How can people who have finally won a long campaign for the right to vote make the most of their newfound power? Many activists have faced this problem over the centuries. One of the most effective solutions was developed in Sweden after women were enfranchised in 1921, when five ambitious and enlightened women worked together to open the visionary Fogelstad School of Women’s Citizenship.
Having devoted many years to the fight for female enfranchisement, all five of the school’s founders—Honorine Hermelin, Kerstin Hesselgren, Ada Nilsson, Elisabeth Tamm, and Elin Wägner—were acutely aware that the majority of Swedish women were ill-equipped to realise their full potential as voters. They decided to establish a school where women from every area of society could learn about and discuss important issues such as citizenship, democracy, ecology, and pacifism.
The school opened in 1925 and ran until 1954, providing free access to a congenial and stimulating environment in which several thousand Swedish women were empowered to become active citizens, locally and nationally. Many of them went on to become activists in their own right and made significant contributions to Sweden’s development as a thriving democracy with a robust welfare state.
It is impossible to imagine such an endeavour succeeding without the ambition and dedication of the school’s founders. Friends for many years, they had previously collaborated not only on the women’s suffrage campaign but on the launch in 1923 of a weekly feminist magazine, Tidevarvet, or “The Epoch.” Each was accomplished in her own right. Tamm and Hesselgren were among the first women to be elected to the Swedish parliament. Nilsson was one of the country’s first female doctors, Hermelin a leading educationalist, and Wägner an influential writer on women’s rights and pacifism.
Thanks to her family’s wealth, Tamm was a generous funder of both Tidevarvet and the school, which she housed at Fogelstad Manor, a grand 19th-century house and estate she had inherited from her father in the Södermanland region of southeastern Sweden. Hermelin moved there to set up the school as its head teacher, and to prepare for the launch of its first classes and workshops in the summer of 1922.
Sweden was the last country in the Nordic region to enfranchise women, following Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, and both Denmark and Iceland in 1915. But the Swedes made the change in 1921 as part of a wider reassessment of their national identity in response to growing recognition that they needed to construct what the leaders of the progressive design movement, Swedish Grace, described as “a new Sweden for new times.”
The Fogelstad School of Women’s Citizenship became an important part of that process as students flocked to its lovely rural setting to attend the lectures and workshops organised by Hermelin and her team. As well as stimulating debate on political and economic issues, these forums encouraged the students to engage in collective experiences through music, dancing, role playing, and exercise. Critically, they were encouraged to challenge the status quo and to develop ideas for alternatives. The school also offered public speaking classes to equip them with the skills required to champion their chosen causes, which included campaigns for preschool childcare and equal pay for women. One student, the Swedish author Moa Martinson, said that “new strata in my brain were put to work” during her time there.
As for the five founders, they remained committed to the school until its closure in 1954, while sustaining their friendship and pursuing personal projects. Tamm and Wägner wrote one of the country’s most influential books on environmentalism, while Hermelin became the first woman in Sweden to chair a school board. Hesselgren was a long-serving president of the National Council of Swedish Women, and Nilsson became editor in chief of Tidevarvet. At a time when democracy is under threat in so many countries, schools like Fogelstad are sorely needed today.
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
