Counter-indoctrinations: Radical childcare books, children’s literature and children’s rights in Sweden around ’68

Abstract

During the last hundred years, the Nordic countries have achieved an international reputation for attending to the child as an individual with rights of its own. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between left-wing children’s literature and the concept of children and children’s rights in Sweden around ’68. This is of course a rather vast subject and my analysis will therefore focus on two key questions: in what way did the New Left make use of discourses on human rights and children’s rights in order to articulate their radical vision of future societies? And how did the New Left mediate and perform their utopian vision of children and children’s rights through children’s literature? My main focus here is on two influential and interconnected books that imagine what a child is or should be, both of which were published in Swedish in 1969: the radical childcare book Handbok i barnindoktrinering (‘Manual of Child Indoctrination’) by Frances Vestin (b. 1949) and Nar barnen tog makten (‘When The Kids Seized Power’), written and illustrated by the radical Swedish couple Gunnar Ohrlander (1939–2010) and Helena Henschen (1940–2011). Gunnar Ohrlander was a satirical columnist in Aftonbladet, one of the larger daily newspapers in the Nordic Countries. He also wrote for different radical socialist newspapers with close ties to the Communist League Marxists-Leninist fraction, formed at the 1967 communist party congress. His wife Helena Henschen was a graphic designer who successfully illustrated several children’s books and was one of the co-founders of the famous anti-capitalistic Swedish design company Mah-Jong in 1966. The ideology of the company’s design relied among other things on the idea that soft, colourful clothes would change people in the right direction.