MT 2

Question 1

Woman-Friendly State

Answer 1

• A woman-friendly state would enable women to have a natural relationship to their children, their work and public life
• Women will not have to choose futures that demand greater sacrifices from them than are expected of men.
• enabled by state feminism - policies like paid parental leave

Question 2

State feminism

Answer 2

• feminism from above in the form of gender equality and social policies and the feminization of welfare state relevant professions
• examples of policies: quotas, paid parental leave
• usually passes with 30% governing representation threshold (Nordic countries average 44%)

Question 3

Salon culture

Answer 3

• a gathering place for upper-class women to discuss the issues, fashions, literature, art, and music of the day, often under the hospitality of an intelligent and witty hostess
• role of certain influential women as cultural mediators or brokers grew out of the salons
• provided an opportunity for some women to take part in art, culture, and politics (even if it was in an idealized role)

Question 4

Det går an (the phrase)

Answer 4

• that will do (roughly)
• what Albert says to Sara at the end of the novel about samboende
• a literal embodiment of that imagination-before-the-fact: Almqvist asserts that it is possible for this kind of relationship to exist and to be accepted by society

Question 5

Samboende

Answer 5

• a long-term, devoted relationship that is not formally registered as a marriage
• Roughly 50% of Swedish children are born to samboende parents (no stigma against it today)
• financial autonomy from this (as argued in Sara Videbeck) allows it to be a gift instead of an obligation, maintaining the relationship better

Question 6

Intermediate (in Sara Videbeck)

Answer 6

• Sara is an intermediate as Albert cannot tell if she’s rich or more working-class, she has a job that many women are banned from having, doesn’t act the way he expects her to when he tries to pay for her
• Intermediate (liminal) spaces also are prominent in the book, like inns - A & S allow innkeepers to address/treat them as married although they never marry
• Intermediate spaces map out a road society could take toward accepting samboende relationships

Question 7

“Analytic” drama

Answer 7

• similar to a detective novel
• Ibsen was known for this structure in his later plays
• requires a retrospective look - starting with an ordinary/happy scene, but then the past comes back up and ruins it

Question 8

Social problem play

Answer 8

• As in the Modern Breakthrough philosophy, deals with a contemporary social problem
• Examples: A Doll House, Peer Gynt
• staging of these plays in public tested the limits of propriety in a way that a private scandalous novel could not

Question 9

Figuration

Answer 9

• the cultural process of distilling social questions and unresolved issues from everyday life into a concentrated, imaginative narrative articulation (as a character, a setting, an action)
• a fictional mode of thinking together about issues of common cultural concern in an “as-if” mode that become persuasive because of the aesthetic, dramatic, or narrative power of the particular figuration
• Ex: Sara Videbeck, Nora both examples of character figuration

Question 10

Intersectionality

Answer 10

• a concept that accounts for each individual’s intersecting identity formations of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation
• examines the multiple, simultaneous power dynamics of social stratification
• Ex: Moa Martinsson with her portrayal of working-class women

Question 11

Ulla Winblad

Answer 11

• Recurring character in Bellman’s songs
• prostitute-nymph-barmaid
• the mixture of the divine woman and the lusty drinking partner gave the figure an imagined autonomy, but the economic realities would often contradict

Question 12

Sara Videbeck

Answer 12

• Protagonist of Det går an
• an intermediate as Albert cannot tell if she’s rich or more working-class, she has a job that many women are banned from having, doesn’t act the way he expects her to when he tries to pay for her
• argues for unmarried relationships and financial autonomy - gift over obligation

Question 13

Nora Helmer

Answer 13

• Protagonist of A Doll’s House
• Outwardly (for the first part of the play) a ditsy spendthrift, but is revealed to be quite thrifty and competent (making up for illegal loan she took for Torvald’s health)
• In the end, says that she wants to be a human being
• Leaves Torvald and her kids at the end of the play - this sparked a huge debate about women’s rights and role of women in a marriage

