Twentieth-century Sweden Research Articles

Early-Life Disease Exposure and Its Heterogeneous Effects on Mortality Throughout Life: Sweden, 1905–2016

Exposure to infectious diseases in early life has been linked to increased mortality risk in later life in high-disease settings, such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Less is known about the long-term effects of early-life disease exposure in milder disease environments. This study estimates heterogeneous effects from disease exposure in infancy on later-life mortality in twentieth-century Sweden, by socioeconomic status at birth and sex. Using historical population data for southern Sweden, we study 11,515 individuals who were born in 1905–1929 from age 1 until age 85. We measure exposure to disease using the local post–early neonatal mortality rate in the first 12 months after birth and apply flexible parametric survival models. For females, we find a negative effect on life expectancy (scarring) at ages 1–85 following high disease exposure in infancy, particularly for those born to unskilled workers. For males, we find no negative effect on later-life survival, likely because stronger mortality selection in infancy outweighs scarring. Thus, even as the incidence of infectious diseases declined at the start of the twentieth century, early-life disease exposure generated long-lasting negative but heterogeneous population health effects.

Swedish sailor songs, popular culture and maritime national identities, 1918–1960

In twentieth-century Sweden, conventional inland nationalism was challenged by strong currents of maritime national identities. The reason was a national frenzy regarding maritime popular music – primarily, songs about Swedish sailors and their adventures in exotic faraway lands. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and continuing into the 1950s, numerous Swedish composers, singers and musicians produced hundreds of sailor songs. Their commercial success was staggering, to the delight of Sweden's developing music industry, but the identitarian consequences were even more astonishing. Maritime national identities flourished as Swedishness itself changed drastically via this huge exposure to sailor songs.

“The golden path to health”: marketing Postum as a cure for coffee abuse in early twentieth-century Sweden

ABSTRACT Throughout the early twentieth century, the widespread growth of coffee drinking in Sweden led for calls by health reformers, doctors and scientists to implement measures to curtail what they deemed “coffee abuse.” Debates about the dangers of coffee took place in Swedish Parliament and trickled out into the popular press. It was not long before canny manufacturers saw an opportunity to capitalize upon this, introducing coffee substitutes onto the Swedish market. One of the most popular brands was the roasted wheat bran drink Postum. This article seeks to investigate the early marketing practices of Postum in Sweden and how the brand used advertisements to exploit the public’s growing fears around coffee and put itself forward as a viable substitute that was essential for good health. Using a dataset of 200 advertisements published in Svenska Dagbladet between 1926 and 1940, it demonstrates how Postum skewed scientific/medical knowledge on caffeine to their advantage, urging consumers to buy Postum to protect themselves against neurasthenia, insomnia and digestive disorders. In doing so, Postum went far beyond its role as a drink, instead tapping into discourses of wellbeing, morality and productivity, which remain a central part of food marketing today.

The technicians of consumer society: the creation of advertising men and practical advertising knowledge in early twentieth-century Sweden

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals, so-called advertising technicians and the knowledge they acquired. Examining correspondence courses in the technology of advertising, we focus particularly on the production of technified knowledge and mass personas.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a qualitative analysis of course material from Sweden’s two largest correspondence schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis: the concept of market devices and the notion of personas, both of which we use to show how the courses crafted a particular kind of advertising professional as well as knowledge.FindingsThe study shows that courses created a template-based persona of the advertising technician, who possessed what we call bounded originality characterized by diligence, modesty and rule-governed creative imagination. Similarly, the courses created a body of knowledge that was controllable and highly practice-oriented. The advertising technician was expected to embody and internalize the advertising knowledge, thus, becoming an extension of this knowledge on the market.Originality/valueBy directing the searchlight at the cadre of ordinary, middle-class advertising professionals instead of the high-profile “advertising creatives” and innovators, the paper brings to the foreground the nonelite level of the advertising industry. These practitioners went to work in the business world to produce the everyday advertising that was not necessarily groundbreaking but was needed in a growing mass-consumption society.

From Fatigue Fighter to Heartburn Healer: The Evolving Marketing of a Functional Beverage in Sweden

ABSTRACT This paper historicizes our understanding of the contemporary functional beverage trend by focusing on the marketing practices of the biggest-selling “health drink” in early twentieth-century Sweden: Samarin. Drawing upon a large dataset of Samarin advertisements, it uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to track the evolution of Samarin over a 48-year period, from its launch in 1923 to the introduction of the Market Practices Act in 1971, which clamped down on false advertising. The analysis demonstrates how Samarin advertisements were continuously reshaped to capitalize upon new scientific/medical discoveries, societal changes, and public interests, tapping into evolving ideas on health and diet to remain popular with consumers. Through these constantly shifting discourses, Samarin became mythologized and framed as a “good” food choice, essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The findings reveal that many of these strategies are still used today, despite legislation in place that is supposed to protect consumers.

