in 1949 and was initially intended to cover all the rights set forth in the UDHR which had been adopted in 1948, but the proposed convention on human rights had to be split into two covenants: one covering political and civil rights, and the other covering social, economic, and cultural rights. The drafts of these two covenants were presented after five years of negotiations, in 1954, to the UN General Assembly; however, due to increased Cold War antagonism the covenants were not adopted until over a decade later in 1966 (ICCPR) and 1967 (ICESCR). Agda Rössel, the world’s first woman ambassador to the UN (appointed Permanent Representative of Sweden to the UN in 1958), commented in Swedish newspapers already in 1956 on the unfortunate divide between civil/political, and economic/social/cultural rights at the UN:

The mission [of the Commission on Human Rights] has since this year, through a decision in the General Assembly, been divided into two parts since it has been decided that two separate convention proposals are to be worked out: one for the civil and political rights and one for the economic, social and cultural. (…) A lively debate arose between east and western states, on the following: the former (and Pakistan) demanded that all rights should be comprised into one convention, by stating that civil and political rights are worthless without assuring the economical (…). (Rössel)²

Women delegates from east Asia who argued for the interrelatedness of women’s rights in the private with their political and economic rights in the public in the early Cold War years formed bonds with Scandinavian women delegates at the UN at that time (Linder, 2001). Doris H. Linder has explored the contribution of Scandinavian women at the UN from its founding years (Bodil Begtrup, Denmark; Aase Lionaes, Norway; and Ulla Lindström, Sweden) whose commitment to women’s right to education was pushed as essential for an increased influence of women in politics (Linder, 2001).

The divide of human rights into first and second generation of rights—as reflected in the adoption of the two covenants—was questioned by countries that did not align with neither an Eastern nor Western block at the UN.

Bridging a conceptual gap

A division of human rights into first and second generation of rights when taken as a given disregards divergencies from this dominant narrative on human rights in UN history through a hegemony of the great powers. The stance towards human rights as indivisible taken by newly independent states in the early Cold War years and Scandinavian countries departs from the so-common division of rights into political and civil constituting the first generation of rights and the social, economic, and cultural rights constituting the second generation.

If the founding years of the UN had ignited hope for international feminism,³ patriarchal nationalism in newly independent states seemed to reinforce traditional roles of women (Adami, 2019). Moreover, Western UN Member States that saw themselves as forerunners for female suffrage had faced rapidly changing socio-political landscapes in terms of women’s economic emancipation after the Second World War when millions of women were laid off in the UK and the US as men returned from the war.⁴ In the US, the 1950s would be referred to as the doldrum years for feminism, when national politics romanticized ideas of traditional women’s roles in the home (Rupp & Taylor, 1987).

We find also during Stalinism (from the middle of the 1920s to the middle of the 1950s) opposition domestically from the Communist Party to organized feminism of independent women’s organizations, deemed as bourgeois and not in solidarity with the Communist struggle (see further Boxer, 2007). Historian Charles Sowerwine states that “Women would come into the socialist party as citizens, like the men, or they would not come at all” (Boxer, 2007, p. 138) to explain the opposition towards raising “women’s issues” within the Communist Party.

Hugh Wilford describes how international women’s organizations were targeted in the US by CIA through, for example, chief agent Dorothy Bauman who observed and reported on supposedly “communist-backed international conferences” on peace and gender equality (Wilford, 2008, p. 157).

Female agency and collaborations over ideological divides on feminist internationalism during the 1950s seem to have been silenced in historical accounts while referred to in Cold War dichotomies as “internationalizing communism”. It may then not come as a surprise that, as Kate Weigand notes, when looking into what she refers to as “Red feminism” in the US at this time, “feminists and the general public” have “come to believe that the critique of [sexism] in personal and family relations emerged for the first time in the mid-1960s” (Weigand, 2001, p. 3).

In this paper, I question, along with Acharya and Plesch, a frequent conflation of a liberal international order on human rights and universalism. Acharya and Plesch state, contrary to such a conflation, that the international organization of the UN “was founded with liberal and non-liberal ideas, including socialist, communitarian and conservative ideas” (Acharya & Plesch, 2020, p. 223), and historically overlooked feminist ideas, as protocols from UN meetings at the drafting of its two founding documents on human rights reveal (Adami, 2019; Dietrichson & Sator, 2022; Marino, 2022; Singh Rathore, 2022).⁵

I have elsewhere (Adami, 2022) explored the Lebanon meetings of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1949 through the concept of “international welfare feminism” to understand international feminist solidarity against exploitation of women’s labour, and how women delegates from both East and West conceptualized women’s labour in terms of exploitation of women in the home under patriarchal structures and of women workers for industrial profit under colonial capitalist arrangements after the Second World War.

