My doctoral project aims to provide new knowledge about Swedish women’s writing between 1940 and 1955. I ask questions about how novels, short stories and chronicles depict women’s citizenship and produce ideas about the Swedish national community. I also ask questions about what conditions are required for women to be writers and in what ways a selection of texts written by working-class and middle-class women can contribute to new perspectives on the history of Swedish literature.

With an understanding that the mass media plays a major role in the production of the imagined Swedish community, I study the production of women’s literature in relation to the dominant culture and the public (literary) sphere. By reading the texts both as mass media and as literature, I analyse the ways in which the texts (re)produce and negotiate the dominant national culture, and I highlight tensions and conflicts in and between the texts. Furthermore, I deploy a critical perspective when discussing the (re)production of myths about Sweden and citizen ideals. Another core point of departure is my understanding of how history is made and how the meanings of time and space are created through the selection, interpretation and valuation of texts. Additionally, the dominant culture becomes visible when marginalized texts, such as those written by female writers from 1940 to 1955, are read and the voices of these writers are heard.

Various notions of Swedish women and their citizenship are produced in my selection of texts found in the archives. Overall, these texts challenge the myth of the Swedish welfare society, where all citizens can live without discrimination and poverty. Women’s citizenship is portrayed as circumvented, and brutal insights are provided into what a limited right to abortion and limited rape legislation mean for women, as well as what a society planned from a gender-complementary viewpoint means for women’s social and economic rights. The texts make visible both the patriarchy and the class society’s naturalised defence of inequality. They show that the struggle for (more) equal citizenship requires that it be waged against discrimination and against unequal material conditions.

Furthermore, the texts also tell us that the myth of the Swedish community as homogenous, requires that conflicting narratives – like women’s novels and chronicles – be sorted out of the historiography.