Income inequality in an industrial city during the great levelling: micro level evidence from malmö, 1900–1950

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate on historical income inequality, and especially on the decrease in inequality found in industrialised countries during the first half of the twentieth century. We use new archival individual – and household-level data for taxpayers in Sweden's third-largest city, Malmö, from 1900 to 1950. Previous research has established that Sweden had a distinctive downturn in income inequality during the first half of the twentieth century, and explanations have not the least focused on capital incomes and taxes. With our original data we shed light on what happened to working-class and middle-class incomes, and show the importance of job upgrading of the working-class, the decline of domestic service and women's enhanced position on the labour market, and declining market incomes for top income earners in changing Malmö’s income distribution. We compare pre-tax and post-tax distributions, and the distribution on the individual level and the household level. With the new micro data, a richer account of income growth and income distribution in twentieth century Sweden is provided.

Journalistic Practices in Media Events Before Broadcasting: The Public Funeral of King Oscar II in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden

ABSTRACT According to Dayan and Katz, media events require live transmission, firmly dating their birth to the age of television. However, the application of such a media-centric criterion runs the risk of projecting an a-historical perspective to the phenomenon as such. By contrast, using the example of the public funeral of the Swedish King Oscar II in 1907, the purpose of this article is to scrutinize and categorize the different efforts on part of the journalists to create media events before broadcasting. Four types of journalistic practices are uncovered: (1) highlighting the attention of media in a broad sense in public space (such as church bells, flags, shop windows, etc.) as well as journalistic presence, to endow eventfulness to the occasion; (2) acting as witness ambassador to evoke the senses of the media audience; (3) mediating the witnessing public participating on location to emphasise the engagement of the whole society; (4) using different kinds of narrativization, such as cross-cutting, to bring a sense of immediacy to the reporting. In terms of theory, the ambition is to draw attention to the journalist’s role as a historical narrator, as well as to bring the historical perspective back to the discussion on media events.

The Effect of Parental Loss on Social Mobility in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden.

Parents are assumed to play a crucial role in the socioeconomic attainment of children. Through investments of both time and resources, they promote the ability, human capital, networks, and motivation of their children to advance socially, or at least to maintain their social position. Consequently, losing a parent in childhood could be detrimental to adult socioeconomic outcomes. We use full-count linked census data and a comprehensive death register to study the effect of parental loss on socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood in Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century. We employ sibling fixed-effects models and the Spanish flu as an exogenous mortality shock to assess the importance of endogeneity bias in associations between parental loss and socioeconomic outcomes. Maternal death led to worse socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood in terms of occupational and class attainment, as well as for social mobility. The effects seem to be causal but the magnitudes were small. For paternal death, we find no consistent pattern, and in most models there was no effect on sons' socioeconomic outcomes. The patterns were similar for sons and daughters and do not support the theory that parental loss had important negative effects on socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood.

Estetisk ingenjörskonst och konstens ekologisering: Richard Bergh, Människan och nutiden och Öyvind Fahlström

Summary The following article seeks to analyze the biopolitical interconnections between cultural policy and the arts during the Swedish 1900s. Of special relevance is the concept of “aesthetic engineering”, denoting the attempt to vitalise and activate the population through manipulation of the sensuous environment. In this context, the significance of the individual artwork can only be understood in relation to the larger media ecology of which it forms a part. The study analyzes three heterogenous examples of aesthetic engineering, juxtaposing a Social-Democratic report on cultural policy, Människan och nutiden (1952), with the essays of painter and museum director Richard Bergh (1858–1919), and the utopian visions of neo-avant-gardist Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976). The different examples all provide theories on the purported necessity of art's “ecologization”: i.e. of the integration of the artwork in the environment. By recognising this shared ground, we suggest that a novel context for the understanding of art and welfare politics in twentieth-century Sweden can be established.

“Arm the Schoolmistress!” Loneliness, Male Violence, and the Work and Living Conditions of Early Twentieth-Century Female Teachers in Sweden

AbstractStarting in the late nineteenth century, the teaching profession became increasingly feminized. This article examines the results of this process, exploring the working and living conditions of rural female primary school teachers with a focus on the experiences of loneliness, harassment, and violence that they suffered in early twentieth-century Sweden. By investigating the public debate on these issues 1900–1940, we found that two main threats to the well-being of female teachers were identified: isolation and the threat of male violence. Male politicians as well as female authors and teachers acknowledged that female teachers faced loneliness, anxiety, and possible threats from violent men. The consequences of these threats were both emotional and practical, but the debate focused to a large extent on practical solutions such as providing the teachers with telephones, guard dogs, or weapons.

