mrs consumer and mr keynes in postwar canada and sweden

Gender & Hislory ISSN 0953-5233 loy Parr and Cunilla Ekberg, ’Mrs Consumer and M r Keynes in Postwar Canada and Sweden’ Ccnder & History, Vo1.8 No.2 August 1996, pp. 212-230

Mrs Consumer and Mr Keynes in Postwar Canada and Sweden JOY PARR AND GUNILLA EKBERG

Gender is at work in consumption, of this there is no doubt. But feminist economic historians have not hurried to explicate the gender politics of consumption as a practice. Neither have the gendered economic policies by which consumption has been constrained and amplified attracted sustained interest. Those beginning this research face the twin challenges of transparency and silence.’

Consumption is transparent in that the ideologies and practices governing the contemporary world of goods have become so naturalized, so common-sensical, that it is difficult to craft about them nontrivial questions, questions which would reclaim their cultural specificity. In the hope that the natural and the common-sensical might seem less so in the light of cross-cultural comparisons, we consider here two small northern nations, Canada and Sweden, each in its own way on the margins of the mid- century transition from dearth to plenty, each having in time developed a distinctive answer to the consuming question, ’How much is enough?’

The challenging silence concerning consumption is literal. In North America, there were a number of early Keynesian studies of consumer behaviour and household consumption, notably by Robert Ferber and the McGill sociologist, Howard Roseborough, after which silence fell.* Atten- tion shifted to analyses of public-sector consumption and investment by private industry, and to fiscal and welfare programmes that redistributed income. By the mid-19505, as Mary Douglas and Baron lsherwood note in The World of Goods,3 consumption by individuals was cast as ‘other’, inscrutable, irrational, not susceptible to differentiation. There are sounds of this silence falling in postwar discussions of import, exchange, price and credit controls in Canada, and of institutional alternatives to the market in Sweden.

In this most Keynesian of times, these measures were determinedly not Keynesian. They were crafted to treat a problematical limitation in Keynes’s theory. Macroeconomic theory was gender blind with respect to consumption. It considered the constituent elements of demand as one, as an aggregate. But for policy makers planning the postwar recovery, all demands 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 11F. UK and 238 Main Street. Cambridge MA02142, USA

Mrs Consumer and Mr Keynes in Postwar Canada and Sweden 213

were not equal. Sound planning required that demands be differentiated and managed differently, in ways which distinguished good from bad consumption on the basis, at least in part, of gendered presumptions about worth and efficiency. This essay analyses this reasoning as it became apparent in discussions between consumer organizations and government planners in Sweden and Canada during and after World War ti.

In both Canada and Sweden postwar consumer organizations were organizations of women. They were brought into being by national women’s groups. But by the mid-fifties in both countries the formal definition of the consumer interest as a matter of distinctive womanly expertise and authority and a sphere which forged bonds among women across class and sectoral differences was much contested. In Canada, a powerful minority in the consumers’ association thought membership should be opened to men. In Sweden, labour groups replaced women as consumer representatives on national regulatory panels. Our hypothesis is that the severing of the association between homemaking and consumerism in the decade during which these two small northern nations sought to forge simultaneously humane welfare states and strong export economies was not incidental. We are interested in the gender politics of this re-articulation, which ap- pears to be reminiscent of the changing associations between productivity and housewifery traced by Nancy Folbre, and between dependency and dissoluteness examined by Nancy Fraser and Linda G ~ r d o n . ~ We consider how gender informed and sustained governing assumptions in these two comparable but d issi mi la r setti ngs.

There were about twice as many Canadians as Swedes in 1945, 12.7 million by comparison with 6.6 million, and the national economies in which they participated roughly reflected this difference. In 1945 the Swedish gross domestic product was 5.7 billion US dollars, the Canadian GNP 10.6 billion US dollars. Both economies were threatened by postwar inflation, but they grew steadily in these years as well, by about 50 per cent in nominal terms from 1945 to 1950. Both faced exchange crises after the war, resolved in Sweden by sharp 30 per cent depreciation in the krona and in Canada by a stiff regime of exchange, import and credit controls which lasted into the early 1950s. The exchange crises made imported goods less accessible and concentrated householders’ attention on domestic-made wares. In both countries, the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture was declining, but in both this change was comparatively recent, within the life experience of many adults. The manufacturing sector in Sweden was larger, contributing about 45 per cent to GNP in the late 1940s, when manufacturing accounted for about 30 per cent of national earnings in Canada. The public sector in Sweden was also larger than in Canada, and would become more so through the 1950s. In the period considered here, far more Swedish than Canadian women were in the labour force: 41 per cent in Sweden in 1950, and only 24 per cent in Canada in 1951 .5

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Policy discussions about what was good, how much was enough, how many should share and who should have a say were conducted in Sweden within a political culture which was predominantly social democratic, and in Canada predominantly liberal. Since the late nineteenth century Sweden had been a country of emigration, and Canada a country of immigration, a difference which, as much as contrasting political ideologies, profoundly constrained how the standard of living question was framed in the two countries. While Canadians looked to economic growth, impelled in part by large-scale immigration, to secure rising standards of living, Swedes looked to income redistribution and secure if modest family incomes to sustain the population of the nation through natural increase. Women not only had very different labour force participation patterns in Canada and Sweden; they also were making decisions about child-bearing, domestic work and the quality of their material and personal lives in contexts which parsed the relationships between the public and the private, the market and the non-market, very differently.

The history of the Canadian Consumers Association begins in the com- mand economy of World War II. Two years into the war, in December 1941, shortly after price controls were instituted, the Wartime Prices and Trade Board (WPTB) created a Consumers Branch, with Byrne Hope Saunders, editor of the leading Canadian women’s magazine, Chatelaine, as director. The founding meeting of the Branch was attended by representatives of francophone and anglophone women’s voluntary and professional organizations from English and French Canada.6 Wartime publicity described the Consumers Branch as a ’democratic organisation set up by Canadian women and operated by Canadian women entirely on a volunteer basis’. Individual housewives kept Bluebooks recording the prices they paid, reporting viola- tions of the ceilings to the Branch through Women‘s Regional Advisory Committees. Price ceilings were defended on equity grounds, that those whose incomes rose during the war should not be able to bid up prices beyond the reach of others. By 1945, 16,700 women volunteers were mon- itoring prices, and the Branch’s publication, Consumer News, with a cir- culation of 350,000, provided advice on efficient ways of expanding home production.’ The advisory committees administered surveys on the stocks of household appliances and pressed to have metal released to meet the needs that women defined as most urgent, in 1943 for washing machines.’ As fixed prices led manufacturers to depreciate the quality of their products, the Consumers Branch successfully pressed for a Standards Division within the WPTB to monitor the quality of all household goods.’

