ABSTRACT
Valid generalizations about preindustrial families in Sweden are difficult because of marked regional variations in family types. Firm conclusions about an early nonkinship stage of the Swedish family must await further evidence, and such a stage, if it did exist, probably evolved from the still earlier kinship-oriented societies of Viking times. The stem family has traditionally been based on a one-heir system of inheritance. The good life for the middle-class family was based in part on the availability of a ready supply of cheap servant labor, the female children of the peasant and working classes. The natural habitat for the bourgeois family, however, was the nation's growing towns and cities. The concern for home and family in Swedish culture lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. Gradually over time the working class did manage to assimilate the main attributes of the middle-class life-style.