Question 14

Nina

Answer 14

• Speaker in From the Darkness
• emphasis on the relation of voice and hidden body can be seen as the writer’s discomfort with the effects of writing from a woman’s position
• hiding of the body can be seen both as an effect (patriarchy’s repression and objectification of female bodily experience) and as a strategy (the speaking Nina gains power to express herself by making the usual visual objectification impossible)
• Internalized her father’s view - Double consciousness prevents secure identity from forming
• Never a friend, always a girlfriend

Question 15

Mother Sofi

Answer 15

• One of the protagonists of Women and Appletrees
• Stomach like a runestone from having so many children, ruptured veins and stretchmarks
• Swedish word for “childbearing scars” (stretch marks) is also used in engineering contexts for failures of carrying capacity
• Washhouse is her safe-space, but it is why the townspeople think she’s a loose woman
• Driven to suicide

Question 16

Sally

Answer 16

• One of the protagonists of Women and Appletrees
• Descendant of Mother Sofi - shows the biological cycle of working-class women
• Friendship with Ellen - when one notes the structural disadvantages all working-class women have in creating a life of dignity for themselves, that is the beginning of a political solution

Question 17

Emilie

Answer 17

• she is a middle-class professional and mother - exhaustion combined with craving for autonomy and freedom lead to a breakdown
• letter to her husband - talks about how he views their daughters as half-people instead of people (why he wants a son so badly)
• she wants to find her femininity - not defined by men, but by knowing about/believing in herself, and in other women

Question 18

Ludvig Holberg

Answer 18

• Norwegian-Danish writer in the 1700s (Enlightenment)
• would fight for a certain basic reasonable treatment of women as thinking beings the way he would argue for the theoretical dignity of any human being, but still kept all the assumptions of a patriarchal society
• regarded as the first Norwegian feminist

Question 19

Carl Michael Bellman

Answer 19

• Swedish musician of the mid-to-late 1700s
• Frequented the inns and taverns, performing his songs
• best-known works are Fredman’s Epistles and Fredman’s Songs
• His work pointed out gender inequality, like Ulla Winblad being taken to a “spinnhus” (workhouse for any woman deemed to be “loose” in lifestyle)

Question 20

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist

Answer 20

• Swedish Romantic writer; social reformer, journalist in early 1800s
• Author of Sara Videbeck (Det gar an; it will do)
• His novel created a literary imagination of change, sparked many to write very similar novels (det går an-literature), and legal changes in gender laws were instituted in Sweden in the immediate years following the publication

Question 21

Henrik Ibsen

Answer 21

• Second most famous playwright in the world, most famous Norwegian one
• Wrote A Doll’s House (well-known for), which became hugely impactful/controversial
• His representative genre: the “social problem play” - goes along w/ the Modern Breakthrough; staging of these plays in public tested the limits of propriety, with publicly showing STDs, alcoholism, poverty

Question 22

August Strindberg

Answer 22

• Swedish naturalist playwright from late 1800s
• Of all the Modern Breakthrough authors, he is the most reactionary on gender issues
• His naturalist view of the battle between the sexes as a biological survival of the fittest carries over to his response to “A Doll House” in a depiction of threatened patriarchal subjectivity (that works very in favor of the captain)

Question 23

Victoria Benedictsson

Answer 23

• Sweden’s most famous female prose writer of the Modern Breakthrough period (late 1800s)
• seeing the world through male eyes with female indignation (why she wrote under a male pseudonym)
• Despair over her own lack of acceptance as a female intellectual in a men’s world led to her suicide at age 38
• Last work: From the Darkness - seen as a last-ditch attempt to express her experience of ill fit within male-dominated society and literary culture

Question 24

Moa Martinsson

Answer 24

• The most prominent female writer from the working class in Sweden during the 1930s - 50s
• She wrote from personal experience with the struggles of working-class life - new intersectionality perspective between being a woman and being working-class
• writing style challenged the aesthetic norms of the novel, with its non-linear interwoven perspectives and time structures
• writing emphasized the ways in which sexuality and childbearing make the cycle of poverty into a biological destiny that is especially difficult for women to escape.
• Author of Women and Appletrees