At the end of the war, the Liberal government was eager to divest itself of its wide wartime powers over consumer goods and return as rapidly as possible to market disciplines. Many of the women most active in the Consumers Branch resisted this change, reluctant to lose the direct voice to government, and through government to industry, that wartime regulation 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996.

Mrs Consumer and Mr Keynes in Postwar Canada and Sweden 21 5

had provided. Many were also reluctant to lose, with the ending of Con- sumer News, a non-market source of information about consumer goods. Wartime regulation had imposed parallel rationalization in the use of materials upon domestic industries and households, that is, upon both domestic economies, forging an ideological parity between the two as producers of goods and services. The wartime emphasis on shared scarcity and conserving resources is apparent in Consumers Branch advice about food preparation and remaking clothing, and in WPTB directions to industry to recycle moulds and limit retooling. For housewives these practices reinforced a longer-standing concern that the goods they brought into their homes be recyclable to other uses rather than disposable.”

In 1946 many regional representatives argued that this work would be beyond the resources of any private organization and could only be effect- ively continued through a federal government body. The most thorough- going plan was put forward by Edith Lang, the liaison officer between the National Council of Women and the Wartime Prices Board. Lang envisioned a government-operated research bureau that would appraise consumer goods, study how these goods affected the time and energy expended in household work, and make recommendations for improvements. This body would be akin to the National Research Council, created in the 1920s to devise technical solutions to problems arising in Canadian industry. In tandem she suggested the establishment of local consumer councils made up of representatives of existing women’s organizations. As associations of manufacturers, retailers and workers served their members, the consumers‘ councils would represent consumer interests to government and industry generally, and particularly speak for consumers to the research bureau, defining what kinds of investigations and products were needed. Lang’s proposal recognized that consumers did not have an adequate influence upon manufacturers through the market, that crystallizing effective engineering solutions to production problems within the household was often beyond the expertise of housewives themselves, and that manufacturers’ focus was more on making goods for sale than for use.”

At a meeting of 34 national women’s organizations convened by the National Council of Women in Toronto in April 1947, the groundwork for a Canadian association of consumers was laid. Present as well were Graham Towers, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, M. W. Mackenzie, Deputy Minister of the Federal Trade and Commerce Department, and Allan Gill, director of the Standards Division of that Department. There was a broad consensus that informed consumers contributed to the economic welfare of the country and that being informed about consumer matters was a particular responsibility of women citizens. But stark differences emerged concerning what information was relevant and what national goals this information was to serve.

Graham Towers had a specific and limited brief to offer Canadian women as consumers. They might continue their wartime work ‘in support of

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stabilization’ by means which were ‘suitable and effective in the peacetime atmosphere’. For Towers this meant women as organized consumers should be spreading understanding that exports drove the Canadian economy, that Canadian wealth depended on re-establishing international markets and reducing barriers to international trade, and that efficient production was key to international competitiveness and thus to a better quality of life at home. In this construction, consumers had no wartime legacy of active participation in the economy upon which to build; rather, they had a history as a stabilizing force. In the peacetime economy Towers portrayed, consumers used but did not create wealth. Consumer advocates were best employed in economic education, helping housewives to understand the relationship between the creation of national wealth and the standard of living, to recognize and accept their essential dependence as consumers.’*

To many women present, informed consumption counselled an independent rather than a dependent stance for consumers and attention to the domestic rather than the international economy. Harriet Parsons, education secretary of the Consumers Branch and in 1947 Convenor of Economics and Taxation for the National Council of Women, reported ’surprisingly violent reaction’ to using Mr Towers’s speech as ‘the basis’ for the early programme of the consumers’ association. For women the priority was maintaining the ’two way channel of communication’ between housewives and government, industry and retailers opened by the war. The difference between goods produced in the home, where ’you know what i s in them and how they are made’, and goods offered on the market loomed large. In the 1930s and forties there had been a considerable increase in home production in North America. In the United States from the 1920s the Borsodis, through their School of Living, had been refining technologies of small-scale production, concerned that householders retain control over the quality, design and construction of goods they required and convinced that when distribution costs and these factors were fairly reckoned the advantages of mass production were ~ontestable.’~ In Canada, home eco- nomists were not generally the champions of this cause. They argued that information about quality could be adequately conveyed through standard- ized sizing and better product labelling. The Canadian Home Economics Association’s narrow construction of appropriate consumer intervention in industrial production processes would be curious, but for the fact that their members’ best employment prospects were with industrial producers of consumer goods or in large institutions that used technologies scaled to industrial rather than domestic needs.

tang‘s suggestion for a research institute that could intervene directly in product design on the basis of suggestions from housewives and systematic study of their work did receive support from prairie and British Columbia women. In BC both Grace Maclnnis and Laura larnieson had been arguing for improved domestic technology since the mid-l93Os, and in 1943 Jamieson was envisioning the conversion of war plants to publicly controlled 8 BlaLkwell Publishers Ltd 1996


producers of domestic appliances as a priority in reconstruction. But even the more modest suggestion by Gladys Strum, a Saskatchewan social democratic MP, that university research services which already prepared technical rankings of farm equipment on the market might expand their work to include household appliances raised scepticism at the 1947 meeting. Allan Gill from the Standards Branch contended that housewives did not have the expertise with which to interpret technical data. Mrs Henry S. Angas from the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire contended that such work, because it concerned domestic trade, fell within the provincial rather than the federal purview, and that in any case ‘it would be highly dangerous for us to rate the durability, desirability of various com- modities offered for sale’. Among the women convened by the National Council of Women, a relatively conservative organization that had opposed woman suffrage in the early years of the century, the need for an active national organization to represent women’s interests as consumers to government and industry was plain. Whether active consumer intervention in markets was in the national interest remained a contentious issue. But the planners of the CAC were insistent that the association could and should work in a non-partisan way to provide an independent, unified voice for consumers. On the basis of this claim they petitioned for and received a federal grant of $1 5,000 with which to begin their work.l4