International welfare feminism—read as solidarities amongst women for substantive equality of women in welfare states—in the 1940s and 1950s can be further understood by discussing the political work in the late 1940s by social democrat Ulla Lindström. She was a Swedish politician and the first woman minister who was appointed representative to the UN General Assembly in 1947. What is of particular interest here is how she during parliament debates drew on her experiences in the UN to explain the Swedish Middle Way coined by Marquis Childs within an international increasingly polemic debate. She argued that, through this Middle Way, democratic citizen need not choose between either freedom or social security but could have both.

Reconsidering the Middle Way within a human rights discourse

“International welfare feminism” in the early Cold War years has been mired in dichotomies that have obscured the links between welfarism and feminism on the one hand and internationalism and feminism on the other. “International welfare feminism” is, in contrast to earlier notions of “red feminism” (Weigand, 2001), “feminist socialism” (Boxer, 2007), and feminist initiatives that were USSR-backed (de Haan, 2010; Gradskova, 2019; Pieper Mooney, 2012; Poulos, 2017) or channelled through US-led international women’s organizations (Rupp & Taylor, 1987), used here to question the presumed unfeasibility of advancing social democratic feminist issues as disconnected from communism, in the international arena during the postwar period.

Scandinavian women delegates in the UN who advanced women’s economic rights could be seen—as I have studied earlier in terms of Southern women delegates in the CSW in 1949—as representing other interests than East–West ideologies (Adami, 2022).

To better understand the rise of feminist internationalists who advanced ideas on gender equality and women’s political, civil, social, and economic rights in the early Cold War years beyond the ideological dichotomy of communism and capitalism, we need to turn our attention to alternative historical trajectories of women’s human rights and the welfare state. The non-alignment movement founded in the 1960s came to exhibit an alternative to the communist–capitalist dichotomy, but already in the 1940s we find alternative positions at the UN critical of the two blocks. One of these earlier alternative positions in the UN is explored in this paper through a feminist lens as held by female Social Democratic politicians at the time, from Sweden, on “the Swedish Middle Way”.

Franz-Xaver Kaufmann notes that the Soviet Union and the United States “are/were not ‘welfare states,’ but epitomize ‘socialism’ and capitalism,’ respectively” (Kaufmann, 2013, p. 157). Neither of these ideological blocks would according to Kaufmann provide us with insight to a welfare state where political and civil freedoms coexist with welfare institutions ensuring economic, social, and cultural rights. To enable a conceptual bridging of the initial division of first and second generation of rights, and how they represent women’s international human rights, we need to reconsider instead examples from the early Cold War years that capture the relatedness of feminism and the welfare state.

In 1936, the book Sweden: The Middle Way by Marquis Childs (Childs, 1936) introduces to American readers the pragmatic position of the Swedish government in the 1930s to enable private enterprise and ensure peaceful labour relations⁶ and cooperative movements under Democratic Socialism. When launching the “Second New Deal” in the US, Franklin D. Roosevelt was interested in finding ways to deal with a supposed “conflict between capitalism and socialism, between freedom and security”, and he “sent a commission to study the cooperative movement in the Nordic countries” with reference to Child’s work on the Swedish Middle Way (Marklund, 2013, p. 266).

Carl Marklund notes that when entering the UN in 1946, Swedish delegates referred to Sweden’s reputation in the United States as “the country of the Middle Way” and connected this both to what Marklund calls the inner middle way (the welfare state) and the outer middle way (neutrality in international diplomacy) (Marklund, 2013, p. 269). While Marklund explores how the Swedish Middle Way was introduced and re-branded through the Cold War in the US with focus on the challenges of conceptualizing the welfare system within a capitalist logic and the narrowness in how Sweden’s “neutrality” was questioned from a US perspective at the time for compromising with socialist ambitions, I argue that women’s history may reshape our understanding of this Middle Way.

Three Social Democratic Women appointed to the UN

The Scandinavian feminist internationalists in the early Cold War years provide us with the historical trajectory to bridge the initial split between first and second generation of human rights in the UN. As noted, earlier research on the contribution of Scandinavian women to the UN have included accounts of Aase Lionaes (Norway) and Bodil Begtrup (Denmark), and there has as well been ample international interest on the work of Alva Myrdal (Sweden) (Ekerwald, 2000; Herman, 1993; Misztal, n.d.). Nonetheless, the international careers of these women in the 1940s and 1950s were accompanied by outspoken questioning of their qualifications in a male-dominated public sphere.

