The Masculine Modern Woman: Pushing Boundaries in the Swedish Popular Media of the 1920s 0367110261, 9780367110260

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Telling Stories: Film, Fashion and “Funny Complications”
1 The M Word: Modern or Masculine?
2 “La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”
Part II Changing Stories: Negotiating Masculinities in Sports and Automobility
3 “What We Have Learned from Our Sporting Ladies”: Making Sense of the Female Athlete
4 The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar: Stories of Masculinized Women Behind the Wheel
Part III Unfinished Stories: Queer Female Masculinities
5 In No Certain Terms: Female Masculinities and Queer Desires
6 The Desire to Desire: The Masculine Modern Woman in Fiction
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

The Masculine Modern Woman

This book takes a fresh approach to one of the most popular cultural symbols of modernity in the 1920s—the “masculine” modern woman. Uncovering discourses on female masculinity in interwar Sweden, a nation that struggled to become modern but not decadent, this study examines cultural representations and debates across several arenas including fashion, film, sports, automobility, medicine and literature. Drawing on rich empirical material, this book traces not only how the masculine modern woman reshaped the imaginary space of what women could be, do and desire, but also how this space was eventually shrunk in order to fit into an emerging vision of a family-oriented “people’s home.” Jenny Ingemarsdotter holds a PhD in the History of Science and Ideas from Uppsala University and has recently concluded a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council, hosted by the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture, University of Manchester, UK.

Routledge Research in Gender and History

Gender and the Representation of Evil Edited by Lynne Fallwell and Keira V. Williams Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures From the Bad to the Blasphemous Edited by Yana Hashamova, Beth Holmgren and Mark Lipovetsky Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648–1920 Edited by Deborah Simonton and Hannu Salmi Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937 Edited by Myriam Boussahba-Bravard and Rebecca Rogers Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890–1920 Sharon Crozier-De Rosa Women, Land Rights and Rural Development How Much Land Does a Woman Need? Esther Kingston-Mann Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400–1800 Edited by Elise M. Dermineur, Åsa Karlsson Sjögren and Virginia Langum Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Rebecca Adami Informal Marriages in Early Modern Venice Jana Byars The Masculine Modern Woman Pushing Boundaries in the Swedish Popular Media of the 1920s Jenny Ingemarsdotter For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

The Masculine Modern Woman Pushing Boundaries in the Swedish Popular Media of the 1920s Jenny Ingemarsdotter

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Jenny Ingemarsdotter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ingemarsdotter, Jenny, author. Title: The Masculine Modern Woman : Pushing Boundaries in the Swedish Popular Media of the 1920s / By Jenny Ingemarsdotter. Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Series: Routledge research in gender and history ; volume 34 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018046028 (print) | LCCN 2018047673 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429024399 | ISBN 9780367110260 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429024399 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Women—Sweden—History—20th century. | Masculinity in popular culture—Sweden. | Sex role—Sweden— History—20th century. Classification: LCC HQ1687 (ebook) | LCC HQ1687 .I54 2019 (print) | DDC 305.4209485—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046028 ISBN: 978-0-367-11026-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02439-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

vi vii 1

PART I

Telling Stories: Film, Fashion and “Funny Complications”

33

1 The M Word: Modern or Masculine?

35

2 “La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”

66

PART II

Changing Stories: Negotiating Masculinities in Sports and Automobility

99

3 “What We Have Learned from Our Sporting Ladies”: Making Sense of the Female Athlete

101

4 The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar: Stories of Masculinized Women Behind the Wheel

141

PART III

Unfinished Stories: Queer Female Masculinities

189

5 In No Certain Terms: Female Masculinities and Queer Desires191 6 The Desire to Desire: The Masculine Modern Woman in Fiction

217

Conclusion

245

Index

254

Figures

I.1 1.1 2.1 2.2

3.1 4.1 4.2

4.3 5.1

The modern young woman (“Margita Alfvén—den moderna unga kvinnan”) 2 Election workers in Stockholm 1924 (the second national election in Sweden when women could vote) 40 Mannequins. Interior shot from Nordiska Kompaniet (NK), Stockholm, 1928 70 Four models in overalls holding advertisement balloons for Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) in Stockholm in June 1929. The models were showing a new “summer-suit” (sommarkostym) for women made by Camp-Ahla83 Winter fashion. A female model wearing a ski outfit for Nordiska Kompaniet (NK), 1929 112 Female model from Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) wearing a pilot-inspired automobile outfit (“Bilekipering”), 1928 147 Ruth Ericson on her Henderson motorcycle in the competition Mälaren Runt (Around Lake Mälaren), 313 km, organized by the Swedish Motorcycle Club (S.M.C.K.) in 1921 158 Three chauffeuses (“Tre chaufföser i Göteborgarnas sommartävling. Överst t.v. Fru Jus; Därunder Fröken Fagerström; t.h. Fröken Signe Kassman”) 162 An older feminist urges a group of young office girls to fight for their rights. From the film Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull Gang), 1923 201

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible through the generous financial support of the Swedish Research Council (VR).1 For inspiration and an unwavering support of this project, I would like to extend first and foremost my heartfelt thanks to Laura Doan, who welcomed me to the University of Manchester as a visiting postdoc at the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and generously introduced me to British academia as well as the charms of Chorlton. Special thanks goes also to Jenny Björklund at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, who supported this project from the start and has provided many insightful thoughts and helpful comments along the way. For their time, support and encouragement, I  am very grateful to Rebecca Ahlfeldt, Anita Hussénius, Karin Lindelöf, Helena Tolvhed, Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Anneli Häyren, Klara Goedecke, David Alderson and Marie-Louise Holm. I  also extend my gratitude to Max Novick and Jennifer Morrow at Routledge for their support in steering this project through the publishing process and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped to improve the book. Many thanks also go to the helpful staff at the following archives and libraries: Kungliga biblioteket (The Royal Library), Svenska filminstitutet (Swedish Film Institute), Stockholms stadsarkiv (Stockholm City Archives), Nordiska museet (The Nordic Museum in Stockholm), Tekniska Museet (National Museum of Science and Technology) and The Sigtuna Foundation (Sigtunastiftelsens klipparkiv). Finally, I  would like to give a special thanks to my family, my friends and my past as well as present colleagues for cheering me on during this long-term academic journey that has now finally reached its destination.

Note 1 Vetenskapsrådet. Internationell postdok: diarienummer 437–2013–334.

