When ladies gained the fitting to vote in Sweden in 1919, a gaggle of intellectuals – together with Ada Nilsson (physician), Honorine Hermelin (pedagogue and instructor) and Elin Wägner (writer) – organised a course for girls in political participation at a manor home outdoors Stockholm. The course developed into an training centre: the Fogelstad Citizen Faculty for Girls.
With its mission to coach college students as autonomous members of society, from 1925 to 1954 Fogelstad performed a central position within the Swedish ladies’s motion. In Ord&Bild, historian Lena Eskilsson outlines how Fogelstad reworked the lives of generations of Swedish ladies, who discovered there ‘the connections between the labour of one’s hand, thoughts and coronary heart, between the home and the societal, between the person and the collective’.
So as to guarantee academic freedom, Fogelstad’s board of administrators made some extent by no means to hunt public funding, and as a substitute collected non-public donations to supply scholarships for college students in want. Lessons ranged from political principle, philosophy, psychology and historical past to literature, rhetoric, sports activities and music. Position-playing political processes at totally different ranges of society additionally performed a central pedagogic position.
Simply as necessary because the courses have been the social actions: meals, espresso breaks, events, excursions and birthday celebrations. On some evenings, a pupil was chosen to sit down in a delegated chair and inform their friends one thing about themselves, their work, or their hometown.
Ord&Bild 1/2025
Eskilsson describes the varsity choir as a logo of Fogelstad’s basic values: particular person voices that got here collectively in camaraderie. The college afforded ladies a spot to alternate concepts, nurture friendships and construct confidence. As one pupil put it: ‘a star of hope is brought so close to Earth that even the most stubborn pessimist can reach it.’
Working-class feminism: Moa Martinson
Ebba Witt-Brattström explores the Fogelstad Faculty’s deep influence on Moa Martinson (1890–1964), one of many biggest Swedish writers of the 20 th century. Born in 1890 to an unwed seamstress, Martinson wrote groundbreaking prose from a feminist working-class perspective. Her acuity was already well-known within the leftist press when she first arrived at Fogelstad. After dropping her husband to suicide and two of her youngest sons in a drowning accident, the varsity board turned her shut mates and help community.
Fogelstad’s co-founder Elin Wägner, who edited of its paper Tidevarvet, realised that Martinson’s radical voice was precisely what the varsity wanted. For the primary time, its bourgeois pupils may examine ‘the proletariat of the proletariat; wives of unemployed workers, the pariah of pariahs.’ Martinson narrated the poverty and brutal misogyny of the working class with humour, utilizing the cash she produced from the articles to purchase her personal cottage (the board additionally funded a course in typewriting).
Along with different scholarship college students, Martinson described a rewarding alternate throughout social courses: ‘There were large gaps in my education, literary and academic. But there were gaps in the educated women’s minds too, when it got here to society and nameless individuals, so it evened out.’ The scholars, ‘buttoned-up, shy ladies’ quickly turned ‘comrades’ to Martinson. Most of the Fogelstad ladies later appeared in her most beloved novels.
Creative modernism: Siri Derkert
Annika Öhrner portrays artist Siri Derkert (1888–1973), maybe probably the most distinguished determine to return out of the Fogelstad Faculty. A quintessential Swedish modernist, Derkert created a few of the most celebrated public artwork works in Stockholm and was the star of the Nordic Pavilion within the 1962 Venice Biennale. Derkert first got here to Fogelstad in 1943 and returned yearly till it closed in 1954, lecturing in artwork historical past and educating drawing.
Crucial drawings of her profession, Öhrner writes, discover the performative facet of what she noticed at Fogelstad, the moments at which ladies replenish a room. Derkert’s notes from the time learn: ‘song and laughter – tempers and silence – the choir: songs by Jonas Love Almqvist – the most tender of songs. The lecture hall made into an instrument by sun patches, yellow squares etched onto the floor – making patterns on the ceiling, glistening sun specks on noses – hands, bodies.’
Oil work, drawings and collages from Fogelstad laid the muse for her greatest paintings, the 145 metre-long mural in Östermalmstorg metro station in Stockholm. Darkert’s black summary drawings towards uncooked concrete have been diametrically against the aesthetics of the time. Girls’s emancipation and peace are overarching themes within the complicated composition, combining traces of music, singing ladies, dancing kids, and snippets of lyrics from the Internationale. Combining on a regular basis life, childrearing, love and parenthood with a peace message, Fogelstad is on the centre of the work.
Sámi rights: Karin Stenberg
One other modern of Fogelstad was the Sámi writer and instructor Karin Stenberg (1884–1969), a central political determine in Sweden within the early twentieth century who led the wrestle for Sámi rights. In a ‘letter’ to Stenberg, Susanne Ewerlöf displays on speaking with our predecessors and speculates on the position of artwork in regaining what has been misplaced by colonisation and erasure.
‘Hello again Karin!’ she writes, ‘I feel an almost desperate need to communicate with my distant relatives after reflecting on Forest Sámi history and places where people once spoke Ume Sámi. The situation is one of violent memory loss, and it is from these broken links to the past that my despair and engagement have sprung.’
Ewerlöf recounts Stenberg’s life and contributions to the motion, most significantly her political pamphlet of 1920 entitled ‘This Is Our Wish: An Appeal to the Swedish Nation from the Sámi People.’ The pamphlet criticised colonial narratives of the Sámi as ‘ethnographic objects’ and the way they enabled state violence by insurance policies of pressured assimilation insurance policies and experiments in racial biology. ‘We, the Sámi, want to live as Sámi in the land of our fathers’, the pamphlet reads. ‘We want, like our fathers wanted, to live our natural lives in peace, looking forward and upward.’
Ewerlöf tells Stenberg how treasured her legacy has been and the way the pamphlet was reissued 100 years after its unique publication. Ewerlöf grieves that Stenberg’s needs haven’t been granted, and as a substitute appears again at a century of racist oppression and destruction of Sámi lands. However Ewerlöf finds hope within the position of artwork: ‘a speculative form of thinking where I imagine someone like you to hear my questions, and maybe even respond’.
Evaluate by Helga Edström