What unified the efforts for women’s equality in the UN by three of the early appointed Swedish women UN delegates in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Agda Rössel, Ulla Lindström, and Alva Myrdal, was their commitment to Swedish democratic socialism based on democratic principles of objectivity, compromise, and public open debate combined with welfare ideals of gender equality through education for all, free day-care to facilitate women’s labour, and social insurance provided by the government to ensure economic safety during sickness, old age, and during childhood. What distinguished them were their backgrounds and professional experiences.⁷ Agda Rössel had a working-class background, was active in the Swedish Labour Union, and became appointed in 1958 as Swedish diplomat to the UN from the side-lines, which was not appreciated by upper-class male colleagues at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs who found her appointment by Östen Undén as the first female Permanent Representative to the UN rather unfair (Järderström, 2018, p. 82). Agda Rössel was notably not an occupational diplomat but had international experience in the refugee crisis of Europe from her work in refugee camps in Austria, diplomatic experience from being stationed as UN delegate in Geneva, and she used her international connections from having presided an international visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Sweden in 1949 (Järderström, 2018).

Ulla Lindström, by contrast, was a middle-class politician whose father had been a right-wing Minister of Finance, and her political engagement reads in opposition to her father’s conservative view of women.⁸ She was member of the Swedish parliament from 1946; Minister of Family, Consumption, Aid, and Immigration from 1954; and the first woman to be acting Prime Minister under Tage Erlander in 1958. Her appointment as minister was supported by the Social Democratic Women, but in the editorial of Arbetar Bladet 1954 it was commented as follows: “Her nomination should be seen as filling a tactic need. She does not comment the nomination as such: ‘I’m nominated because of what I know in these matters, not because I’m a woman.’ Well, that is what she believes, anyhow.”⁹

Ulla Lindström would play a pivotal role in furthering several of the social reforms we now associate with the Swedish welfare state, including health insurance covering the unemployed, state subsidies for public day-care centres, and state child allowances.

Alva Myrdal is probably the most internationally known of the three; her written work and public talks on welfare institutions, ideas of gender equality, population and economy, and women’s labour influenced and ignited reforms under Swedish Democratic Socialism (Ekerwald, 2000; Holmwood, 2000; Misztal, n.d.). In Nation and Family(Myrdal, 1941) she had “provided a feminist account of the national welfare state, or what has come to be referred to as the ‘women-friendly welfare state’” (Misztal, n.d., p. 346) and through her political work “strove to make modern society accommodate not only men, but women and children” (Ekerwald, 2000, p. 343). Alva Myrdal was the first woman holding a position of head of section on welfare policy in 1949 at the UN Secretariat. As Director, Alva Myrdal was serving on the highest level held by a woman at the time in the UN Secretariat. One of the questions she was investigating was women’s right to vote and their important role in “developing countries” [sic!]. At the appointment by UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie as Chief of the UN Social Affairs Division she wrote to Disa Västberg, a Social Democratic member of Sweden’s Parliament, “I shall be able to work for the internationalization of social policies we as Swedes, as Social Democrats, and as women aim at” (Herman, 1993, pp. 325–326). Dagens Nyheter (DN) editor Åhman commented on the appointment that it would surely attract negative reactions from several political parties. Lisa Svanberg, Union Secretary of the Working Women Cooperation Federation and right-wing politician, said in an interview with Morgon Tidningen(MT) that it was typical of DN to make party politics and propaganda of the appointment. What, she asked, would international readers say about Sweden when they read this? Ulla Lindström, Disa Västberg, and Agda Rössel said that DN needed to think about all Swedish women and their interests instead of drawing negative opinion regarding the appointment.¹⁰

Rössel, Lindström, and Myrdal formed a feminist Social Democratic alliance at the UN and were, as Doris Linder notes, “optimistic about the potential of the UN to improve the quality of life of women and men around the globe and believed recent Swedish history offered some ideas about how this might be accomplished” (Linder, 2001, pp. 196–197). In August 1945—right after the founding of the UN—Alva Myrdal was interviewed in Copenhagen, where she spoke at the Danish Women’s national council’s first big meeting after the peace, regarding the postwar women’s problems in different countries. Myrdal says in the interview that she wanted socialist democratic parties in different countries to cooperate on women’s rights as these could be solved in practical ways through political initiatives.¹¹

Ulla Lindström served as a delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1947 and took part in the last debates before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (Adami, 2019). The three Swedish women UN delegates stirred up some controversy when raising the issue of family planning on the agenda in the UN, an issue they related both to national economy, labour rights, and as a prerequisite for gender equality.