The Canadian Association of Consumers’ emphasis on non-partisanship and independence was intended to draw an explicit contrast with the House- wives’ Consumers Association, a group begun in 1937 and increasingly active after the war. In most provinces the leadership of the Housewives was drawn from members of the Labour Progressive Party, the Canadian communists, but in the west and particularly in Ontario many social democratic women, members of the Cooperative Commonwealth Party, were active as well. The Housewives argued that ‘while watching prices and quality of goods’ was important, ‘the principle of human need‘ should be ‘the basis from which to approach consumer problems’, emphasizing the equity concerns which had underlain wartime regulation. They championed the wartime precedent for central control and planning, arguing that ‘rationing and subsidies made for equal distribution and worked for the benefit of all because these were means, fair means, of making the public purse do what the individual purse could not do’, ensure that wages and prices were ’kept in line’ and that the basic ‘everyday requirements’ of all Canadians would be met. They argued that the end of government controls in 1946 was ‘a blow to democracy at its foundation’, a change that faced housewives with a set of market controls which were ’out of our reach, and we fear out of our interests, and where we have neither rights of approval nor of protest’.15 Through 1947 Housewives delegations that travelled from Western Canada, Toronto and Montreal to Ottawa gained wide national publicity in their failed attempts to secure meetings with ministers of the federal Liberal government. In a time of rapid inflation, when fears of postwar

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depression persisted and shortages of basic consumer goods and housing were acute, their demands for the restoration of subsidies on basic foods, for rent controls and a national low-income housing programme, and for the curtailment of the manufacture of luxury goods to ensure the manufacture and distribution of adequate utility goods and clothing presented a compelling alternative to free market principles."j

Consumers felt the pressure of shortages, inflation and the exchange crisis most acutely because the exchange controls, import restrictions, excise taxes and credit controls were implemented selectively. They were designed to spare export producers competition from sectors producing goods for the Canadian home (one form of the domestic) market, and shield manufacturers of capital goods from contending demands by makers of household goods (the other domestic market). The last of these restrictions on the import of consumer goods and patented parts indispensable to Canadian appliance manufacturers were not removed until 1952, when the excise taxes and credit controls intended to slow the equipping or re-equipping of households were st i l l in place."

While through 1947 and 1948, both the Canadian Consumers Associa- tion and the Housewives proclaimed their non-partisan stance and their belief in a single, inclusive consumer interest, the antipathies between the two groups grew increasingly intense. For social democratic women this fracture of the unified wartime consumer work presented a strategic dilemma. After wartime electoral success, the Cooperative Commonwealth Fed- eration was facing the bleak reality of Cold War politics. Joint initiatives with the communists, always fraught with ideological and tactical tensions, held greater dangers for social democrats as the Red Scare spread. Marjorie Mann, the head of the Ontario-CCF women's committee, argued against any association with the Housewives, firm in the belief that they were a communist front, invoking the long history of disaster such alliances had brought to the social democratic cause. For several years she remained confident that CCF women could work within the consumers' association to educate women and make policy representations, while directing the preponderance of their energies to the only real remedy for consumer concerns, the election of a CCF government. She saw the CAC as a venue through which Canadian women could learn about the effects of oligopoly pricing on the cost of food and about the remedies that cooperatives, such as bakeries, could offer wage-earning women too pressed to undertake increased home production. She believed that the CAC could be made to investigate those controls which organized the free market in the interest of makers and sellers, in order to devise strategies through which consumers could intervene in the interest of buyers and users.la Grace Maclnnis, from British Columbia, in early 1948 still shared Mann's hope that the CAC could lead a national campaign for subsidies and price ceilings on basic foods.

Rae Lucock, a former CCF member of the Ontario legislature, by contrast assumed a prominent position among the Toronto Housewives, and in a 6 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996.


heated private meeting with Lucy Woodsworth, the wife of the CCF federal leader, accused Mann of siding with the forces of reaction in the CAC rather than with the masses.” increasingly through 1948 the social democratic women who had agreed to try to work within the Canadian Associa- tion of Consumers grew dispirited. Marian Harrington and Adeline Haddow, from the steel-producing city of Hamilton, Ontario, already in early 1948 were characterizing the Canadian Consumers as a ’sinister’ force, which counselled ’the Canadian housewife to adjust herself to the austerity which continuing high prices will bring’ and which, as the recipient of federal government support, would never undertake militant agitation against ’the hand that feeds them’. ’Constitutionally’ the Canadian Consumers ‘might be OK,, Haddow conceded, ’but in practice it is working out very reaction- ary’. In February 1948, while Mann continued to insist that the Housewives were communists ’in women’s clothes’, Harrington was convinced that the Canadian Consumers had dwindled from their early promise as a national voice for the consumer interest into ‘a company union’.*’ By the next year Mann was isolated in her position, her CCF colleagues by then convinced that the Liberal capture of the Canadian Association of Consumers was complete.21

It i s plain that neither Donald Gordon, the head of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board, nor Towers from the Bank of Canada and Mackenzie from the Department of Finance welcomed initiatives to continue the work of the wartime Consumers Branch after the peace. Once it became apparent that many women without strong political loyalties saw a need for an independent organization to represent and inform them as housewives, and that partisan women intended to form an association which would counterbalance the Housewives’ Consumers Association, the Liberal Gov- ernment looked more favourably upon the Canadian Association of Con- sumers. With Harriet Parsons, the former Wartime Prices Board official, as the first field secretary of the CAC, and active Liberals, many of them the wives of senior civil servants, predominant among its elected officers in the early years, the Canadian Association of Consumers became an important support for postwar Liberal economic policy.

The view of the consumer that emerges in Canadian Association of Consumers’ representations to federal royal commissions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in their education work with their members through the CAC Bulletin, closely accorded with the principles of classical liberal economics, intermittently rhetorically intensified by Cold War anxieties. The primary tenet in this system of thought, that consumers were sovereign, made housewives as buyers individually responsible and, when outcomes were other than they wished, collectively culpable for the workings of the market. As prices rose, members were urged to practice thrift, and through the Bulletin were offered ways to intensify their household production in order to circumvent the rising costs of manufactured items. Good products would drive out bad, so long as women kept themselves informed about



what was available for sale and chose wisely or deferred their purchases until worthy wares were offered. Consuming became a weighty matter, of strategic national importance, because women who demanded too much could compromise the stability of prices and women who settled for too little could impede or distort the development of the domestic manufacturing sector. Government and industrial spending generally was assumed to be deliberative and beneficial. It was with women, as managers of the nation’s housekeeping dollars, that the threats to the stability of the Canadian economy lay.

