When women gained the right to vote in Sweden in 1919, a group of intellectuals \u2013 including Ada Nilsson (doctor), Honorine Hermelin (pedagogue and teacher) and Elin W\u00e4gner (author) \u2013 organised a course for women in political participation at a manor house outside Stockholm. The course evolved into an education centre: the Fogelstad Citizen School for Women.<\/p>\n
With its mission to educate students as autonomous members of society, from 1925 to 1954 Fogelstad played a central role in the Swedish women\u2019s movement. In Ord&Bild<\/em>, historian Lena Eskilsson outlines how Fogelstad transformed the lives of generations of Swedish women, who learned there \u2018the connections between the labour of one\u2019s hand, mind and heart, between the domestic and the societal, between the individual and the collective\u2019.<\/p>\n In order to ensure educational freedom, Fogelstad\u2019s board of directors made a point never to seek public funding, and instead collected private donations to provide scholarships for students in need. Classes ranged from political theory, philosophy, psychology and history to literature, rhetoric, sports and music. Role-playing political processes at different levels of society also played a central pedagogic role.<\/p>\n Just as important as the classes were the social activities: meals, coffee breaks, parties, excursions and birthday celebrations. On some evenings, a student was chosen to sit in a designated chair and tell their peers something about themselves, their work, or their hometown.<\/p>\n Ord&Bild 1\/2025<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Eskilsson describes the school choir as a symbol of Fogelstad\u2019s fundamental values: individual voices that came together in camaraderie. The school afforded women a place to exchange ideas, nurture friendships and build confidence. As one student put it: \u2018a star of hope is brought so close to Earth that even the most stubborn pessimist can reach it.\u2019<\/p>\n Ebba Witt-Brattstr\u00f6m explores the Fogelstad School\u2019s deep impact on Moa Martinson (1890\u20131964), one of the greatest Swedish writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1890 to an unwed seamstress, Martinson wrote groundbreaking prose from a feminist working-class perspective. Her acuity was already well-known in the leftist press when she first arrived at Fogelstad. After losing her husband to suicide and two of her youngest sons in a drowning accident, the school board became her close friends and support network.<\/p>\n Fogelstad\u2019s co-founder Elin W\u00e4gner, who edited of its paper Tidevarvet<\/em>, realised that Martinson\u2019s radical voice was exactly what the school needed. For the first time, its bourgeois pupils could read about \u2018the proletariat of the proletariat; wives of unemployed workers, the pariah of pariahs.\u2019 Martinson narrated the poverty and brutal misogyny of the working class with humour, using the money she made from the articles to buy her own cottage (the board also funded a course in typewriting).<\/p>\n Together with other scholarship students, Martinson described a rewarding exchange across social classes: \u2018There were large gaps in my education, literary and academic. But there were gaps in the educated women\u2019s minds too, when it came to society and anonymous people, so it evened out.\u2019 The students, \u2018buttoned-up, shy ladies\u2019 soon became \u2018comrades\u2019 to Martinson. Many of the Fogelstad women later appeared in her most beloved novels.<\/p>\n Annika \u00d6hrner portrays artist Siri Derkert (1888\u20131973), perhaps the most prominent figure to come out of the Fogelstad School. A quintessential Swedish modernist, Derkert created some of the most celebrated public art works in Stockholm and was the star of the Nordic Pavilion in the 1962 Venice Biennale. Derkert first came to Fogelstad in 1943 and returned every year until it closed in 1954, lecturing in art history and teaching drawing.<\/p>\n The most important drawings of her career, \u00d6hrner writes, explore the performative aspect of what she saw at Fogelstad, the moments at which women fill up a room. Derkert\u2019s notes from the time read: \u2018song and laughter \u2013 tempers and silence \u2013 the choir: songs by Jonas Love Almqvist \u2013 the most tender of songs. The lecture hall made into an instrument by sun patches, yellow squares etched onto the floor \u2013 making patterns on the ceiling, glistening sun specks on noses \u2013 hands, bodies.\u2019<\/p>\n Oil paintings, drawings and collages from Fogelstad laid the foundation for her biggest artwork, the 145 metre-long mural in \u00d6stermalmstorg metro station in Stockholm. Darkert\u2019s black abstract drawings against raw concrete were diametrically opposed to the aesthetics of the time. Women\u2019s emancipation and peace are overarching themes in the complex composition, combining traces of music, singing women, dancing children, and snippets of lyrics from the Internationale<\/em>. Combining everyday life, childrearing, love and parenthood with a peace message, Fogelstad is at the centre of the work.<\/p>\n Another contemporary of Fogelstad was the S\u00e1mi author and teacher Karin Stenberg (1884\u20131969), a central political figure in Sweden in the early twentieth century who led the struggle for S\u00e1mi rights. In a \u2018letter\u2019 to Stenberg, Susanne Ewerl\u00f6f reflects on communicating with our predecessors and speculates on the role of art in regaining what has been lost by colonisation and erasure.<\/p>\n \u2018Hello again Karin!\u2019 she writes, \u2018I feel an almost desperate need to communicate with my distant relatives after reflecting on Forest S\u00e1mi history and places where people once spoke Ume S\u00e1mi. The situation is one of violent memory loss, and it is from these broken links to the past that my despair and engagement have sprung.\u2019<\/p>\n Ewerl\u00f6f recounts Stenberg\u2019s life and contributions to the movement, most importantly her\u00a0 political pamphlet of 1920 entitled \u2018This Is Our Wish: An Appeal to the Swedish Nation from the S\u00e1mi People.\u2019 The pamphlet criticised colonial narratives of the S\u00e1mi as \u2018ethnographic objects\u2019 and how they enabled state violence through policies of forced assimilation policies and experiments in racial biology. \u2018We, the S\u00e1mi, want to live as S\u00e1mi in the land of our fathers\u2019, the pamphlet reads. \u2018We want, like our fathers wanted, to live our natural lives in peace, looking forward and upward.\u2019<\/p>\n Ewerl\u00f6f tells Stenberg how treasured her legacy has been and how the pamphlet was reissued one hundred years after its original publication. Ewerl\u00f6f grieves that Stenberg\u2019s wishes have not been granted, and instead looks back at a century of racist oppression and destruction of S\u00e1mi lands. But Ewerl\u00f6f finds hope in the role of art: \u2018a speculative form of thinking where I imagine someone like you to hear my questions, and maybe even respond\u2019.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Mockup_OrdBild-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWorking-class feminism: Moa Martinson<\/h2>\n
Artistic modernism: Siri Derkert<\/h2>\n
S\u00e1mi rights: Karin Stenberg<\/h2>\n