Introduction

There she was, the modern girl, young and serious in a dark suit, with close-cropped hair framing a solemn face. Portrayed in 1926 by a Swedish film magazine, the young actress Margita Alfvén was presented as “a child of her time”—slim, sporty, a girl who “knows what she wants.”1 One year previously, the same magazine had noted that there was indeed something “garçonne-like” about Alfvén, suggesting that she might be the “truly modern” young woman of Swedish film.2 By mentioning Victor Margueritte’s scandalous novel La Garçonne (1922), the reporter evoked titillating associations; this was a novel associated with modern decadence rather than modern confidence. However, as the readership was reassured, all women had been “masculinized” since then, and the garçonne style had turned into something quite “harmless.” Moreover, this harmlessness was demonstrated, as the article concluded, in a recent photo of Alfvén, appearing in her latest film in pajamas “without shocking anyone or appearing as unwomanly.”3 By the mid-1920s, Swedish entertainment periodicals were filled with such stories of garçonne-like but harmless modern girls, pointing to a prospect that was both exciting and disturbing: that modernity had brought forth a new kind of female masculinity that was unlike anything seen before. These young women were unlike the “mannish” emancipists of the previous century, unlike the muscular amazons of ancient tales and unlike the military maids of the recent world war.4 For many observers, the modern garçonne type was above all fashionable. Emphasizing her youth and playfulness, fashion historians have tended to agree that the “modern girl” of the 1920s—a cultural icon across the world during this period of time—was not seen as very threatening to society.5 Her slim body, her fashionable garçonne style, her short hair (see Figure I.1); everything signified a boyish rather than a mannish appearance, and, thus, she was not, presumably, seen as infringing on or making claims to adult male privilege. This makes a convincing argument, as it highlights not only the playfulness of early interwar fashions but also the importance of age in relation to power and tolerance of female gender transgressions. At the same time, these studies also show that modern

2 Introduction

Figure I.1 The modern young woman (“Margita Alfvén—den moderna unga kvinnan”) Source: © 1926 AB Svensk Filmindustri. Photo: Ekstrand. Reproduced by Svenska Filminstitutet.

gender confusion was a popular topic in satire and in the press, indicating “heightened cultural anxieties that the sexes were somehow changing places.”6 Turning to the Swedish popular media of the 1920s, similar patterns of anxiety surrounding the status of femininity in a world of

Introduction  3 short-haired, pajama-wearing garçonne girls indicate that the prediction of “harmlessness” was rather unstable. In fact, the wealth of opinions on the style of the modern girl or woman suggests that this “boyish” modern masculinity did pose a problem to many Swedish commentators at the time.7 As pointed out in an entertainment magazine in 1926, the matter involved much more than dress: Devoted to their new “masculine” habits of smoking, drinking, sporting and driving, modern girls seemed to be rapidly “eliminating femininity” in area after area.8 A  Swedish movie advertisement claimed in the same year that such girls could now be seen not only at the movies, but also on the streets of Stockholm: Woman or Man? Boy or Girl? The type will be recognized in these days of shingled, slim ladies. The main character is precisely that little lady who we recognize from our walks and at the restaurant, and the funny complications she causes will amuse anyone who appreciates a good laugh.9 To what extent these young women in Stockholm really understood their gendered limits remained unclear. Beyond movie advertisers, a range of Swedish observers, from bishops to physical educators and politicians discussed at this time whether the modern girl or woman was, in fact, eliminating or merely redefining femininity. Ultimately, the Swedish “girl of today” was encouraged to be modern, but not too modern—or masculine.10 How these limits were set in place, but also challenged, constitutes a central theme of this study. Concerns with the “masculinization” of the modern woman were not unique to the Swedish context, of course; they have been explored in recent decades in a range of national contexts, focusing on aspects such as the visuality, sexuality, physicality or agency of the “modern girl” or “new woman.”11 As the historian Katie Sutton writes in her study on the masculine woman in Weimar Germany, these studies confirm that the New Woman as a type could be found across the world in the 1920s, from Europe to North America, from Australia to Japan.12 However, despite a certain “unity of appearance”—the short hair, the tuxedo jacket, the straight-waisted dress—Sutton also emphasizes how “nationally specific factors and experiences led to vastly different interpretations in different cultural contexts.”13 In British and French studies, the impact of World War I forms an important context to discourses on the “masculinization” of women, whereas American and Australian scholars have focused more on the rise of consumerism and modern media.14 In her German study, Sutton explores “the breadth and complexity of female masculinities circulating within Weimar society” in different contexts, from fashion and sports debates in mainstream media to Berlin’s queer magazines and subcultures.15 Many studies, in a range of national contexts, have discussed women’s emancipation and the rise of suffrage

4 Introduction movements in relation to representations of “new” and/or “masculinized” girls and women.16 These studies have brought attention to a rich and complex history of modernity’s female masculinities, one that does not forget the damming effects of the historical targeting of emancipated women as “mannish,” but also adds new cultural dimensions to women’s desire to explore, negotiate, challenge, appropriate and play with the signifiers of masculinity. Building on this scholarship, the present study uncovers for the first time discourses on the “masculinized” modern woman in a Scandinavian context, particularly in Sweden, a country that was defined at the dawn of the 1920s neither by the horrors of the recent war nor an established urban, consumer culture. Against the background of a rapid urbanization, technologization and democratization of the Swedish society in the 1920s, I explore the centrality of the modern young woman in cultural debates and how the many stories of her—internationally connected but locally adapted—were filled with paradoxes. On the one hand, she was charged with fun and modernity, but at the same time she was also used as a symbol of foreign decadence and oddness. The Swedish context provides an opportunity to explore more specifically how cases of female “gender stretching” unfolded in a society that fostered a strong women’s movement, a widespread belief in modern progress, changing views on women’s physical rights (as indicated by a growing women’s sports movement), but also a deeply conflicted attitude about the social effects of women’s emancipation, including the influence of an American entertainment culture on the dreams and desires of young girls.17 Throughout this investigation I  relate discourses on female masculinity with contemporaneous debates on femininity—an approach that gives important insights but is more unusual than one might expect. Cultural studies of the 1920s “modern girl” tend to focus, in fact, on either her masculinity or her femininity (addressing in the latter case, for instance, fashion discourses, make-up-consumption or ideals of feminine beauty).18 Focusing on specific perspectives arguably makes sense, considering not only limits of scope but also, in this case, that the modern young woman of the 1920s was, in fact, associated both with the heterosexually charged, vibrant jazz-scene of the flapper, and with the “masculine” garçonne type and her display of gender transgressions.19 However, understanding interwar concerns with either of these perceived excessive female styles requires, I argue here, also some consideration of how they related, in terms of how they were defined and positioned by each other. Thus, I consider throughout this book how the oftentimes lively efforts in Swedish popular media to define the modern girl reflect, above all, a desire to (re-)draw the boundaries of and between masculinity and femininity, whether in regard to fashion, sports, body ideals or sexual agency. Exploring this boundary work sometimes requires an effort to relate make-up advice to cross-dressing, driving to dancing, sports to jazz