Once the price system was established as the site for women’s work as consumers, the possibility of a continuing consumer alliance across class and sectional interests fractured. Most active social democratic women had left the association by 1950.22 That year a resolution from labour women favouring price controls on basic consumer goods was defeated. In 1952 the association opposed guarantees of price security for agricultural producers. By the mid-1950s there were no women with close ties to agriculture or organized labour among the executive of the association. In 1956 Canadian Business observed that the CAC, by successfully ’divorcing itself from the ”lunatic fringe” and communist-front trouble makers’, had ’streng- thened i ts voice at Ottawa and in industry’. But this was not a voice which could be distinguished as a woman’s voice. Although the first two attempts to end the all-female composition of the group did not win popular approval, in 1961 the association was opened to men.*’

In Sweden as in Canada, the postwar consumer organizations dominated by women had their institutional roots in bodies formed to help housewives deal with wartime scarcity. In Canada the ideological debate focused on contrasting views of housewives’ circumstances in centrally planned versus free market economies. In Sweden the wider implications of housewives’ roles were framed by starkly different appraisals of what women’s work was socially productive and how resources were best used in households, agriculture and industry. These views are identified with three women, Alva Myrdal, Brita Akerman, and Elin Wagner. In the late 1930s and early forties Myrdal came to derogate and Wagner to savour women’s non-waged work. Myrdal, a social scientist and leading social democrat, saw contemporary housewifery as both wasteful and demeaning for women. Wagner, a journalist, novelist, pacifist and conservationist, envisioned women’s work in small-scale enterprises on the land and in the home as the prototype for a more humane and provident social order. For Wagner, rationing and conservation were not merely wartime emergency measures but patterns through which women might model a peace that included peace with the earth. Through the 1940s and early 1950s Akerman, a university graduate in literature and a social democrat with close ties to leading experts in hoos- ing and home economics, worked through the path-making Swedish Home Research Institute to implement Wagner’s vision. Yet by the mid-1950s in 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996


Sweden as in Canada, the consumer interest was no longer explicitly associated with the household expertise of women.

In 1933 the Social Democratic Party, which drew its support from the largest national labour unions and the powerful cooperative movement, formed a parliamentary alliance with the Agrarian Party. This coalition then held within it farmers’ groups who had been promised agricultural price supports to sustain the rural way of life, industrial unionists who linked a decent standard of living for all Swedes with an adequate male breadwinner wage, urban intellectuals who saw rationalized households and housing forms supported by the earnings of competitive export industries as Sweden‘s hope for an equitable, prosperous future, and tens of thousands of cooperative members working to improve their quality of life by taking collective control over the production and sale of consumer

In their 1935 book, Crisis of the Population, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal argued that the decline of family size in Sweden was a sign that couples were unable to achieve the basic living standards they required to raise children. Alva Myrdal had professional training in child study and the personal experience of sole care for three children while working full-time, which made her particularly attuned to the pressures created within households by crowded urban housing and wage work. In turn the Swedish Social Democrats’ ideal of the folkhemmet, Per Albin Hansson’s 1928 assertion that all social life should follow the principles of equity and sharing which were the best traditions of family life, gave the goal of a good life within the home profound political force.25

The social democrats’ 1930s prophylactic social policies, state programmes to avert crisis by meeting citizens‘ needs, accorded readily with Keynes’s emphasis at mid-decade on increased consumption as the route to economic growth. Socializing consumption rather than production, and above all attending to inequities in income distribution, became charac- teristic of Swedish articulations of Keynesianism early on. Establishing and maintaining a decent standard of living for all Swedes was prerequisite to population growth, and the cause rather than the consequence of economic growth.26 In Sweden, Gunnar Myrdal argued, household consumption would be an important rational component of business cycle and unemployment policy generally,*’ rather than the destabilizing force Towers and Mackenzie feared it to be in Canada.

Thus Swedish policy makers, like their Canadian counterparts, rejected Keynes’s undifferentiated aggregate conceptualization of consumption, but for different reasons. In Swedish economic policy household consumption would not be subordinated but systematized. If all Swedes were to enjoy a good standard of material and family life, their needs must increasingly be met collectively, by scientifically validated means. Wasteful forms of consumption must be excised, and funds with which to consume must be directed where they would generate maximum societal benefits. This meant marriage loans to help young couples establish their households and



universally accessible child-care. It also meant well-designed social housing where evening meals could be provided by central kitchens and individual apartments were simple and efficiently maintained spaces for family life.28

Both Myrdals were keen exponents of rational domestic consumption. Alva Myrdal worked closeiy with the leading functionalist architects of the day, notably Sven Markelius, in whose modern Stockholm apartment build- ing she and her family lived. But for her the drive to investigate and define the best foods and methods of food preparation, the best designs for furniture and household appliances, and the best housing forms was grounded in the belief that the traditional housewife’s role contributed to both sexual and economic inequality.

Drawing on the views of the German Marxist, Clara Zetkin, Alva Myrdal argued that human dignity was created through socially productive work, and that social equality between women and men would only be created when both were engaged in wage For Alva Myrdal housewifery was a remnant of a mode of domestic production once shared by women and men, but now increasingly irrational and rapidly being displaced by the industrial and public provision of goods and services. Women‘s work in the isolated household would always be devalued by comparison with work outside the home and leave housewives financially dependent upon their husbands. Equally important, because isolated household production was inherently inefficient, women’s work as housewives wasted national resources, and thus retarded the efficient production and redistribution of wealth which would secure a good quality of life for all Swedes.30

Among Swedish social democratic women there were also champions of housewifery. Many writers since have shared Alva Myrdal‘s characteriza- tion of this position as a ‘sentimental glorification’ of a ‘long obsolete social pattern’. Jane jenson and Rianne Mahon recently described the defence of housewifery as an analysis through which ‘the identity of the female worker-citizen was marginalised and in her place stood the mother/housewife’.’’ There i s no doubt that in Sweden, as elsewhere in the 1930s and 1940s, ideas about housewifery were linked with the struggle for a breadwinner wage for male workers and with depictions of the home as a shelter for all family members from the alienation of modern industrial But this construction misses an important radical and oppositional component in Swedish women’s analysis and defence of housewifery, a component less systematically articulated in Canada but which emerges there as well.