The Professional Body in Boxing and Strength Sports: The Connection between Manual Labour and Sports in the Early and Mid Twentieth-Century Sweden

The main focus in this article is to analyse representations of body and class in strength sport and boxing in a Swedish context during the period 1910–1960, as well as their deeper societal meanings. The concepts of profession, body and class are understood in close connection to the theoretical concepts of value and capital. This study’s understanding of class and group affiliation differs from more traditional class analyses. It is argued for an in-depth understanding of how such processes take place and work through a broader concept of class. Representations are examined through magazines closely connected to the sports, as well as identification through autobiographies, written by prominent athletes during the early and mid twentieth century. The study shows a close link between these sports and manual labour. Physically strenuous work functioned both as a training regime in itself but was also presented as a way to be ‘discovered’. However, the close connection to the working class and manual labour groups meant that physical strength came to be seen as something natural. Sporting success was also locked into body capital, which also had a relatively low exchange value in relation to other forms of capital.

Braiding Time: Sami Temporalities for Indigenous Justice

ABSTRACT In Indigenous/settler relations, temporal rhetoric functions as an essential tool for both subjugation and resistance. Much scholarship on these temporalities focuses on Turtle Island and is thus implicitly shaped by a seminal historical event: the arrival of European colonizers. We extend this research by turning to Sweden, where the Indigenous Sami and the Scandinavians, who would later become their colonizers, have a long history of continuous interaction. We analyze a pamphlet written by Elsa Laula, the leader of the Sami civil rights movement in early twentieth-century Sweden, as well as Swedish policies and press documents from the time. While the settler Swedes employ similar techniques of temporal othering and erasure as colonizers on Turtle Island, Laula’s rhetoric differs subtly. Her rhetoric enacts resistance by highlighting how Sami temporalities are braided with Swedish temporalities, a rhetorical move that echoes their intertwined histories.

Social class and fertility: A long-run analysis of Southern Sweden, 1922–2015

This paper examines social class differences in fertility, using longitudinal micro-level data for a regional sample in Sweden, 1922–2015. Using discrete-time event history models, we estimated the association between social class and parity-specific duration to next birth, adjusting for household income in separate models. Social class was associated with fertility quite independently from income and the association was both parity-dependent and sex-specific. For transitions to parenthood, higher class position was associated with higher fertility for men and lower fertility for women before 1970, but then converged into a positive association for both sexes after 1990. For continued childbearing, a weak U-shaped relationship before 1947 turned into a positive relationship for second births and a negative relationship for higher-order births in the period after 1990. These patterns likely reflect broader changes in work–family compatibility and are connected to profound shifts in labour markets and institutional arrangements in twentieth-century Sweden.

Women in forestry in the early twentieth century – new opportunities for young women to work and gain their freedom in a traditional agrarian society

ABSTRACT Logging and forestry have traditionally been seen as a purely masculine sphere. The aim of this study is to analyze women’s introduction into and situations in the forestry sector in twentieth century northern Sweden. We interviewed 30 women who worked as cooks between the 1930s and the 1960s, and examined written sources. We found that driving forces behind the emergence of a system involving forestry cooks included state investigations, rationalization of the forest sector, the effects of WW2, and overall modernization of society. Our informants were unmarried and young when they started working, and their introductions to the job were characterized by encouragement and pressure in their surroundings. They had prior knowledge of cooking, but few underwent formal training. They were, in most cases, hired by the forest workers, and portray the camps as egalitarian social systems. It is clear that the Swedish system was rather unusual internationally, and these women had a definite impact on modernizing a workspace far from cities and industries. For the women, the job entailed hardships, but also a sense of freedom. Conceivably, a seed of women’s liberation in twentieth century Sweden was planted by these thousands of young women working in the northern forests.

Needles and Cribs: Becoming a First-time Mother and Starting Industrial Homework in Early Twentieth-century Sweden

This article investigates the relationship between labor force transitions and becoming a mother in the early twentieth century. It aims to answer the question: did women start industrial homework when they had their first child? The empirical material consists of 588 interviews made with individual industrial homeworkers in 1911. Event history models were used to analyze the data. The study found that many of the industrial homeworkers did start around the time they had their first child. The results thus suggest that in the early twentieth century, having a child did not always imply making a labor force transition out of the labor force but could also imply making a labor force transition to flexible types of employment, just as it often does today.