Rössel, Lindström, and Myrdal combined family and international careers and experienced in different ways the difficulties for women to both work and raise children at that time (Hirdman, 2007; for more biographical notes on the life and ambitions of Rössel, Myrdal, and Lindström see further; Järderström, 2018; Sjögren, 2003). Lindström had remarried, Rössel divorced without remarrying, and the Myrdals combined two careers in their marriage with three children. Lindström had to manage being minister of the government without a portfolio which means she lacked administrative support as minister while carrying the burden at home as a mother of two (Sjögren, 2003). Rössel moved with her two children to New York for her position at the UN, juggling the responsibilities connected to being Swedish Ambassador without anyone to relieve the expected representative host-duties (Järderström, 2018, p. 117).¹² Both Alva Myrdal and Ulla Lindström advanced the idea of general child benefits and free public nursery homes. In the 1950s, Lindström was responsible for preparing a new model for state subsidies for day-care centres in Sweden. These Social Democratic ideas were raised by the three women politicians at the UN.

At the UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting in 1955 Agda Rössel “discussed the need for more assistance to working mothers, especially day-care centres, and the same pension conditions for women and men” (Linder, 2001, p. 197). She explained to her CSW colleagues “that since work outside the home was now an indispensable part of the Swedish economy, it was the duty of society to organize services to help the wife and the family” (Linder, 2001, p. 198).

Ulla Lindström: life is politics

What would welfare feminism mean if we read it through the political work of Lindström in Sweden in the 1940s and 1950s? It seems that her passion for politics came from the recognition of how politics affected family life, and her political activism was that of being concerned with women’s lived realities and possibilities in society. When asked in an interview in Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) on 18 September 1945 how she came to be interested in politics, Ulla Lindström retorted: “Ask me rather how one could not!”, and added: “Wherever you look in your daily life, it’s politics.”¹³

At that time she was living with her second husband, two daughters, and another couple in an apartment in Stockholm. The couple living with them was expecting a baby but could not find an apartment in Stockholm after the war. “Everywhere you look you will find problems that are only solvable through politics”, Lindström noted in the interview in SvD in 1945. When the journalist asked why she became a Social Democrat she responded that her political interest was rooted in feminism and the understanding that social problems women face could be solved through politics. By reading the work of Alexandra Kollontai, Lindström realized that “Only in a more rudimental democracy than the old bourgeois society could everyone have the same human dignity.”¹⁴ Alexandra Kollontai had been appointed ambassador to Sweden in 1921 after having written a pamphlet on the need for freedom of press for labour workers in the USSR. She was a Marxist feminist who argued for working women’s equality, and saw marriage as a form of exploitation of women’s unpaid labour in the home. The connection between women’s economic rights and political freedom became explicitly clear for Lindström through reading Kollontai. “She made me understand that one is not feminist in mid-air, one has to see the issue in its social context.”¹⁵ At the time of the interview, both Lindström and Kollontai lived in Stockholm, and the fact that Kollontai was appointed ambassador to Sweden after having criticized the Communist party in the USSR for not respecting the freedom of press may have impressed upon Lindström the importance of not only questioning economic inequalities affecting women but equally the importance to ensure the freedom for women to voice such injustices through free press and speech. Lindström explicates to the journalist that from reading the early work of Kollontai (Kollontai, 1909, 1916); “I saw the old society as an institution where both workers and women were bought—and all of that I wanted to get away from.”¹⁶

Kollontai had been a member of the USSR Socialist party and, in the words of biographer Katharine Anthony, “next attained the status of a political traitor” in the USSR and subsequently worked abroad as ambassador in the 1940s (Anthony, 1930, p. 280).

Based on the conviction that women’s equality was interrelated to democratic socialism, Ulla Lindström joined Clarté¹⁷ and signed up for the Social Democratic party. For Lindström it was important that everyone had a practical possibility to engage in work and politics:

As women start working we have to make sure that they get rid of the routine job at home, so they have time for a private life too, have time for partner and children. The home has to be a place where you like to be, not a place where you work as a slave to late at night, when you are deadly tired after ordinary work. (Lindström)¹⁸

Illustrative of her stance that women’s unpaid work in the home had to be addressed, Alm [Lindström’s last name from first marriage], cast a blank vote in 1946 to a family insurance that the parliament would rule in favour for: “The general health insurance is for me such an important issue (…) but one in which also the non-working married women are independently covered.”¹⁹ When arguing in the Swedish parliament for general healthcare insurance for married unemployed home-wives, Alm expounded in parliamentarian debate: “If I cast my memory right, in the marriage code it is stated that the work of the wife in the home constitutes a contribution to the family income.”²⁰