Question 25

Bjørg Vik

Answer 25

• Norwegian short story writer, playwright, journalist, poet of the late 1960s
• second-wave feminist; concerns about women’s careers, pressures of middle-class family life, mid-life crises, suburban angst - fulfillment instead of survival
• keen eye for the details of everyday life and the taken-for-granted structural imbalances and disadvantages for women

Question 26

Mette Moestrup

Answer 26

• is a Danish experimental poet/(post)feminist writer of the 2000s and 2010s
• concerned with the exploration of language: the way it constructs our thoughts, our values, our sexual and ethnic identities, and even our sense of what is possible
• “Poetry asks questions about meaning and works the entire time with the relationship between form and content.”

Question 27

Skard’s and Haavilo-Mannila’s three developmental phases of gender equality policy

Answer 27

• first phase: solitary voices, often literary, help make imaginable the female perspective on society
• second phase: between the late 19th century and beginning of WWII, important organizational phase that achieves legal landmarks (independence for single and married women, the right to vote, economic equality in marriage, access to education at all levels, access to most professions)
• third phase: official, government-driven policies in the 1960s and after to direct the movement toward full gender equality

Question 28

Models of female influence during the Enlightenment 18th century (in Holberg’s essays about human rights, in Bellman’s songs, in the literary salon)

Answer 28

• gender egalitarianism was more of a male thought experiment in the 18th century than an actual possibility or serious program - similar to how Enlightenment thinkers viewed any human’s rights, without letting go of patriarchal assumptions
• the small positive tendencies that did develop occurred within a tightly circumscribed social sphere (salon culture, where there were tight bounds to how women could participate in arts/culture)

Question 29

Legal status of women in Sweden leading up to mid-19th century

Answer 29

• Could not run their own businesses except in limited circumstances: innkeeper and street vendor were two common female professions
• Were legally responsible to a father, husband, or another male relative as guardian unless they were widowed
• Could not own or inherit property, unless widowed
• Could not vote

Question 30

Reasons why A Doll House continues to be performed around the world today

Answer 30

• In George Shaw’s view, a problem play should aspire to eventual irrelevance, because that will transpire when society changes sufficiently on the issue in question, but didn’t happen with this play
• As women’s rights and gender equality are taken up as social problems in emerging modernizing countries, the play has experienced a resurgence of interest.
• Thus, applicable to many cultures when performed with a contemporary set/edits

Question 31

Paradoxes of staging a realistic play outside of its original time and place

Answer 31

• Contemporary in the moment is historical in the future
• Different cultures have different social mores/values, so a normal household in one place is at least slightly different from that of another
• These changes make it so that the play that’s supposed to be easily recognizable/normal in its original staging is strange to a different time/space

Question 32

Strindberg’s literary counter-argument to A Doll House as masculine backlash

Answer 32

• Argued that Torvald was not representative of men
• Scarcity view of the world - thought that women and men were in a battle (in his response, made wife Gurli jealous of her female friend Ottilia to make her come running back to the captain)
• The Captain battles Ibsen’s metaphor by subjecting it to pedantic technical (very very literal) analysis
• in a double reversal, he makes it so that the newly unhappy wife turns out to be only apparently unhappy once she is brought back round to her senses, and as soon as she is corrected by her wise husband the Captain, things can return to the status quo

Question 33

How From the Darkness relates to Benedictsson’s relationship to the Modern Breakthrough literary culture

Answer 33

• Despair over her own lack of acceptance as a female intellectual in a men’s world led to her suicide at age 38
• From the Darkness - seen as a last-ditch attempt to express her experience of ill fit within male-dominated society and literary culture
• seeing the world through male eyes with female indignation (why she wrote under a male pseudonym)

