ABSTRACT
This final chapter considers the persistent influence of agrarian notions of womanhood and the activism of rural women themselves in the formation of Sweden's two-breadwinner welfare state. Before World War II, the majority of Sweden's population remained rural, and at least one-third engaged in agriculture. Married women with young children performed gainful labor on smallholdings and in towns, so bourgeois notions of wifely dependence had little relevance. Rural residents who migrated to the city brought the idea that women as well as men were family breadwinners with them. From the 1930s onward, when the Social Democratic and Agrarian parties governed the country in coalition, women united to support welfare programs that were universal rather than employment-based and advocated policies that treated married women's paid work as necessary and legitimate. Drawing on oral histories and campaign materials, the chapter shows that rural women organized and proposed programs to facilitate the combination of motherhood with productive labor. During the interwar period, feminists affiliated with the two leading parties laid the foundations for the two-breadwinner model of the welfare state. In these respects, then, the Swedish path to gender equality is distinct from contemporaneous developments in other European countries.