In the 1940s, the Swedish government department investigated through several bills the possible measures to create increased occasions for married women to work part-time in public service. In 1942, it adopted a motion on women’s right to public office, changing the constitution,²¹ in 1945 a proposition on law against firing employees due to pregnancy or marriage,²² and in 1946 requested investigation of the issue of women’s competence to church office.²³ There were also major draw-backs, as the chambers rejected in 1948 the motions on women’s right to equal pay for equal work.²⁴

Sweden, The Middle Way

In a Swedish Parliamentarian debate on 4 February 1948, Ulla Lindström responded to chamber colleague Sven Linderot, a Swedish communist leader, on his attempt to lay upon the Swedish UN delegation the responsibility for why the Swedish public opinion and sentiments at the time had in his mind become colder towards their Eastern neighbouring countries. Lindström retorted that it was not the Swedish delegation to the UN that had caused this shift, but rather the access the Swedish population had to newspapers reporting directly from their foreign correspondents in New York and Paris about the attitudes of the great powers at the UN negotiations.²⁵

[P]eople in general have not failed to notice—through foreign telegram, foreign press etc.—this; that the great powers in the peace negotiations and in the United Nations work have become complicated, not due in small part to the opinions of the Eastern great power shown in a stubborn position which complicates, or makes impossible, necessary compromises. (Lindström)²⁶

Lindström recognized here one of the tenets necessary for any agreement on human rights in international diplomacy in a political organization such as the UN—made up by the total sum of its Member States with divergent political and economic systems—namely that of compromise. She problematized the stances of the great powers of the time, especially the USSR, of not wanting to compromise with capitalism due to ideological reasons. The international efforts to reconcile political freedoms with economic and social rights were hampered by such attitudes taken by the great powers in the UN during the Cold War. The appointment of two Scandinavians as the two first Secretary-Generals of the UN (Trygve Lie from Norway, 1946–52, and Dag Hammarskjöld from Sweden, 1953–61) captured this need for the UN to be representative of higher aspirations than the limitations placed on any of the East–West ideological systems. The UN had to find common ground among conflicting ideologies to safeguard a respect for the interconnectivity of human rights and to enable peaceful negotiations amidst increased polemic debates.

Lindström continued the parliamentarian debate with the communist leader Sven Linderot, by sharing her experiences from UN negotiations, while expressing the need for alternative positions outside dichotomic deadlocks at the time:

“One does not compromise with capitalism”, said a Soviet delegate in Lake Success this fall, and he said it in a way that one says something trivial, highly everyday truth. And this is where the fault lies. Because what is democracy without the ability to compromise, a compromise between different opinions—even capitalist—to enable proposals and results that will be accepted by a broad public, by as many and as wide groups of citizens as possible? Almost every [domestic Swedish] committee report we receive is a result of those compromises between bourgeois/liberal and socialist, between many different views. (Lindström)²⁷

The domestic willingness for political compromise in Sweden at the time was, according to historian Carl Marklund, due to “the uniquely homogenous set-up of Swedish society” that Gunnar Myrdal emphasized in his 1938 Godkin Lectures at Harvard when discussing the democratic welfare state (Marklund, 2009, p. 273). Sweden was until the 1930s an emigration country—Swedes emigrating mostly to Northern America until 1920s. Emigrationsutredningen [The emigration inquiry] from 1910 investigated the possible reasons for the high emigration to Northern America, mentioning the class divide in the Swedish society, with poor housing and school conditions for the working class, as in need of urgent reforms. At the end of the Second World War Sweden had, nevertheless, turned into an immigration country with refugees from Germany, from the neighbouring Nordic countries, and from the Baltics immigrating to Sweden, and later from southern Europe.

The compromises that Lindström discussed in the parliament were characteristic of a democratic process in a pluralist society consisting of liberal, communist, socialist, and conservative parties. Such compromises cannot be reduced to the “solidarity and unity” image that Gunnar Myrdal portraited of Sweden (Myrdal, 1938) when problematizing why the Swedish Middle Way and welfare state would not be replicable to societies with less homogeneous populations.

The combination of tenets of democracy (including freedom of speech and press and suffrage for all citizens regardless of gender or ethnicity) with socialist welfare policies that Sweden epitomized in the early Cold War years stands in contrast to how the USSR and the US debated economic and political rights and freedoms at the UN. Lindström argued in 1948 that “To be able to reconcile and cooperate and take into account even to wicked opinions is a criterion for democracy, and inability or principal unwillingness thereof is related with dictatorships, regardless if it is still referred to as a people’s democracy nonetheless.”²⁸ Sweden had found ways to seek compromise between left- and right-wing political parties on social welfare policies and when securing through legislation press freedom in the country (Sweden’s current Freedom of the Press Act came into effect already in 1949).