After their election in 192 1, two women Parliamentarians, Elizabeth Tamm and Kerstin Hesselgren, founded a school at Fogelstad to prepare women for political life. Through their classes and their journal Tidevarvet, which Elin Wagner edited from 1924 to 1927, the Fogelstad group formulated a critique of modern industry and agriculture as wasteful, short-sighted and dehumanizing. They argued for a distinctive female voice in Swedish politics, a voice which spoke for the necessary balance between human life and the natural environment and valued the simpler needs and simpler life 8 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1Y96.


they believed characterized Swedish rural communities. They argued that women’s particular contribution to modern politics was to work for peace, both between nations and with the earth, and to make the nurturing of both human and natural resources a civic

In her novels and journalism from the 1920s, and in three visionary political essays, The Crisis ofthe Mothers (a critique of the Myrdals’ Crisis of the Pop~lat ion),~~ Peace With the Earth (with Elizabeth Tamm, 1940) and The Alarmclock (1941), Elin Wagner refined these ideas. Whereas Alva Myrdal’s concern was to find for women an equal place beside men in a prosperous social democratic Sweden, Wagner argued that women‘s culture must replace rather than reform the contemporary culture dominated by men. The mother rather than the warrior should be the exemplar of good citizenship. Wagner sought to uncover and reforge the womanly values and bonds she believed could anchor a society more cautious and sceptical in its embrace of technology and more judicious in its use of natural resources.35

Her quest for an Archimedes point from which to critique the logic of patriarchal capitalism in its Swedish social democratic manifestations led Wagner to the matriarchal myths explored by Johann Bachofen in his Mother Right (1861) and Robert Briffault in The Mothers (1927). In A Thousand Years in Smdland (1939) she retold the stories of the ancient giant woman who had resisted Christianity in her home region to argue that women’s subordination to men was not natural, but had been made historically and could be unmade. She hoped by such stories to break what she called the ‘hypnosis’ which kept women trapped within masculine patterns of thought and unwilling to forge alliances amongst them~elves.~~

In The Crisis of the Mothers Wagner and her colleagues argued that mothers’ loss of influence in industrial economies had precipitated a crisis, not only for women, but for the society as a whole. Revolutionary technologies were being implemented without thought for their consequences. It was this prevailing uncertainty about the future, rather than the material standard of living the Myrdals invoked in The Crisis of the Population, she contended, which made women less willing to bear ~hildren.~’ As indus- triaiization shifted productive functions from the home to the factory and the capitalization of agriculture depopulated the countryside, Wagner and Elizabeth Tamm wrote in Peace With the Earth (1 940), the alternative vision of productive work held within the practices of the household and small holding grew clo~ded.~’ In The Alarmclock (1 941 ) Wagner integrated her radical pacifist convictions and her invocation of matriarchal alternatives with a plan to safeguard small-scale agriculture and regenerate household produ~tion.~’

These writings should not be dismissed too quickly as sentimental nostalgia, for they held at their core a practical vision of a sustainable agricultural and industrial economy.4o Wagner was not a traditionalist. She defended married women‘s right to enter the professions, sought links between university-trained women and housewives, and was troubled by



the increasing conservatism born of social isolation among urban housewives.4’ But by contrast with contemporary mass production in agriculture and industry, which she believed were causing great damage to the natural environment and alienating Swedes by class and gender one from another, she saw in contemporary housewifery and small-scale agriculture elements of the resource-conserving production she argued must characterize Sweden’s future. Rather than envisioning the home as a shelter necessarily co-existing with and sustaining large-scale industry, she saw housewifery as a prototype for an alternative ‘micro’ form of production which seriously reckoned the environmental and social costs of economic activity rather than definitionally excluding these considerations as outside the market. For Wagner, then, research into housewifery was to be part of a reconsid- eration of the balance between large-scale and small-scale production in the economy, a way to refine and elaborate small-scale production methods and amplify the authority of household users over the form and content of the manufactured goods they brought into their homes.42

This last point would have had some resonance for housewives who were social democrats, for in 1935 Kai Anderson, the editor of the Social Democratic Women’s journal, Morgonbris, had argued that for the Swedish manufacturing economy to be strong, women must be thought of as the workers’ employers, those best placed to define what should be

Aha Myrdal’s plans had garnered opposition from the National House- wives’ Association and housewives within the Social Democratic Women‘s Association. Wagner’s plan drew criticism from women in the professions and organized labour. Yet from contrary positions Myrdal and Wagner both argued for the need for close study of domestic production and consumption, Myrdal in order to trim and rationalize a wasteful and archaic form and Wagner in order to document and refine a prototype of wider applicability.

Soon after the war began in Europe, the Swedes established Aktiv Hus- hdllning, a body quite like the Canadian Consumers Branch in its mandate to win consumer cooperation for rationing and to provide information that would help households stretch the scant wartime supplies of food and clothing. Both Brita Akerman and Kai Anderson were centrally involved in this work from 1 940.44 In 1941 the Population Commission commissioned their Home and Family Committee, of which Akerman was secretary, to prepare a series of work time and method studies in certain areas of house-

By April 1944, Akerman and colleagues among the Home Econom- ics Teachers and the housewives’ organizations had put together funding from the government, Kooperativa Forbundet (a major Swedish retailer of household goods), and a number of consumer-goods manufacturers to found Hemrnens Forskningsinstitut (Home Research In~t i tute).~~ From its beginnings this was a women’s institution. Women dominated the Board; only four of its nineteen members were men, and only two came from commerce or i ndu~try.~’ 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996


The Home Research Institute conducted engineering studies of labour processes within households, developed prototypes for kitchen tools, and prepared specifications for the manufacture of domestic appliances. For example, they endorsed alternating drum rather than agitator washing machines, and questioned the efficiency of contemporary tumble dryers and dishwashers. Their influence was thus extensive over the work of both Swedish housewives and manufacturer^.^' For some years. the granting of this authority to organized housewives as consumers served the national interest well. The central HRI work made product development more efficient and effective for Swedish appliance manufacturers, amplifying the advantage their relatively undamaged plants gave them over European competitors in export markets4’

The Home Research Institute, with Mobelinstitutet (Furniture Research Institute) and Svenska Slojdforeningen (Swedish Institute for Crafts and Design), by defining best forms and practices in domestic consumption and in both home and industrial production for domestic use, and by aesthetic and technical education programmes for consumers, were to make the redistribution of income practical and tenable. Through vigorous research and publication programmes they had great influence upon the Swedish postwar world of goods.

