The Changing Roles of Women in Sweden

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The Changing Roles Of Women Of Sweden

Introduction
Sweden has developed a modern industrial culture based on natural resources, technical skills, and a sense of quality. Along with this modern culture, the roles of Swedish women have changed drastically in the last 100 years. The degree to which and the speed with which changes have occurred, however, are somewhat more difficult to evaluate. In this paper, I will present some data related to gender roles in the family. I will also include some examples of child rearing, division of labor between the spouses and gender roles in relation to cohabitation and marriage. This data will allude to evidence of changes in female employment rates and fertility rates as well as some important information on governmental policies in Sweden.

Cohabitation
Sweden is an essentially atheistic and non-moralistic society with open-minded norms concerning the way men and women choose to live together. The choice between a formal marriage and informal cohabitation has for a long time been an essentially private matter. There is no set way to any particular family formation, Swedish family law (last revised in 1987) is not confined to married couples. The law treats unmarried and married couples equally in most aspects. For example, the law makes no distinction between married and unmarried couples with respect to tax assessment or housing allowances or child benefits (Hoem, 39). This liberal view, later encoded in the law, may help explain Sweden so rapidly accepted non-marital cohabitation compared to many other countries, soon regarding it as a social institution rather than as deviant behavior.
Non-marital cohabitation is not a new practice in Sweden, especially in Stockholm and in the northern parts of the country. According to Swedish history, there were two different types of cohabitation at the beginning of the century. One very visible type was called samvetsäktenskap (marriage of conscience) and was practiced by a group of intellectuals as a protest against the fact that only religious marriage existed in Sweden at the time. This in turn may have been influenced by the Bohemian movement in Norway that also began about that time. The protest was successful in that civil marriage (roughly equivalent in status to American/British common-law marriage) was introduced in 1909. The other form of consensual union was called ...

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... respects. Swedes who are active in child socialization activities seem to be very radical and argue for changes in the gender-roles towards equalization. Society demands and claims equality, which is bound to produce some kind of norm conflict and risk of deviation from the norm for teenagers and even young adults. Knowing that norms may be in opposition to one another does not have to mean a state of abnormality; it may mean simply taking a stand for one norm or the other.

References

Hoem, Britta. (1995) The New Role of Women: Sweden. Colorado: Westview Press
Inc.
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. (1999). Sweden. Redmond, WA: Microsoft
Corporation.
Trost, Jan, (1983) The Changing Position of Women in Family and Society: Sweden.
(Vol. 34) E.J. Brill, Leiden: The Netherlands

World Wide Web Resources

1 Appleqvist, Katerina. “Sweden: Folksam and the Women Security Programme

(1995).” http://www.wisc.edu/uwcc/icic/orgs/ica/pubs/ica-news/1995/4/folksam.html

2. . Dey, Debashish. “Family Planning in Sweden.” http://www.si.se/eng/esverige/familypl.html 3. Laack, Stefan. “Thoughts about male involvement: Swedish experiences.”

http://www.qweb.kvinnoforum.se/papers/laack2.html

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