National social reforms: realizing women’s international human rights

Internal debates on priorities within the Swedish government in the 1950s, when Ulla Lindström served as the only woman minister in the Social Democratic government, forced her to create strong public opinion on family- and child-related questions to get these on the political agenda (Sjögren, 2003). In 1955 and 1956, Lindström established support for raising child benefits instead of lowering of taxes through the Social Democratic Women’s Foundation and its 930 member organizations (Sjögren, 2003). Lindström’s friend and colleague at the UN, Alva Myrdal, saw that in “all societies and in varying degrees women were deprived of opportunity” and that women’s status world-wide was the “most revealing index of each nation’s modernity” (Herman, 1993, p. 327).

Sandra Herman, professor in American History, has studied how the social reforms enhancing women’s rights in Sweden at the time were brought to international public debates at the UN through international feminists such as Alva Myrdal. Herman notes that as an international feminist Myrdal saw the possibility of women to “join together to create or demand institutions such as nursery schools, adult literacy training, and shorter hours of employment in order to reconcile their own ambitions and dreams with the healthful upbringing of their children”. Alva Myrdal envisioned an international political arena with “women committed to the United Nations but equally the United Nations committed to women’s progress” (Herman, 1993, p. 327).

Ulla Lindström “remained the only woman in the Swedish government [from 1955] until her resignation in 1966” (Sjögren, 2003, p. 27), and the fact that she lacked, in comparison to her male colleagues, a minister cabinet to support her in the work reflects her unfaltering ambitions.

The possible realization of human rights through national politics—read through the following quote by Lindström on the Swedish Middle Way—can be seen as a synthesis of the aspiration for both women’s individual freedom and their equal access to social justice, which speaks as well of human rights as indivisible.

For us Swedes—in a country with five hundred years of parliamentarian system—freedom is an intermediate between these two extremes [capitalism and communism], a synthesis of individual freedom and social justice. Sweden, the middle way—Sweden, the middle country—as the American Marquis Childs once named us, can therefore also be placed as a title for the course of our foreign policy. (Lindström)²⁹

Ulla Lindström shared with Alva Myrdal and Agda Rössel a political feminist vision to internationalize the Swedish Middle Way. For them, only through democratic socialism could an alternative be envisioned where women did not carry the burden of a capitalist myth of freedom. Welfare feminism was based on social reforms to tackle women’s unpaid domestic work, to relieve women who had been forced to substitute the lack of public spending on welfare institutions while sacrificing their public work life and careers. This Swedish Middle Way was one of progressive welfare reforms in the early Cold War years from an international perspective; however, recent research has shown the need to further our understanding of the countless needed links between political support for families and the realization of gender equality. Folke and Rickne (2020) have studied how parliamentarian promotion of women still today in Sweden “doubles the baseline of divorce” in heterosexual marriages as traditional couple formations continue being that of prioritizing the husband’s careers (Folke & Rickne, 2020).

Concluding discussion

Reluctance towards, or avoidance of, feminist critique as “bringing in gender” disregards how both language and the public reception of women politicians in the early Cold War years were already gendered (Adami, 2018, p. 67). The advancement of human rights at the UN can be read as already male-biased if disregarding alternative trajectories of feminist thought that would provide us with a conceptual path on the political and economic rights of women as indivisible. Agda Rössel, Alva Myrdal, and Ulla Lindström were women in national and international politics who combined family and work. Feminist solidarity in making this possible for other women as well was crucial for the three. As Ulla Lindström said in a Swedish newspaper interview from 1945,

Men often try to downgrade the female sex by explaining how women who—with additional luck—succeed in making their way, despite prejudice against women, are extraordinary exceptions. There is nothing that irritates me more. Some successful women do the same. (…) But what joy is there in some women succeeding to make their voice heard, when they are not in solidarity with all those who are speechless? (Lindström)³⁰

Lindström, Rössel, and Myrdal had advanced to positions not accessible to women before them in the public, and this was a new space women could only occupy when their rights in the private became realized through welfare institutions. Studying solidarities among women politicians who were active in a male-dominated political sphere in the 1940s and 1950s aims to question a historical narrative of Cold War politics which seems to have disrupted further connections between feminism and welfare issues that could be explored as international welfare feminism.