Fashion History As Hybrid. A Transnational Perspective on the Distribution of Fashion History in Sweden, 1950–1980

The fashion press has long played a powerful role as one of the most important primary sources for fashion history in the West. This article argues that the popular fashion history of the post-war decades is written in a methodological field that can be characterized as a hybrid: in-between the practices of journalistic writing and academic research, as well as curating, teaching, etc. The history of fashion in twentieth-century Sweden has in general not been particularly well known or documented, which may have contributed to make the field of fashion literature particularly open to influences from media, popular culture and international publishing. The object of this article is to propose a methodological examination of this frequently neglected group of fashion publications, with a particular emphasis on the illustrations. Inspired by a print culture perspective, popular fashion history and theory books are considered both as material objects and vehicles of ideas, texts and images. The focus on the situation in Sweden offers a perspective from the geographical margins of a conventional fashion history narrative.

Nature, Nation and the Dam. Narratives about the Harnessed Waterfall in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden

When the first large-scale hydroelectric power plants were built in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century, the waterfall became a twofold symbol of the Swedish nation. On the one hand, the harnessed waterfall promised unlimited energy and economic growth, and thus turned into a unifying symbol of a national productive landscape. On the other hand, the unharnessed wild waterfall, to be enjoyed by tourists seeking refuge from the modern industrial world, became a symbol of a national recreational landscape. This situation, however problematic, did not result in conflict. Taking a look at the first two state-built water power plants in Sweden, I trace how the two contrasting concepts of landscape were harmonized within public discourse. I demonstrate how engineers, architects, conservationists, tourist organisations, and journalists together produced a broad public acceptance of the drastic changes in the national landscape brought about by the construction of these power stations.

Review: The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City, by Jennifer Mack

Jennifer Mack The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 344 pp., 7 maps, 78 b/w illus. $30 (paper), ISBN 9780816698714 At a moment when divisive and xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants is on the rise, “place histories” can illuminate migrants’ critical place-making practices and contextualize their complex relationships with their new homes as well as the ones they left behind. In The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City , Jennifer Mack presents a social, spatial, and urban history of Sodertalje, a city on the periphery of Stockholm, over the past fifty years. Drawing on a range of methodologies, Mack guides the reader through empirically rich case studies while also demonstrating how ethnographic research can inform historical analysis and contribute to the telling of vital architectural and urban stories. In large part, this book explores how Syriac spatial and building practices have disrupted Swedish architectural and planning philosophies based on the notion that formal homogeneity and uniformity promote social and economic equality. Mack also examines the assumption—made by many urban planners, politicians, and citizens—that segregated immigrant neighborhoods in Sweden are a social problem. In response to this prevalent narrative, she explores the spatial richness of so-called segregated neighborhoods as well as the stories of individual Syriac migrants, who are often perceived as being part of a monolithic immigrant bloc. These histories illustrate how those on the margins produce “urban design from below” through repeated tactical and material interventions into local planning processes and uses of public and private spaces (17). According to Mack, “rather than urban anthropology,” hers is “an anthropology of the urban,” one that creates a road map for studying a shifting material world so as to better understand migrants’ social and architectural histories (11). Sweden's unique political history makes it a particularly interesting place in which to study migrant-initiated urban change. In twentieth-century Sweden, where spatial solutions to social problems were the norm, planners and architects …

Early-Life Assets in Oldest-Old Age: Evidence From Primary Care Reform in Early Twentieth Century Sweden

Do early-life effects of investments in public health persist to the oldest-old ages? This article answers this question by using the primary care reform in rural Sweden that between 1890 and 1917 led to the establishment of local health districts, together with openings of hospitals and recruitments of medical personnel, as a natural experiment in early-life environmental conditions. The initiatives undertaken within these districts targeted control of infectious diseases, including various isolation and disinfection measures. This study applies a difference-in-differences method combined with propensity score matching to register-based individual-level data for Sweden from 1968 to 2012 and to multisource, purposely collected data on the reform implementation. Providing pioneering evidence for such a distal relationship (ages 78–95), this study finds that treatment through primary care in the year of birth leads to a significant reduction in all-cause mortality (4 % to 6%) and mortality from cardiovascular diseases (5 % to 6 %) and to an increase in average incomes (2 % to 3 %). The effects are universal and somewhat stronger among individuals from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and at higher baseline levels of disease burden.

The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth-Century Sweden. By Carly Elizabeth Schall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 258p. $55.00 cloth.

The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth-Century Sweden. By Carly Elizabeth Schall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 258p. $55.00 cloth. - Volume 16 Issue 3