Question 34

Moa Martinsson’s new contribution to the discussion of Nordic gender equality

Answer 34

• She wrote from personal experience with the struggles of working-class life - new intersectionality perspective between being a woman and being working-class (previously most gender equality arguments had featured upper/middle-class women)
• writing served as a counterpoint to the masculine bias of this 1930s literature by emphasizing the ways in which sexuality and childbearing make the cycle of poverty into a biological destiny that is especially difficult for women to escape.
• Awareness of the intersection of class and gender was a major contribution of her authorship

Question 35

The connection between sexual reproduction and war in Women and Appletrees

Answer 35

• Sexuality and war both maim bodies, but of different sexes
• When Sally gives birth she is at first relieved that it is a boy bc he won’t give birth. But then she thinks of the way all of those boy babies who have been born one at a time are being mowed down in WWII
• Uncontrolled reproduction for women marks their bodies with the “stress fractures” that show up like a runestone pattern on Sofi’s belly while war sends home countless male cripples from the front, equally scarred both outside and inside

Question 36

Bjørg Vick’s reasons for depicting unhappy middle-class domesticity

Answer 36

• “Even middle-class women have lives”
• interested in language as a way to make space for some change; ex: the word female in Norwegian, marital language as a way to mask problems, mobilizing internalized view to turn it outward (“women must learn to hate”)

Question 37

How Mette Moestrup’s attention to the properties of language can be seen as a feminist project

Answer 37

• exploration of language: the way it constructs our thoughts, our values, our sexual and ethnic identities, and even our sense of what is possible
• change in the language can make space for feminist ideas to exist (currently many words based in men - history, human, etc.)
• she questions how habitual language is constructed in contrast with the actual feeling or idea

Question 38

Essay Prep

Answer 38

• YOU MUST TALK ABOUT ALL 6 EXAMPLES
• What does each example convey about barriers to (or possibilities of) female empowerment at these different historical moments?
• Are there patterns that emerge from these examples that point toward a more gender-equal future?
• Ulla Winblad’s boudoir: her boudoir is where she is free to do whatever, but as soon as she steps out to the bar, she’s arrested and taken to a spinnhus; shows the unfair treatment of women who are deemed as “loose”; points out that society has wronged women, but doesn’t do anything but point it out
• The steamship or the inn in Sara Videbeck: these intermediate spaces serve to illustrate a path for society to follow to accept samboende/women like Sara; show how innkeepers need to see A & S as married to treat them as such, and it works, even though they never get married; paves the way for legislation about marriage/samboende
• Nora Helmer’s dollhouse: in this historical moment, wives are like the dolls of their husbands, conveys possibility of a woman becoming a human being first instead of a wife/mother/daughter; her mask of ditsy/incompetence but she enjoys working off her debt/having control; ties into idea that marriage is not the truest form of love, it’s the relationship that’s important; this play led to people realizing that this situation should not happen in real life, policy changes
• Nina’s dark corner: Benedictsson uses the idea of “friendship” in similar ways: to call into being a hoped-for space beyond the tyranny of a rigid gender system; the dark corner serves to hide her body (patriarchy’s repression and objectification of female bodily experience) and is a strategy (the speaking Nina gains power to express herself by making the usual visual objectification impossible); Nina speaking is her empowerment - her voice/experience being heard
• Mother Sofi’s washhouse: Her only safespace away from the judgement of the world - in contrast with Emilie and Nora where they leave their respective houses to be free out in the world; the one thing she does to feel safe is what others judge her for - think she’s sexually loose because she cleans herself “often”; she’s stuck but her descendants do something - Sally’s political organization
• Emilie’s townhouse: townhouse is a pattern, not an isolated incident like the original Doll House - every house on her street is similar to her, those women have analogous experience; the townhouse is even more stress for her after work and before - her interactions in the house are tired and strained, she can’t even speak openly with Jon; this paves the way for future as she talks about solidarity with other women in her letter to Jon - as this is a common female experience, everyone must work to reclaim their femininity and each others’