Introduction  5 and, more generally, debates on masculinity to femininity and, also, gender to sexuality. This cross-registered methodology may be described as queer in its approach; yet, it will not primarily focus on queer identities or subjects but, rather, as I will discuss further later, queer processes that allowed and sometimes even encouraged individuals to move back and forth across gendered and even sexual boundaries—at least to a certain limit. Expanding on Scandinavian scholarship on the “new woman” in literature and politics, this book examines conflicted stories and cultural representations of female masculinity across a range of sources, focusing primarily on print media but also including examples from film and literature.20 In examining these materials (to be further introduced later), I engage with new historical and theoretical work in the context of queer critical history as well as feminist and cultural studies.21 As shown by scholars in the Swedish context, early twentieth-century gender history in Sweden has been characterized by, on the one hand, a strong women’s movement and an emerging politics of equality, but at the same time, the idea of a democratic “people’s home,” launched in the late 1920s, was also imbued with a patriarchal gender structure that in many ways worked to preserve a politics of gender segregation.22 In this book, I return to the 1920s roots of these gender negotiations, though I am not primarily examining the women’s movement but, rather, the centrality of young women’s perceived gender transgressions at this time and, more specifically, cultural discourses on female masculinity.

Modern, Masculine and More: The Context of Change In a manner of speaking, the “modern girl” of the 1920s was a younger sister to the “New Woman,” a key figure used in fictional as well as in political discourse in the late nineteenth century, when notable numbers of women entered the public spheres of education, work and artistic creativity.23 In the Swedish context, historians have identified three generations of new women, beginning with emancipated, universityeducated women in the early 1880s, struggling for equal rights whilst being depicted by conservative critics as “mannish,” power-hungry and a threat to the institution of marriage.24 A  second generation of new women, fighting to utilize their university degrees and enter the work market, became increasingly involved in the suffrage movement in the early 1900s, and a third generation appeared after the war, struggling to combine their new-won democratic rights with expectations of marriage and still-pending duties as mothers.25 While Swedish gender historians have tended to focus on the first two generations of “new women” and their political struggle for a place in the public arena, I have in this study set out to study the third (1920s) generation, exploring how a modern visual culture on the one hand

6 Introduction tended to place young women at the center, while at the same time critiquing them for their public displays of (masculine) agency.26 As pointed out by film historian Tommy Gustafsson, the moral anxieties concerning young women’s increased visibility in the 1920s were linked to the same underlying phenomena that had affected (and inspired) the women’s movement all along: an ongoing and major transformation of Swedish society.27 Sweden was experiencing at this time how traditional societal hierarchies, including gender relations, were challenged by a number of structural developments, including a growing industrialization as well as new mass-communication technologies that enabled an increasingly trans-national exchange of news, fashion, film and visual culture.28 While not everyone rejoiced in everything “modern,” a wide range of observers nevertheless agreed that change had come to stay. As concluded in 1922 by the editors of a new Swedish encyclopedia, the best thing to do in this new world of “perplexity and confusion” was simply “to learn as much as possible about the times we live in.”29 Beyond encyclopedias, knowledge about the new times could also be found in newspapers, magazines and movies that inspired readers and viewers not only to “learn” but also to buy products and make choices, to shape oneself as modern and join the march forward, or as one commentator put it: Everything changes, and it is a peculiar feeling to be part of that motion—a breath-taking and funny sensation in your diaphragm, like you are riding a carousel or roller coaster. What a pleasure to be right in the vortex of the whirl, to feel the wind swishing by your ears, to be at the front. Ahead is nothing, unexplored chaos.30 In other words, to succeed as modern the individual needed to embrace a flux of constantly changing attributes and signs. While other metaphors of modernity might have been less “breath-taking,” many discussions of change did emphasize at this time a sense of instability in the traditional ways of being, affecting women as well as men. Whether temporal or spatial, such metaphorical language may in today’s terminology be discussed as “queer” in its references to unexplored opportunities and a sense of “peculiar” unpredictability.31 However, the passage quoted did not hinge on queer subjects or identities but rather suggested that culture and desire was being opened up for anyone to explore. The rollercoaster-metaphor appeared in the daily paper StockholmsTidningen in an article about male elegance, where the “modern man” was encouraged by the fashionable actor Gösta Ekman to bring into harmony inner refinement and outer style.32 However, despite the fashion awareness of Ekman and other male actors, the flux of things was more often analyzed at this time in light not of the modern man but of the modern woman, associated not only with progress but also more negatively with the shallowness and cheapness of mass culture.33 By the

Introduction  7 1920s, women’s interest in mass-produced products and fashions was often interpreted in Sweden as a sign of Americanization and cultural decay that threatened the originality and spirit of (male) high culture and genius.34 Anxieties surrounding women’s consumption and physical appearances were of course not new to the 1920s—recalling how the Bloomer costume had once caused an outrage, it is clear that women’s clothing has constituted a recurring topic of concern.35 Historically, concerns with women’s fashions have been linked, as the sociologist Joanne Finkelstein writes, to women’s subordinate position in society: While the status of men in industrialized societies has been more closely attached to their labor value, women’s status has been tied to “fluctuations in cultural definitions of beauty, femininity and sexual seductiveness.”36 Still, as evidenced by fin de siècle concerns with the figure of the dandy and the status of (male) masculinity in the modern world, the increasing diversity of male styles in the modern era has constituted a source of concern as well. By the 1920s, Swedish observers typically expressed concerns not only with modern girls but also with “feminized” jazz boys and the (questionable) style of a range of American Hollywood actors.37 However, as gender historian Yvonne Hirdman points out, men still had the choice to turn away from these images, engaging themselves in the worlds of politics, business or sports, worlds that were still predominately male.38 As Hirdman concludes, the modern “mirrors” of fashion and film did simply not hold the same existential weight to men as it did for women. Left to bear the brunt of accusations regarding modernity’s perceived leveling of the sexes was the modern woman, particularly the urban, unmarried career woman.39 As suggested by the satirists of SöndagsnisseStrix (a Swedish satire magazine) the modern woman who was more interested in her new “feminine right to vote” and her “masculine habits” of cigarettes and alcohol would eventually lose interest in motherhood and perhaps even in men.40 While such insinuations did not necessarily reference sexological ideas of “perversions,” they did reflect concerns with the heteronormative stability of modern society. Similar usages of the modern woman as a symbol of disruptive change occurred also in other national contexts. As pointed out by Mary Louise Roberts in relation to a French postwar context, representations of modern women offered a way of making sense of a seemingly ever-changing modern society by providing a “set of images, issues, and power relationships that were both familiar and compelling.”41 Hopes as well as fears concerning major political, cultural or technological developments in modern society were, in other words, made “culturally intelligible” when projected on the surface of the modern woman, whether monocled, shingled and confident, as many cartoonists liked to draw her, or further sub-categorized into a range of types including the garçonne, the flapper (or jazz girl), and the sports girl.42 Even though all of these types could still be subsumed