This regulation of the form of consumer goods was but part of a general pattern within the Swedish economy. In contrast with the Canadian postwar haste to return to market-oriented liberalism, in Sweden wartime price controls remained in effect until the later forties, exchange controls for a good deal longer.5o While Canadian planners attempted to evade inflation by selective restrictions on household consumption, Swedish policy makers used steeply progressive income taxes, the relative equalization of wage rates, and a civic ideology of moderation (lagom) to channel and balance the constituent parts of demand.51 For a decade Swedish social democratic women and members of the housewives’ organizations participated in these mediations through the Home Research Institute.

By 1956, however, the Swedish government had decided to replace housewives with labour organizations as representatives of the housewives’ interest and to redirect consumer research from the development of specifications for manufacturers before production to the ranking of the goods retailers offered for sale. The HRI had not successfully integrated into its decision-making structures the increasing numbers of women’s organizations, of diverse political and sectoral interests, which wished to share in its work. Through time the housewives seemed to both the government and labour organizations too fractured and contested a voice to represent consumers in national bargaining about economic policy. Industry grew restive with the consumer-housewives’ pre-emption of their product-development processes and with their own slender representation on the board of an organization they were expected amply to fund. Once labour replaced housewives as the voice of consumers, the alternative visions of production

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which had informed Akerman’s work with the HRI work lost prominence. The institutional recognition of a socially useful convergence between women’s knowledge and experience and the work of consumption was ended.52 The specifically feminist character of the Swedish consumer movement had been lost to stronger forces within the coalition politics of the governing social democratic party.”

So long as the concept of the housewife as producer as well as consumer remained vital, there was a conceptual apparatus with which to think of the economy as larger than the market. In the 1930s and forties this author- itative housewife was in part a re-invention, spurred in Sweden by the population crisis, in Canada by the depression, and in both countries by the war. From the housewife’s perspective, a whole system analysis of factor inputs and outputs, which made visible both the market and non-market implications of production, was accessible and plausible. This was Wagner’s contribution in Sweden, and the orientation of many housewives in Canada before the mid-1950s as well.

As non-industrial producers were made invisible in the economy, the pressure to design consumer goods for use rather than sale lost urgency. An alternative form and scale of production faded from policy consideration. With it, a separate logic of resource use derived from household modes, formerly fortified and renewed by each decision about whether to buy or to make, also grew more faint.

When consumption in economic policy was redefined by the mid-l95Os, in Canada as government and industrial consumption alone and in Sweden as a force to translate income redistribution into jobs, research on household behaviour dwindled. The household economy, being unmeasured, was subsequently called unmeasurable and then of no account. Research aimed at rationalizing (as opposed to capitalizing) domestic production subsided. The domestic as a sphere where both material and social goods were produced slipped from view. Consumption became less a practice, let alone a knowledge and frame of mind, from which to exercise a distinctive influence. Rather, it figured in public discourse increasingly as ’purchasing power’, a genderless Keynesian conduit rather than the ethical living space for which many a Mrs Consumer in both Canada and Sweden had hoped.

Notes

Ulla Wikander of the Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, and Veronica Nygren of the National College of Art and Design, Stockholm, made the Swedish portion of this research possible. This work was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Swedish Institute.

1. Victoria de Grazia, Avner Offer, Sue Bowden and their colleagues at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (New Jersey) have recently begun a research project on this topic. 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


2. This literature i s reviewed in Robert Ferber, ’Research on Household Behaviour’, American Economic Review, 52 (1 962), pp. 19-63, and Robert Ferber, ’Consumer Economics, a survey’, journal of Economic Literature, 12 (1 973), pp. 1303-42; Howard Roseborough, ’Sociological Dimensions of Consumer Spending‘, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 26 (1 9601, pp. 452-64; Nelson Foote (ed.) Household Decision-making (New York University Press, New York, 1961); Willard Cochrane and C. S. Bell, The Economics of Consumption: Economics of Decision-making by the Household (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956).

3. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (Norton, New York, 1979, ch. 1.

4. Nancy Folbre, ’The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth- Century Economic Thought’, Signs, 16 (1991), pp. 463-84; Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘A Genealogy of Dependency Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State’, Signs, 19 (1 994), pp. 309-36.

5. B. R. Mitchell, lnternational Historical Statistics, Europe 1750-7988 (Stockton, New York, 1992); B. R. Mitchell, lnternational Historical Statistics, The Americas and Australasia (Macmillan, New York, 1983); Statistiska Arsboken for Sverige 1951 (King’s Printer, Stockholm, 1951); Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles (Routledge Kegan Paul, London, 1956), pp. 67-8; Historisk Statistik for Sverige (National Central Bureau of Statistics, Stockholm, 1969); F. H. Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada (Statistics Canada, Ottawa, 1983).

6. The organizations included the National Council of Women, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, Catholic Women’s leagues and protestant women’s denominational organizations, the YWCA, Home and School Associations, women‘s professional bodies, and from Quebec the Federation des Femmes Canadiannes Franqaises, La Ligue des Droits de la Femme, and the Fedgration Nationale St Jean Baptiste.

7. National Archives of Canada (NAC), RG64 Wartime Prices and Trade Board (WPTB), Consumer Branch vol. 1445 founding documents, and vol. 1448 Central Ontario conference 1 October 1946.

8. NAC, RG64 1445 Women’s Regional Advisory Committee (WRAC) Montreal 16 November 1943, WRAC Saskatchewan 12 September 1944.

9. NAC, RG64 1447 Dr R. T. Elworthy, Director of Standards Division, at WRAC National Conference 17-20 January 1944.

10. These tensions are first apparent in the 1946 National Conference of the Consumer Branch: NAC, RG64 1448. Christine White, the Branch’s Labour Liaison, was particular attuned to the ways in which work for the branch had brought women with different political views together in a common work: NAC, RG64 1446 report from Calgary July 1943.

