Narratives of Birth in Swedish Popular Autobiography

Abstract

My paper concerns a corpus of workers’ autobiographical writings at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1945, the Nordiska Museet began to systematically collect workers’ narratives (Nilsson 1996). The museum, in collaboration with almost twenty labour unions, urged retired workers to relate the stories of their lives in writing and issued a series of guidelines suggesting appropriate themes. By 1960, the collection of Workers’ Recollections in the museum amounted to approximately 2000 written narratives, comprising more than 30,000 pages of text. The narratives are mostly personally written life stories, in which the narrators, using the first person, tell of their experiences. A significant proportion, however, were written down on behalf of the narrators by local informants who then sent the material to the museum. The primary context for these workers’ recollections was the museum’s investigation into Swedish cultural history and social life. During the inter-war years ethnologists and museum curators began to change the thematic focus of investigation, so as to include the history of the modern working class in addition to the old peasant culture. This new perceptual field was necessitated by the social change that Swedish society was going through at the time. The first phase of industrialisation had been completed and the industrial working class had become one of the main forces in society. When the Social Democrats assumed governmental responsibility in 1932 the construction of a modern welfare state began. In my thesis, Workers’ memories in the Swedish Folkhem. A study of the historical and discursive preconditions of Swedish working class biography (Nilsson 1996), I have shown how descriptions of the old class society gave the development of modern welfare its legitimacy, creating a historic situation where the workers’ class-based “weexperiences” became relevant for the society in large. If my earlier project thus concerned a historic and discursive contextualisation of the collection of material, my present work