| Summary: | This paper analyses the Fogelstad Citizen School for Women in relation to first andsecond-wave feminism in Sweden. The school was established not long after women in Sweden were given the right to vote in 1921, with the purpose of educating women in civic education, in order for them to be able to make use of their newly gained rights.The school and its founders had thus a close connection to the ideas of Swedish first-wave feminism. On the other hand, the school shut down in 1954, about a decade before second-wave feminism is considered to have started in Sweden in the late 1960’/70’s. Hence, the school was active between two so-called “waves”. By analysing specific ideas on women expressed through course notes from the school’s later years, 1939–1945, this paper explores ideas about women that women’s specific qualities were emphasised in order to argue for women’s increased participation in society, while contextualising with other contemporary tendencies and events in Swedish society. A closer examination shows that specifically the school’s founders and its teacher in citizenship, Ebba Holgersson, were promoting gender essentialism, emphasising women’s nurturing characteristics and using it as an argument for women to participate more in societal and political matters. The results further imply that while this period cannot be attributed a specific feminist “wave” with regards to how a social movement’s wave it was defined, it was nonetheless a period where feminist ideas flourished and thus worked as bridge between first and second-wave feminism.
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