1 1. NAC, RG64 1446 Standards Division File, memo from Mrs W. R. Lang 3 May 1946. 12. Metropolitan Toronto Public Library (MTPL), Baldwin Room, Harriet Parsons

Papers, address by Mr G. F. Towers, 16 April 1947. 13. Vivien E. Dreves, ‘The New Woman Goes Home: Myrtle Mae Borsodi Pits Home

Production Against Industrialization, 1929-1 940’, New York History (1 990), pp. 283-307. 14. MTPL, Parsons Papers, Proceedings of the National Conference arranged by the

National Council of Women, 16 April 1947. 15. University of Guelph, Macdonald Institute Collection, Margaret McCready

Papers, A0021 Box 1 Consumer Education, Address by the Housewives‘ Consumer Association of Toronto to Douglas Abbott, Minister of Finance, 11 June 1947.

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16. NAC, CCF-NDP Records, vol. 198, Research Women 194648, Presentation of Western Housewives’ Consumers Associations regarding Price Controls and Food Subsidies to Douglas Abbott, Minister of Finance, 5 April 1947; Canadian Tribune 13 December 1947 report of Montreal Housewives‘ delegation to Ottawa.

17. NAC, RG64 WPTB 1381 and 1382 ‘Emergency Import Control, 1948-51’; NAC, RG20 Department of Trade and Commerce 987 ‘Canadian Reconstruction Committee’.

18. NAC, MG2 G12 Marjorie Mann Papers, vol. 2, Housewives’ Consumers Associa- tion file; vol. 1, Mann to corresponding members of Ontario CCF women’s committee, 24 February 1948, enclosing letter to CAC, 23 February 1948.

19. NAC, Mann Papers, vol. 2, Housewives’ Consumers Association file, Maclnnis to Mann, 19 January 1948; notes on the meeting of Marjorie Mann, Peg Stewart and Lucy Woodsworth with Rae Lucock, 21 March 1948.

20. MTPL, Parsons Papers, ’What later became the CAC’, Marian Harrington, ‘No CAC for Me’, CCF News, 25 March 1948; NAC, Mann Papers, vol. 2, Housewives’ Con- sumers Association, Adeline Haddow to Mann, 28 January 1948, Harrington to Mann, 6 February 1948, Mann address to the Ontario provincial CCF executive, 14 February 1948.

21. NAC, Mann Papers, vol. 1, Stewart to Mann, 21 November 1948, 16 November 1949, January 1950; Cass-Beggs to Mann, 20 November 1949.

22. For example, see S. P. Lewis, Grace (Harbour, Madeira Park, BC, 1993), p. 303, on the departure of Grace Maclnnis and Therese Casgrain from the CAC.

23. ‘Business and government listen to this consumer voice’, Canadian Business, February 1956, p. 73; NAC, MG28 1200 annual meeting reports of 1955,1956 and 1961.

24. Andrew Martin, ’The Politics of Change in a Keynesian Political Economy: The Swedish Case and its Implications‘, in State and Economy in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. Colin Crouch (Croom Helm, London, 1979), p. 98; Sven E. Olsson, Social Policy and the Welfare State in Sweden (Arkiv, Lund, 1990), ch. 2; Yvonne Hirdrnan, ‘Utopia in the Home’, lnternational Journal of Political Economy (1 992); Alan Carlson, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis (Transaction, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1990), p. 25.

25. See Timothy Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990), especially ‘Per AIbin Hansson: Socialism as the ”People’s Home”’, pp. 12544; Barbara Hobson, ’Feminist Strategies and Gendered Discourses in Welfare States: Married Women’s Right to Work in the United States and Sweden‘, in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (Routledge, New York, 1993), pp. 409-1 2; Margareta Lindholm, Elin Wagner och Alva Myrdal: En Dialog Om Kvinnorna och Samhallet (Anamma, Uddevalla, 1992), pp. 50-2, 95-8.

26. Timothy Tilton, ‘A Swedish Road to Socialism: Ernst Wigforss and the Ideo- logical Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy’, American Political Science Review, 7 3 (1979), p. 508; Ulf Olsson, ‘Planning in the Swedish Welfare State’, Studies in Political Economy, 34 (1 991), pp. 152-3; Yvonne Hirdman, ’Social Engineering and the Woman Question: Sweden in the Thirties‘, Studies in Polificaf Economy, 44 (1994), p. 78; Jane lenson and Rianne Mahon, ‘Representing Solidarity: Class, Gender and the Crisis in Social Democratic Sweden‘, New Left Review, 201 (1 993), p. 84.

27. Gunnar Myrdai, Population: A Problem for Democracy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1940), pp. 209-1 0.

28. Hirdman, ’Utopia’, pp. 28-9; Carlson, Swedish Experiment, pp. xvi, 138, 147, 191 ; Ann-Sofie Kalvemark, More Children of Better Quality? Aspects of Swedish 0 Blackwell Publisher5 Ltd 1996.


Population Policy in the 1930s (Studia Historica Upsaliensia, Uppsala, 1980), pp. 38-84; Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (Routledge Kegan Paul, London, 1945), pp. 230-1.

29. Yvonne Hirdman, Den Socialistiska Hemmafrun och Andra Kvinnohistorier (Carlsson, Stockholm, 1932), p. 108; Hirdtnan, ’Utopia’, p. 34; Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, p. 145.

30. Tilton, Political Theory, p. 146; Sondra R. Herman, ‘Aha Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929-1956’, Journal of Women’s History, 44 (1992), p. 90; Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, pp. 6, 36-7; Carlson, Swedish Experiment, p. 197.

31. Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, pp. 4, 145; Jenson and Mahon, ’Representing Solidarity’, p. 82.

32. Hirdman, ‘Utopia’, pp. 22, 24. 33. Sondra Herman, ’Feminists, Socialists and the Genesis of the Swedish Welfare

State 1919-1945’, in Views of Women‘s Lives in the Western Tradition, ed. Frances Keller (Mellen, Lewiston, New York, 1991), pp. 476-81; Lindholm, Elin Wagner och Alva Myrdal, pp. 15, 60-2; Lena Eskilsson, Drommen om Kamratsamhallet (Carlsson, Stockholm, 1991).

34. Elin Wagner, Rut Grubb and Ruth Gustafson, ’Kvinnornas kris’, Yttrande Med Socialetiska Synpunkter Pd Befolkningsfrdgan SOU (Swedish State Papers) 1 938, paper #47 (sessional papers cited hereafter as year:number). This work was an addendum to and critique to the 1938 Population Commission Report.

