ABSTRACT
Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s relationship continued to be marked by the contradictions that appeared during these first years. Their struggle to combine love and work met obstacles that came both from the constraints of gender and from the structures of feeling each had developed while growing up. Unsparing honesty, self-reflection, and psychological analysis did not shield them from the most troubling, even paralyzing dilemmas they confronted, sometimes together but often separately. Gunnar and Alva married in 1924, after she had completed her university degree and he had embarked on graduate study in economics. A diary Alva kept while he was working on his dissertation expressed her distress at his emotional distance. Things went better when they were engaged in a common project: spending a year of study in the United States; coauthoring Crisis in the Population Question, which outlined a new family policy that would enable women to have children remain in the labor force; and lending their expertise to the Social Democratic Party. In a path-breaking feminist essay, Alva declared that “the woman as she really is does not exist. We shall have to discover her” by allowing women “a freer development of the self.”
