To Örebro University

At last! The voice of a woman was heard in the Swedish Parliament! The voice belonged to Agda Östlund, representative of the Social Democratic Party and the first woman to give a speech in Parliament. The event took place on Saturday the 11th of March 1922. Together with other women she had struggled for a more equal and democratic society for more than a decade. Now five women were the first to take seats as Members of Parliament. Finally, women suffrage had become a reality – the final parliamentary decision was made in January 1921. 

Focus in our paper is on Agda Östlund. We explore her path up to the speaker´s chair and the resources that brought her there against the background of some forty women struggling in various ways to achieve, build, and develop higher education, professional work and civil rights for women.  The analysis draws upon this more comprehensive study, recently published. There, our overall purpose is to describe and analyse a number of Stockholm women and their paths from private to public in the decades around 1900. The Swedish capital proved an important site framing material conditions and social networks. By analysing how the women made use of and increased their social, cultural and economic resources we could outline patterns that characterised their ways of gaining access to, influencing or founding various institutions and civil rights – and so contributed to the profound social changes characterising the years around 1900. What strategies did they follow? What assets did they set moving?

In the paper, we summarise some critical aspects characterising three of the first five women that gained access to the Swedish Parliament and two women active on the municipal level. We highlight similarities and dissimilarities and we pinpoint some main results from the wider study of forty women.