A formal notion of equality assumes “women” to be treated “as men” by which access to political rights are not placed in relation to the necessary initiatives for social security and child welfare suggested by welfare feminists at this time. Substantive equality, by contrast, requires us to take into consideration the social conditions of women, for example the inherent gender inequalities connected to motherhood. The Swedish Middle Way, when read through the feminist and socialist international aspirations of women in the early Cold War years, constitutes alternative positions at the UN that epitomize international welfare feminism.

Swedish newspaper articles from 1945-1956

”Ny kvinnlig minister” [New female minister], Arbetar Bladet, AB, 3 June 1954.

“Stor indignation i vida kretsar över DN-attack mot Alva Myrdal” [Great indignation in wide circles over DN attack against Alva Myrdal], MT Morgon-Tidningen, 8 January 1949.

”Socialdemokratin kan nu bli ideologisk världsmakt” [Social Democracy can now become an ideological world power], MT Morgon-Tidningen, Alva Myrdal interview, 31 August 1945.

Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).

Rössel, Agda. ”Mänskligheten och paragrafer” [Humanity and Paragraphs], Svenska Dagbladet, 14 September 1956.

UN archival material and meeting protocol of the Commission on the Status of Women from 1949

Open Letter to the Women of the World, United Nations, First Session of the General Assembly, 1946.

E/CN.6/SR.49, Commission on the Status of Women, Third Session, Summary record of the 49^th meeting, Beirut, Lebanon, 28 March 1949.

Motions and debates in the Swedish Parliament in the 1940s

Motioner i Första kammaren, 1942:181, ”Utredning angående åtgärder för att bereda gifta kvinnor ökade tillfällen till deltidsarbete i allmän och enskild tjänst” [Investigation on measures to ensure married women increased opportunities for part-time work in the public and private sector], Leading to changes in Regeringsformen, paragraphs 17, 21, 27, and 28.

Kungl. Maj:ts proposition:368, 1945, ”Proposition till riksdagen med förslag till lag om förbud mot arbetstagares avsked i anledning av äktenskap eller havandeskap m.m; given Stockholms slott den 19 oktober 1945” [Proposition to the parliament with proposal for law on prohibition against dismissal of employees due to marriage or pregnancy etc., Stockholm castle, 19 October 1945].

Riksdagens protokoll, 1946:43, Första kammaren, ”Lagförslag om allmän sjukförsäkring” [Bill proposal on public health insurance], Wednesday 18 December 1946.

Motioner i Andra kammaren, 1946:173, ”kvinnas behörighet till prästämbete” [woman’s competence for priesthood].

Motioner i Första kammaren, 1948:146, ”angående lagfästande av kvinnans rätt till lika lön med mannen för samma prestation” [regarding enactment of women’s right to equal salary as men for the same accomplishment].

Riksdagens protokoll, 1948, första kammaren, nr: 5, Onsdag Februari 4, ”Ang. Sveriges utrikes- och handelspolitik” [Regarding Swedish foreign- and trade politics].

Author’s note

Empirical material consisting of newspaper articles and parliamentarian meeting protocols have been translated from Swedish to English by the author, and the sources are found in the language of origin in the referenced archives.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the “Nordic women and the transnational networks during the Cold War (1945–1990): collaboration, conflicts, achievements and memory” workshop organized by Stockholm University, Department of History, 18–19 February 2021, for invaluable comments from colleagues, and feedback on draft by discussant Monica Quirico, Södertörn University. I also want to extend my gratitude to the reviewers for invaluable critical comments that helped shape the text and argument of the paper in its current shape.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Adami

Rebecca Adami is Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Stockholm University and Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies). She specializes in critical human rights theory through counternarratives, and studies on intersectionality and cosmopolitanism. Editor of Women and the UN and author of Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Notes

1. For a detailed account of the role of the two women delegates in the CHR 1946–48 see Adami (2019).

2. Rössel, A. (1956, 14 September). “Mänskligheten och paragrafer” [Humanity and Paragraphs]. Svenska Dagbladet.

3. This article explores what is commonly known as the first wave of feminism while based on the assumption that there are alternative historical narratives from the early Cold War years of international feminist aspirations that do not align with the two ideological economic and political systems of capitalism and communism.

4. E/CN.6/SR.49, Commission on the Status of Women, Third Session, Summary record of the 49^th meeting, Beirut, Lebanon, 28 March 1949, p. 8.

5. Adami, Rebecca, Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York & London: Routledge, 2019); Khushi Singh Rathore, “Excavating Hidden Histories: Indian Women in the Early History of the United Nations,” in Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights (London : New York: Routledge, 2022); Katherine Marino, “From Women’s Rights to Human Rights: The Influence of Pan-American Feminism on the United Nations,” in Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights (London : New York: Routledge, 2022); Elise Dietrichson and Fatima Sator, “The Latin American Women: How They Shaped the UN Charter and Why Southern Agency Is Forgotten,” in Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights (London : New York: Routledge, 2022).