8 Introduction under the heading of the “modern girl” or the “modern woman,” their perceived transgressions varied, from the masculine drinking habits of the jazz girl to the masculine body of the sportswoman and the masculine clothes of the garçonne. However, this book will not attempt to repeat the interwar quest to categorize specific types of “masculine” women nor to recapitulate such quests; its explorative focus lies elsewhere, inspired by questions that extend beyond typology. Most fundamentally, this study explores, as discussed previously, why the topic of female masculinity came into such focus in the 1920s particularly, both as the latest fashion and as a symbol of a strange future. Understanding the position of the modern girl or woman in this context will above all require an openness to explore, as literary scholar Sharon Marcus writes, “the internal complexities” inherent in any delimited period of time.43 With regard to the 1920s, this was a time of spectacular clashes between, on the one hand, traditional value systems based on gender segregation, and, on the other hand, modern ideas of equality, progress and democratization. Exploring these clashes, as they played out with regard to emerging “masculine” but non-male fashions, styles and attitudes, opens up a wide analytical window to the dynamics of early twentieth century calls to embrace—and yet contain— the rising instability of modernity’s gender boundaries. Ultimately, I am interested in how and when female masculinity could or could not, in gender scholar Todd W. Reeser’s words, be articulated as “a viable gender presentation on the female body.”44 However, in light of recent decades’ queer deconstructions of binary gender systems, the question may be asked what this gender presentation—“female masculinity”—actually references.

Female Masculinities Even though a majority of masculinity studies have consistently related masculinity to men and the male body, recent years has also seen a growing body of historical work analyzing “masculinities without men.”45 Historically orientated works include Ann Abate’s study on the North American literary history of the tomboy, Laura Behling’s study of American media representations of women in the suffrage movement and Katie Sutton’s already mentioned work on the fashionable but controversial masculine woman in Weimar Germany.46 Moreover, a range of cultural studies has engaged with specific subjects related to cross-dressing, fashion, sports, body ideals, subcultures and queer sexualities.47 These studies all confirm the argument formulated by gender studies scholar Jack Halberstam in 1998, that “women have made their own unique contributions to what we call modern masculinity.”48 By Halberstam’s argument, female masculinity should thus not be considered an imitation of an “original” or more true male masculinity: “far from being an

Introduction  9 imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity.”49 Still, the concept of female masculinity can also be seen to confirm the very binary it seeks to deconstruct.50 Halberstam’s study of female masculinities has stricken some critics as guided by a problematic taxonomizing impulse, characteristic of modern identity politics, which reinscribes the essentialism of identity in eras when identity did not yet necessarily structure the way people thought about gender and sexuality.51 Searching for a “middle ground excluded by a binary understanding of difference,” literary scholar Claudia Breger proposes instead the notion of “feminine masculinities,” interchangeable with “masculine femininities,” as a way of opening up our understanding of early twentieth-century scientific and literary representations of “inversion” and the “third sex.” Critical of prior readings of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, characterized by a search for a definite “referent,” either in terms of lesbian identity, privileging sexuality over gender, or transsexual identity, privileging (trans)gender over sexuality, Breger calls for a need to “investigate the variety of metaphorical—or, more generally, rhetorical—processes that configure historical accounts of gender and sexuality.”52 However, as noted by Katie Sutton, this more relativist position may be problematic too, considering that “there were, and continue to be, real differences between the social, political and cultural experiences and representation of men perceived as ‘feminine’ and women perceived as ‘masculine’.”53 Keeping these important insights in mind, it nevertheless makes historical sense to study the binary gender representations that have shaped Western culture with such ideological force. This does not need to entail a subscription to an essentialist way of thinking. For instance, as film historian Laura Horak reasons in her study of cross-dressing in early twentieth-century American cinema, the word cross-dressing, on the one hand, “problematically assumes the existence of two separate and opposite sexes and implies that the body instantiates one’s ‘real sex,’ ” but at the same time, these assumptions “do reflect the way these roles were understood at the time.”54 The challenges of terminology and language constitute a recurring topic in introductions to historical queer scholarship: In her Weimar study, Katie Sutton opts for quotes when employing terms like “queer,” “transgender” and “cross-dressing” to underscore “the nonessentialist and contested nature of these signifiers, particularly in the context of historical research.” However, Sutton also underscores how these terms offer a more nuanced approach than historically specific terms, which are often rooted in nineteenth-century medical discourse (such as “invert” and “third sex”).55 To achieve such a nuanced and broadened historical analysis, I agree that is important to utilize terms that are, as Horak similarly concludes, “general enough to incorporate many different practices.”56 In this study, the terms “queer” and “female masculinities,” which I mostly use in the plural in order to emphasize the

