ABSTRACT
The Rimbo dairymaid represents a unique piece of Swedish industrial history. Industrial dairying as a female occupation brings to the fore the question of women’s relation to science and engineering technology. The idea that milk belongs to the female sphere pervaded many pre-industrial cultures. The strong feminine coding of milk and dairying persisted well into the twentieth century. Commercial and industrial dairying developed in Sweden from the late nineteenth century. In Sweden as a whole, the masculinization process in dairying clearly paralleled the industrialization process. In the early twentieth century, thousands of industrial dairymaids were given the opportunity to develop specialized and technical skills. The author focuses on one particularly important trend: the recoding of the gender of skilled dairy work from a feminine milk-related task to a masculine, scientific, machinery-related task and also pointed to the complex interplay between industrial development and occupational gender coding.