35. Elin Wagner, Vackarklocka (Bonnier, Stockholm, 1941); Elin Wagner and Elizabeth Tamm, Fred Med Jorden (Bonnier, Stockholm, 1940); Lindholm, Elin Wagner och Aha Myrdal, pp. 39, 11 2, 120, 129; Abby Peterson and Carolyn Merchant, ”‘Peace with the Earth”: Women and the Environmental Movement in Sweden‘, Women’s Studies International Forum, 9 (1 986), pp. 465-68.

36. Peterson and Merchant, “’Peace With the Earth”’, p. 466; Donald Meyer, Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Sweden and Italy (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn., 1987), p. 195; Lindholm, Elin Wagneroch Alva Myrdal, pp. 126-30.

37. Wagner, Grubb and Gustafson, ’Kvinnornas kris’, p. 19; Britta Lovgren, Hemarbete Som Politik: Diskussioner om Hemarbete, Sverige 7 93WO-talen, och Tillkomsten av Hemmens Forskningsinstitut (Almquist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1993), p. 128; Lindholm, Elin Wagner och Alva Myrdal, pp. 96-9.

38. Lindholm, €/in Wagner och Alva Myrdal, p. 66; Herman, ’Feminists, Socialists’, p. 482.

39. Lindholm, Elin Wagner och Aha Myrdal, pp. 145-50. 40. Peterson and Merchant, “‘Peace with the Earth”’, p. 477; Lindholm, Elin Wagner

41. Herman, ’Feminists, Socialists’, p. 481. 42. Lovgren, Hemarbete som politik, ch. 6; Meyer, Sex and Power, pp. 194-6;

K. Persson and B. Akerman, ‘Dagen ar Antligen Har: Kvinnogrupper-Splittrade, Eniga, Tillsammans’, in Vi Kan, Vi Behovs, ed. B. Akerman (Akademilitteratur, Stockholm, 1983), pp. 203-5; Herman, ’Feminists, Socialists’, pp. 481-3.

43. Hirdman, Den Socialistiska Hemmafrun, pp. 100-1; Jenson and Mahon, ‘Repre- senting Solidarity’, p. 82; Herman, ‘Feminists, Socialists’, p. 492; Lindholm, Elin Wagner och Alva Myrdal, p. 71.

44. Brita Akerman, ’Aktiv Hushillning’, in Kunskap for vdr vardag, ed. Brita Akerman (Akademilitteratur, Stockholm, 1984), pp. 78-98; Frdn Aktiv Hushdllning och Hemmens Forskningsinstitut 194&1956 till Statens lnstitut for Konsumenifrilgor [From Active

och Alva Myrdal, p. 156.



Housekeeping and Home Research Institute to the State Institute for Consumer Affairs] (Civiltryck, Stockholm, 1957j, pp. 5-8; Victor Pestoff, ‘Exit, Voice and Collective Action in Swedish Consumer Policy’, Journal of Consumer Policy, 1 1 (1 988), p. 9.

45. fr3n Aktiv Hushdllning, p. 9; ’Utredningen For Hem-och FamiljefrSgor’, Familjeliv Och Hemarbete SOU 1947:46.

46. Fr2n Aktiv Hushdllning, p. 9; Lovgren, Hemarbete Som Politik, pp. 104-24; Persson and Akerman, ‘Dagen ar Antligen Har‘, pp. 205-6; Victor Pestoff, ‘Swedish Consumer Organisations and Authorities since 1946‘; Brita Akerman, ’Forskning att Forandra‘, in Kunskap for vdr vardag, pp. 13 1-8.

47. Carin Boalt, ’Hemmets Forskningsinstitut: Hur Vi Arbetade. Vad Vi Gjorde’, p. 141, and Brita Akerman, ’Forskning att Forandra’, p. 138, in Kunskap for v& vardag; V. Pestoff, ’Swedish Consumer Organisations and Authorities since 1946’ (typescript), p. 8.

48. The technical work of the Home Research institute is summarized in Carin Boalt, ’Hemmets Forskningsinstitut: Hur Vi Arbetade. Vad Vi Gjorde’, in Kunskap for viir vardag, pp. 141-93; the technical reports of the Institute were published as HN-Meddelanden from 1946 to 1956.

49. Victor Pestoff, ’Swedish Consumer Policy as a Welfare Service: Organisations in a Negotiated Economy’, Studies in Action and Enterprise (University of Stockholm, Department of Business Administration, 1989), p. 22; Boalt, ‘Hemmets Forskningsinstitut’, p. 189; Akerman, ‘Forskning att Forandra‘, p. 133.

50. Olsson, ‘Planning’, p. 156; Tom Traves, ’The Canadian Insurance State: A Com- parative Note on Olsson‘s “Planning the Swedish Welfare State”‘, Studies in Political Economy, 34 (1 991 j, p. 176; Donald Hancock, Sweden: The Politics of Post industrial Change (Dryden Press, Hillsdale, Illinois, 1972), p. 212; Dezso Horvath and Donald Day, Small Countries in the World Economy: The Case of Sweden (Institute for Research on Public Policy, Halifax, 1989), ch. 2.

51. Tilton, ‘Swedish Road‘, pp. 508-19; Martin, ’Politics of Change’, pp. 101-6; Henry Milner, Sweden: Social Democracy in Practice (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989), pp. 49, 153; Olsson, ‘Planning’, pp. 156-9; Tapani Paavonen, ’Reformist Programmes in the Planning for Post-war Economic Policy During WWII’, Scandinavian Economic History Review (1 983), p. 194.

52. HFI, Arsberaltelse (1951) p. 3, and (1952) p. 15; Lovgren, Hemarbete Som Politik, pp. 152-4; Pestoff, ‘Swedish Consumer Policy as a Welfare Service‘, pp. 13-1 5; Persson and Akerman, ’Dagen ar Antligen Har’, p. 210; Pestoff, ‘Swedish Consumer Organisations and Authorities’, p. 4.

53. Marika Lindholm argues that incorporation into class-defined priorities is a long- standing dilemma for women working within the social democratic party. See her ’Swedish Feminism 1835-1 945: A Conservative Revolution’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (1991), pp. 121-42. In this respect, the conclusions of Jane Lewis and Gertrude Astrom, ’Equality, Difference and State Welfare: Labor Market and Family Policies in Sweden’, Feminist Studies, 18 (1 992), pp. 61, 80-2, and Hobson, ‘Feminist Strategies’, p. 41 8, are similar.

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mrs consumer and mr keynes in postwar canada and sweden

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