10 Introduction multiplicity of practices, are used in this manner, referencing different instances of female gender representations that were not at the time seen as normatively feminine.57 Taking an even broader historical perspective, it is clear that the label “masculine” has been attached to women for many reasons, depending on the gendered division at the time of a number of qualities linked to body, mind, dress, desires and actions.58 The understanding or tolerance of women thus labeled masculine has moreover hinged on the perceived explanation of their masculinity. While the mythological Amazon or the cross-dressed woman passing as a soldier in the early modern period may have been seen as adventurous exceptions worthy of some respect, the “mannish lesbian,” described in nineteenth-century medical discourse as a case of “inversion,” has caused a higher degree of cultural anxiety.59 Contextual specificity is thus important for the simple reason that female masculinity has been judged differently in different situations. To take yet another example: As revealed by a eulogy in Latin over a young noblewoman in 1626 (at the height of the Swedish so called Great Power Era), the deceased had been highly erudite and able to argue in a “manly” (mascule) way, and through these qualities she had succeeded in “rising above her sex.”60 While the church no longer considers studying and speaking in public to be masculine skills, the anecdote shows how skills once associated with men can be disengaged from their gendered status as society changes. The anecdote also shows the importance of context: The young noblewoman’s skills of argumentation were appreciated by the Swedish Church because she had used them against the Catholics, defending the Protestant Kingdom of Sweden. However, when Swedish feminists began to argue for women’s rights in the nineteenth century, they were judged differently. In their case, being labeled masculine or mannish was not a sign of appreciation.61 During the interwar period, concerns with female masculinity arose in relation to a hierarchical and binary gender system put under rising pressure: Just like reading and writing were no longer defined as masculine skills, a range of other arenas previously defined as male—the office, the sports field, the parliament, the union, the poker table—now seemed to be wide open for female territorialization. However, it is also important to understand when and how the label of masculine was less likely to be employed: Working-class women, for instance, who have generally been expected to be strong and perform hard physical labor, tended to be placed outside of gender anxieties, while upper-class women, protected by their wealth and status, have often been perceived as eccentric more than masculine when dressing or acting in non-traditional ways.62 Interwar concerns with gender ambiguity were thus mostly performed with regard to the increasingly large group of office girls and other middleclass women. However, the 1920s was also a time when fashion migrated across class barriers, thus blurring visual class distinctions, as many

Introduction  11 critics regretfully noted at the time.63 Another factor that sometimes mitigated women’s gender transgressions was related to national pride. For instance, in the Olympic Games, a certain degree of female heroism could be accepted without being marked as a case of female masculinity, though the matter of women’s physicality in sports was still fraught with myriad conflicted reservations.64 Reports of a steadily increasing presence of women in previously masculine arenas caused in Sweden in the 1920s not only cultural confusion but also a great deal of political anxiety. As Hirdman writes, the traditional “gender system,” which presumed a segregated labor market as well as a norm of male primacy, seemed to be in a state of crisis in the years following World War I as processes of democratization and urbanization created new spaces to work and meet as well as new grounds to question old principles.65 This modern gender crisis surfaced first in the nineteenth century, when women’s movements claimed the right to equal (“male”) rights and autonomy, demands that gave rise to a wide array of opposition and counter-actions, including derision and scorn. As pointed out by the editors of a recent anthology on Swedish gender history, the stereotyping of feminist women as “ugly,” “monstrous” and “mannish” indeed constitutes one of gender history’s most persistent longue durée.66 While Swedish women could vote in national general elections for the first time in 1921, the genre of anti-feminist satire did not vanish but was rather expanded to include all kinds of new or modern women.67 In this context, the idea of a fashionable and even attractive “masculinized” modern young woman, whether labeled garçonne or something else, did not help to mend the perceived gender disruption, but rather enforced it.

A Spectrum of Ambiguity: Play, Agency, Desire In examining the cultural space for female masculinity in Sweden in the 1920s, I  consider in this study how aspects of play, agency and desire relate. Historically, gender transgressions have tended to be judged differently if seen as expressions of playfulness or, in contrast, as a sign of something more profound, involving some sort of disruption of the “imagined binary oppositions between male masculinity and female femininity.”68 The risk of such disruptions of gendered binaries has caused a wide range of responses, but in terms of cultural anxiety certain forms of female masculinity, such as the agency of sportswomen or female politicians, seem to have been more controversial than others, and as suggested by Halberstam: “female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire.”69 When and how female masculinity has historically been “coupled” with lesbian desire has been debated, particularly in light of the realization that the conceptual framework of sexual identities is itself very recent.70 The interwar period has in this context often been described as a period of transition, when, as

12 Introduction recent studies argue, “competing frameworks”—whether moral, medical, religious etcetera—influenced the way people thought about (or did not think about) “the organization of sexuality.”71 For this reason, contextual specificity is important when exploring “queer” female masculinities in this era.72 In this study, I  show that representations of the modern woman in Swedish popular media tended to move across a spectrum of ambiguity, where “harmless” playfulness could easily be construed as overlapping with female agency and desire. For instance, the playful female movie star wearing a suit and tie signified not only Hollywood entertainments, but she was also a reminder of women’s very real entrances into a range of male spheres of power and politics. Women’s participation in sports similarly showcased a new kind of female physical agency. When such “masculine” activities—which needed not be linked to masculine looks— moreover translated into sexual agency, as suggested by several Swedish interwar novels, the modern woman risked being associated not only with gendered transgressions but also with sexual ones.73 In the 1920s, a commercially orientated modern mass culture moreover seemed to encourage people to explore their desires, particularly in the context of consumption: After all, as historian Anna Clark writes, this was a culture that needed “citizens to consume, to endlessly desire new commodities, to seek out pleasure in a form of polymorphous perversity escaping the imperatives of reproduction.”74 In the Swedish debate, critics of this commercial interconnectedness of (female) agency and desire saw the masculinized modern girl in tuxedo, as she appeared at the movies and on the covers of film magazines, as a prime suspect of modern, pleasure-seeking selfishness.75 Such critique did not necessarily entail a reading of women in tuxedos as “queer.” As historians of gender and sexuality point out, tuxedos and monocles have sometimes too easily been interpreted by present-day observers as lesbian or queer signifiers.76 In regard to the 1920s, it has been emphasized how this was a period of sexual ambiguity, a time of “twilight moments,” when the logic of the oppositionality between normal and deviant, by which contemporary sexual identities have been configured, was not yet fully articulated.77 Considerations of contextual specificity become crucial in this context: In her British study, historian of sexuality Laura Doan argues that the masculine fashion of the 1920s was at the time more likely to be read as upper-class eccentricity or as something modern rather than lesbian or queer. However, the situation changed, as Doan goes on to show, in the years after the “obscenity trial” of 1928 (targeting Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness), which brought about public attention to possible links between “inversion” and female masculinity.78 In her German study, Sutton shows how mainstream media mostly associated women’s masculine fashions with modernity and modern trends, but, at the same time, she also shows how the monocle and