6. An example was the Saltsjöbaden Agreement signed in 1938 between the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and the Swedish Employers Association, which laid down rules concerning collective bargaining, industrial action, and disputes threatening the public interest.

7. They became a social democratic elite in their broad engagements and influence in the Swedish society, amongst others through Svenska kvinnoföreningars samorganisation [Swedish women’s associations co-organization] (SKS), Svenska Socialdemokratiska kvinnoförbund [Swedish social democratic women’s association] (SSK), and Yrkeskvinnornas samarbetsförbund [Working women’s cooperative association] (YSF).

8. Ulla Gunilla Lindström, www.skbl.se/sv/artikel/UllaLindstrom, Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon [Biographical dictionary of Swedish women] (paper by Gunnel Karlsson), accessed 22 March 2021.

9. “Ny kvinnlig minister” [New female minister], Arbetar Bladet, AB, 3 June 1954.

10. “Stor indignation i vida kretsar över DN-attack mot Alva Myrdal” [Great indignation in wide circles over DN attack against Alva Myrdal], MT Morgon-Tidningen, 8 January 1949.

11. “Socialdemokratin kan nu bli ideologisk världsmakt” [Social Democracy can now become an ideological world power], MT Morgon-Tidningen, Alva Myrdal interview 31 August 1945.

12. Järderström, Hennes Excellens Agda Rössel: Från Barnvaktstugan till FN-Skrapan [Her Excellence Agda Rössel: from Kindergarten to the UN-Scraper], 117.

13. Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).

14. Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).

15. Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).

16. Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).

17. Clarté, meaning clarity and characterizing intellectual opposition to fascism, is a non-partisan socialist students’ organization in Sweden established in 1921.

18. Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).

19. Riksdagens protokoll, 1946:43, Första kammaren, “Lagförslag om allmän sjukförsäkring” [Bill proposal on public health insurance], Wednesday 18 December, p. 26.

20. Riksdagens protokoll, 1946:43, Första kammaren, “Lagförslag om allmän sjukförsäkring” [Bill proposal on public health insurance], Wednesday 18 December, p. 27.

21. Motioner i Första kammaren, 1942:181 “Utredning angående åtgärder för att bereda gifta kvinnor ökade tillfällen till deltidsarbete i allmän och enskild tjänst” [Investigation on measures to ensure married women increased opportunities for part-time work in the public and private sector], Leading to changes in Regeringsformen, paragraphs 17, 21, 27, and 28.

22. Kungl. Maj:ts proposition:368, 1945, “Proposition till riksdagen med förslag till lag om förbud mot arbetstagares avsked i anledning av äktenskap eller havandeskap m.m; given Stockholms slott den 19 oktober 1945” [Proposition to the parliament with proposal for law on prohibition against dismissal of employees due to marriage or pregnancy etc., Stockholm castle 19 October 1945].

23. Motioner i Andra kammaren, 1946:173 “Kvinnas behörighet till prästämbete” [Woman’s competence for priesthood].

24. Motioner i Första kammaren 1948:146 “Angående lagfästande av kvinnans rätt till lika lön med mannen för samma prestation” [Regarding enactment of women’s right to equal salary as men for the same accomplishment].

25. She refers here to both the San Francisco Conference in 1946 at the founding of the UN and adoption of its Chapter, as well as the 1947–48 meetings in New York and Paris on the adoption of the UDHR which would provide the scope of the human rights mentioned in the UN Charter.

26. Riksdagens protokoll, 1948, Första kammaren, nr: 5, Onsdag Februari 4, “Ang. Sveriges utrikes- och handelspolitik”. [Regarding Swedish foreign and trade politics], p. 60.

27. Riksdagens protokoll, 1948, Första kammaren, nr: 5, Onsdag Februari 4, “Ang. Sveriges utrikes- och handelspolitik”. [Regarding Swedish foreign and trade politics], p. 60.

28. Riksdagens protokoll, 1948, Första kammaren, nr: 5, Onsdag Februari 4, “Ang. Sveriges utrikes- och handelspolitik”. [Regarding Swedish foreign and trade politics], p. 60.

29. Riksdagens protokoll, 1948, Första kammaren, nr: 5, Onsdag Februari 4, “Ang. Sveriges utrikes- och handelspolitik”. [Regarding Swedish foreign and trade politics], p. 60.

30. Jaconde, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 18 September 1945 (interview with Ulla Lindström).