Elusive Independence in a Context of Gender Equality in Sweden

TL;DRAbstract

This quote from the final report from the Swedish Commission on Women’s Power1 underlines the different meanings and implications that economic independence can have for women and men. For centuries ideas about individual freedom, independence, the right to vote and to participate in public and economic life have been associated with men.2 It was not until the early twentieth century that these came to be associated with and granted to women in most countries in the West; in Sweden women gained national suffrage in 1921. Economic independence has been a concept reserved for men while women’s economic dependence has been taken for granted. As a result of increased industrialization and urbanization, an ideology (and ideal) that included complementary roles for women and men, and women’s economic dependence on a breadwinner husband, spread during the 1930s and reached its peak in the 1950s. An increased demand for women in the workforce, rising wages for women (in relation to men’s) and

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