Introduction  13 other attributes did take on additional meanings in the context of Berlin’s queer subcultures and clubs catering to female “inverts,” where masculine attributes played “an important role as a signifier of virile female identities.”79 Swedish research on (historically located) cultural representations of women’s “queer” gender expressions and desires has largely focused on literature.80 In her study on lesbianism in Swedish literature from 1930 to 2005, literary scholar Jenny Björklund points to the presence of medical discourses throughout this period (which, in sexological as well as psychoanalytical traditions tended to relate female homosexuality to female masculinity), while also showing how this connection in literature was often problematized, challenged or nuanced.81 Research related more specifically to female masculinities focusing on the 1920s is, in the Swedish context, scarce: Beyond literary studies, a few studies in film and theater history have addressed female to male cross-dressing, whereas gender historians have focused more generally on political and social reform (rather than cultural representations).82 No Swedish study has yet been carried out that takes a more comprehensive approach, examining cultural representations of female masculinity across a range of sources and perspectives. Returning to the focal points of analysis outlined above, the play, agency and desire inherent in, and related to, female masculinities in the 1920s, I trace how the “masculine” young woman in early interwar Sweden was configured in many different ways, whether as an object of desire, as a misogynistic strategy, as a tool of emancipation or as a way of commercial and individual explorations of the opportunities of modern life. The approach outlined earlier, referencing ambiguities and queer mobilities rather than identities, has been informed by recent approaches in queer critical history that have strived to, as Laura Doan writes “to confront not simply the categories of identity we take for granted now but the predetermined and overdetermined structural logic of categorization itself.”83 Stepping outside of this logic is of course easier said than done, particularly since interwar gender configurations were in fact beginning to be shaped by the logic of taxonomy familiar to us today (as I will discuss in Chapter 5). A growing body of LGBT and queer scholarship has in recent years given many insights into the historical, social and cultural impact of gendered and sexual norms, insights which can be placed within, as Sutton writes, a “wider political project of affirming and legitimating a range of embodied experiences in the present as well as in the past.”84 However, in the context of present-day political projects of queer “affirmation,” Sutton also acknowledges the familiar challenge in historical queer studies to avoid anachronisms. As Doan discusses extensively in Disturbing Practices, studies that proceed from a project of affirming, or finding, historically located “queer subjects” will also risk foreclosing the “messiness” of past desires and debates that

14 Introduction were not organized by our contemporary understanding of sexual identities.85 Troubled by a feeling that “identity history itself excludes and disallows in its bid for inclusion,” Doan thus underscores the importance of adopting analytical frameworks that also consider “meanings outside the context of identity.”86 Illuminating the “historicity of key concepts such as the normal,” Doan outlines a “queer critical history” that sets out to explore not the past of known sexualities, but rather “how sexuality was made knowable in the past.”87 The historicity of key concepts also constitutes a central interest in a study like this, focusing on the history of gender and sexuality in a specific time period. As argued by Doan, it is important in this context to understand that “the norm of normal,” paramount in queer theory has, historically, in fact operated as but one of several “indexes of sexual regulation” (others being, for instance, “pure/impure, chaste/unchaste, virtuous/unvirtuous, clean/filthy, right/wrong, honorable/dishonorable, natural/unnatural, or respectable/unrespectable”).88 However, through the interwar period, “ordinary people would become increasingly familiar with normal or abnormal as descriptors of sexual types—polarities that added discursive layers to the epistemology of modern sexuality rather than displacing older ones.”89 By now, we are so accustomed to thinking of sexual identities as organized by a normal/deviant dichotomy that it has become a considerable challenge, as noted previously, to step “outside the epistemological apparatus of modern sexuality.”90 Still, queer theory, while not a cohesive school of thought, is also rooted in a practice of questioning, blurring, decentering, rupturing and exploring, “whatever is at odds with the normal,” as David Halperin writes, or even “the logic of opposition” itself, as Lee Edelman suggests.91 Rather than tracing “queerness-as-being,” Doan thus proposes to exploit a “queerness-as-method” that “seeks to understand the conditions of how the sexual was constituted across space and time.”92 The implications of such an approach are clear: Instead of latching onto a certain ontological queerness, a project that asks how gender and sexuality were negotiated and explored across different contexts may become unexpectedly queer in its openness to the unexpected. Instead of establishing a certain “masculinized” modern girl or woman as a distinct type, I am thus interested in exploring the many and often conflicted stories of a new and fashionable female masculinity in Swedish early interwar culture and what this position meant for the imaginary space of what women could be, do and desire.

Scope and Sources In terms of sources materials, this study focuses primarily on print media, such as popular monthly and weekly entertainment magazines, but also including specialized periodicals devoted, for instance, to film,

Introduction  15 motorsports or fashion. Novels and other types of literature, such as conduct books and popularized scientific literature, also contribute to this study (particularly in Chapters 5 and 6). The choice to explore “popular” media rather than parliamentary debates or judicial records, is motivated by the increasingly vital role these media played in Sweden during the 1920s. As Swedish media historians have shown, this was a time when Swedes were rapidly becoming more informed and involved in the world “outside.”93 This involvement included a rising awareness of an international arena of gender negotiations, informed not only by news stories, but also by movies and new forms of female visibility in popular magazines.94 The visual contents of print media constitute an especially important arena for questions concerning normative masculine and feminine appearances in the interwar period. As many cultural studies have shown, the early decades of the twentieth century constitute a crucial shift with regard to women’s visibility. This was a time when women’s “earlier incursions into public space” were extended, as cultural historian Liz Conor writes, “to their iconization within the mechanized production of popular images.”95 In other words, as Conor shows in her study on the “spectacular modern woman,” this was a time when urbanization, visual technologies, and commodity culture became foundational to the “modern perceptual horizon.”96 To Swedes, this horizon had not only widened considerably during the first decades of the twentieth century, but people’s lives were by the 1920s also beginning to be affected by media in ways that had not been the case previously: As media scholar Pelle Snickars writes, media not only mirrored modernity’s ongoing transformations of the Swedish society, but also shaped and enabled these transformations.97 Many literary and cultural studies scholars have similarly emphasized that “representations” involve a complex two-way process: far from being simplistic reflections of the “real” world, images and stories have historically been party to the shaping of social and cultural realities.98 As Katie Sutton points out in regard to the Weimar period, “popular media played an important role in shaping and refracting the ways in which women and men formed their views of themselves, each other, and their society.”99 Studying such fundamental meaning-making processes is crucial, I believe, to any gender analysis that seeks to understand “how sexual difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world,” as Joan Scott once stated.100 In Sweden, the breakthrough of a modern consumer culture happened in the 1920s, a few decades after the first modern shopping malls and marketing methods had been developed in the US, England and France.101 New magazines played an important role in the wider dispersion of this aspect of modernity: Lisbeth Larsson has even described the Swedish interwar years in terms of a “gold rush” for popular weekly magazines that quickly expanded in terms of copies and circulation.102 Utilizing

16 Introduction this rich empirical body of source materials, this study investigates a wide range of periodicals, including fashion, film, sports and women’s magazines, focusing on volumes published in the years 1920–29. Several periodicals, such as Bonniers Veckotidning, Våra Nöjen (Our Entertainment), Veckojournalen (The Weekly Journal) and the satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix, covered a range of topics and may be characterized as general entertainment magazines. Other magazines, such as Charme and Idun, were targeted more specifically towards the “modern woman,” and covered topics of health, fashion, women’s sports as well as the many new challenges, expectations and opportunities that modern women faced, in terms of work-life, travelling and relationships. Both Charme and Idun constitute important sources in several chapters in this study.103 Occasionally, I also refer to the well-known Swedish feminist periodical Tidevarvet, founded in 1923 by a group of women that formed the heart of the Swedish women’s rights movement at the time.104 Less commercial in its outlook, this periodical was mainly devoted to political and social issues. Finally, I have also studied closely the film magazine Filmnyheter (Film News),105 analyzing themes of fashion and cross-dressing, and the motorsports magazine Svensk Motortidning (The Swedish Motor Magazine), analyzing debates on women in motorsports.106 In addition to these materials, I  have also looked at arguments and comments (in relation to the modern woman) in the daily presses, mainly the major morning papers Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet and Stockholms-Tidningen. This book is structured broadly as follows: Part I, Telling Stories, examines reports and stories of “masculinized” modern girls in fashion and film, focusing on a curious paradox: While magazines often emphasized how young women’s gender transgressions were playful and “harmless,” efforts soon ensued to re-feminize these women and their styles, softening not only their looks but also their ambitions—an adult version of “tomboy-taming.”107 Part II explores the Changing Stories of women in sports and automobility and how female athletes and drivers were associated to various degrees with masculinity and modernity, depending on their capacity to “compensate” for their (masculine) interests. Focusing on a little-explored series of all-women’s sports events and motor races, Part II thus adds the dimensions of body ideals and physical agency to the previous discussions of controversial fashions. Lastly, in Part III, Unfinished Stories, I investigate early interwar initiatives in Sweden to educate “the people” on matters of gender and sexuality, including behaviors seen as deviant or “abnormal,” such as gender inversion and homosexuality. I also look at the interplay of such theories with novels and cultural debates. This section ties together the themes of the previous sections, the playfulness of fashion, the agency of the body, and, finally, the desire to desire in “masculine” ways. More specifically, Chapter 1 focuses on the Swedish capital city in the 1920s and its increasingly cosmopolitan media landscape reporting of the masculinized modern girl from near and afar, with her short hair

Introduction  17 and odd habits, as seen at the movies, as an illustrated apparition of the future, or walking the very streets of Stockholm. Utilizing fashion and film magazines, Chapter 1 traces how a new female masculine aesthetic came into play in the 1920s as a diversifying force in terms of available female gender expressions. In Chapter 2, I discuss how the perceived threat not only of the “masculinization” of women’s fashions but also of women’s habits and ambitions led to intensifying efforts to moderate the modern girl and her masculine, or garçonne-like, tendencies. By relating fashion debates to a wider critique of the modern woman in Swedish media, I analyze in this chapter how the idea of an attractive female masculinity appeared in the 1920s as something increasingly disturbing and how it was finally rejected. While Chapter  1 thus focuses on the popularity of the “garçonne”-styled, or even “masculine” young woman, Chapter  2 turns to efforts to restore her femininity. Chapter 3 turns to the changing stories of female agency and bodily ideals. The 1920s was a sports-crazed decade across the world and in Sweden, where print media celebrated national Olympian heroes as well as heroines while also critiquing what was perceived as too much change in regard to the progress of women’s sports. As this chapter uncovers, a range of concerned observers, male as well as female, struggled to define the progress and limits of the female body, physically as well as culturally. While feminist sports leaders rejected the imagined frailty of girls, they were also hesitant to expose them to a range of masculine requirements, including stamina and persistence. I  show in this chapter that the celebrated sports girl was constantly targeted not only with advice on how best to preserve her physical femininity but also how to approach sports as a matter of (“feminine”) play and not (“masculine”) winning. In Chapter  4, I  examine how stories in the 1920s on speed-loving and adventurous female motorists worked to challenge and unsettle the boundaries between masculinity and femininity in automobility and in motorsports. Drawing on a range of Swedish popular periodicals, from fashion magazines to motorsport journals, the investigation focuses on two (overlapping) contexts of female automobility, covering in the first case discourses on the cosmopolitan modern woman, and, in the second case, the fate of a pioneering group of women in Swedish motorsports. The analysis shows that the mobility of the driving city woman tended to be construed as modern more than masculine, whereas concerns were voiced in the press that female racecar drivers and motorcyclists would ultimately be masculinized. Though stereotyping and satire often worked to re-inscribe old gender hierarchies in motorsports, the analysis in this chapter shows that the rising overall visibility of female motorists in Sweden in the 1920s also contributed to a pushing of boundaries in regard to cultural expectations of women’s place in the modern world—a place no longer limited to home.

18 Introduction The two final chapters revisit and place at the center the subject of female masculinities and queer desires. In Chapter 5, I discuss the impact of a series of new popularized scientific books that theorized gender and sexuality. As I will show, these publishing initiatives were launched with the stated intent to educate the general public on all aspects of medicine and modernity, including matters of women’s sexuality and cases of gender inversion. I also discuss how these medical discourses intersected with a range of moral concerns as well feminist critique, particularly in regard to gender stereotyping. Finally, in Chapter 6, I analyze queer female masculinities in literature, played out in urban as well as rural milieus. In this context I  suggest that the scholarly focus in Swedish literary history on the 1932 novel Charlie (seen as the first Swedish novel with a lesbian protagonist), has left queer representations of female desires in the 1920s in Sweden largely unexplored, especially in regard to female masculinity and its uses in literature.108 In my analysis of two overlooked 1920s novels, Ejnar Smith’s Kate Ranke from 1921 and Sigrid Olrog’s Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) from 1927, I argue that female masculinity—and queer femininities—were used in the early interwar period in much queerer ways than has previously been acknowledged. My choice to focus this exploration of interwar gender stories on the 1920s rather than the entire interwar period is motivated by the fact that these two decades are characterized by different cultural and political circumstances. In some cases, trends and topics that were discussed lively in the 1920s, such as the sports girl or the garçonne style, had faded from public interest in the 1930s, and conversely, some sensitive topics, such as homosexuality, that were present but generally not named in the 1920s were suddenly labeled and discussed publically in the next decade. This transition is in itself complex and interesting, which is why I have chosen in some cases to trace how the stories and debates on the modern “masculine” woman evolved in the early 1930s. Engaging with new historical and theoretical perspectives on female masculinities, this book traces how the masculine woman in the interwar period reshaped the imaginary space of what it meant to be a woman, but also how this space was eventually shrunk in order to fit, in the Swedish case, into an emerging vision of a family-orientated “people’s home.”

Notes 1 “I klädlogen hos Fru Margita,” Filmnyheter, February 8, 1926, 2. “. . . ett barn av vår tid, av detta nu. Smärt, ansvarsmedveten, men ändå glad, hon sportar, helst ritt och skidåkning, hon vet vad hon vill.” All English translations from Swedish in this book are my own in collaboration with line editor Rebecca Ahlfeldt, unless otherwise stated. 2 “En tip-top bild ur Dollarmillionen,” Filmnyheter, November  2, 1925, 7. “den verkligt moderna damen i svensk film”

Introduction  19 3 Ibid. “Vi ha maskuliniserats sedan dess, d.v.s. damerna, och att en vacker ung kvinna kan posera i så rätt och slätt pyjamas som vidstående och detta utan vare sig chockera eller verka okvinnlig det är ett tecken så gott som något på garçonnestilens ofarlighet.” 4 On cultural representations of these types of female masculinities, see Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989); Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985); Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey, and Martin B. Duberman (New York: Meridian Books, 1989); Eva Borgström, ed., Makalösa kvinnor: könsöverskridare i myt och verklighet (Stockholm: Alfabeta/Anamma, 2002). 5 James Laver, A Concise History of Costume (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969); Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 102–4; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Rev. ed. (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 6 Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 105. 7 On debates related to women’s fashions in Sweden in the 1920s, see Johan Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001). See also Chapter 2. 8 “Damer som herrar,” Våra nöjen, May 29, 1926, 39. “Det feminina elimineras . . .” 9 Stockholms-Tidningen, October 25, 1926, 3. “Kvinna eller man? Pojke eller flicka? Typen känns igen i dessa de shinglade, slanka damernas dagar. Just en sådan liten dam, vi känna igen från promenaden och restaurangen, är huvudfiguren här och de lustiga förvecklingar, hon blir upphovet till, måste roa alla, som roas av ett godt skämt.” 10 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December 6, 1926, 12. 11 These age-related labels and distinctions were fluid and tended to be used interchangeably in many Swedish periodicals at the time. 12 Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 3. See also Alys Eve Weinbaum, ed., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 13 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 3. 14 Ibid; Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Laura L. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). For the British context, see also Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture; Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 15 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 3. 16 Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935; Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930; Marti M. Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).

20 Introduction 17 On women’s “gender stretching” in the British context of World War I, see Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 111. 18 On beauty and fashion ideals from the perspective of femininity, see Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s; Kathy Lee Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett, Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women’s Fashion from the Fin de Siecle to the Present (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Therése Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014). 19 On the flapper in the “heterosexual leisure scene,” see Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, 209–52. 20 On the “new woman” in a Swedish interwar context, see Kristina Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002); Yvonne Hirdman, Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010); Eva Österberg and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, eds., Rummet vidgas: kvinnor på väg ut i offentligheten 1880–1940 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002); Kristina Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014). 21 On queer critical history (to which I will return later in this Introduction), see Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War; Brian Lewis, ed., British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 22 Jenny Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–11. As Yvonne Hirdman has pointed out in regard to the metaphor of “the people’s home” (folkhemmet), the activity of house construction has traditionally been considered a masculine one while the home itself has constituted the number one “woman’s place.” Hence, in his use of the metaphor in 1927, the social democrat PerAlbin Hansson assumed the building of “the people’s home” to be the main responsibility of men (active in the public arenas of politics, economy, science, etc.) whereas women were expected to engage with matters of “interior design,” as Hirdman writes, such as family matters and social welfare. Yvonne Hirdman, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds., Sveriges historia: 1920–1965 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 200–2. On the Swedish historical context, see also Chapter 1. 23 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 24 On the different generations of “new women,” see Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 21–29. On the “new woman” in the 1880s, see also Eva Helen Ulvros, “Den nya kvinnan,” in Individer i rörelse: Kulturhistoria i 1800-talets Sverige, eds. Birgitta Svensson and Anna Walette (Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2012). 25 Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 21–29. 26 On the history of Sweden’s women’s rights movement, see, for instance, Lena Eskilsson, Drömmen om kamratsamhället: Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på

Introduction  21 Fogelstad 1925–35 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991); Christina Florin and Lars Kvarnström, Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap: genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1950 (Stockholm: Atlas, 2001); Ulla Manns, Den sanna frigörelsen: Fredrika-Bremer-förbundet 1884–1921, Kulturhistoriskt bibliotek (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1997). 27 Tommy Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet (Lund: Sekel, 2007), 63. See also, by the same author, Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015). 28 As Birgitte Søland argues in the Danish context, it was in fact the impact of new media and the rise of a modern consumer culture, rather than the war, that affected and shaped gender negotiations in Denmark at this time. Birgitte Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 29 Sture Centerwall, Yngve Lorents, and Gotthard Johansson, eds., Bonniers konversationslexikon (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1922), preface. 30 “Vem är modernast: Ekman eller Schanche?” Stockholms-Tidningen, November  7, 1926. “Allt förändras, och det innebär en säregen njutning att följa med rörelsen—en hissnande och lustig känsla i mellangärdet som vid åkning i karusell eller berg- och dalbana. Det är en njutning att känna sig midt i rörelsens virvel, att känna draget susa kring öronen, att vara främst. Framför ligger ingenting, det outforskade kaos.” 31 On modernity and “queer temporality,” see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Jordan Alexander Stein, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (2013). 32 “Vem är modernast: Ekman eller Schanche?” Stockholms-Tidningen, November  7, 1926. On the interconnectedness of film and fashion in a Swedish interwar context, see Louise Wallenberg, “Designing Desirable Men: Fashion, Style and Masculinity in 1930s Cinema,” in Star and Seam, ed. Dirk Laundwert (Antwerp: MoMu Press, 2011). 33 Citing Andreas Huysen’s classic study on “mass culture as woman,” Rita Felski notes in this context how already in the nineteenth century “women and the masses merge as twin symbols of the democratizing mediocrity of modern life.” Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 106; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 34 For an example of this rhetoric, see, Arnold Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan (Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924). See also Peder Aléx and Johan Söderberg, eds., Förbjudna njutningar: spår från konsumtionskulturens historia i Sverige (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001); Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, 178. 35 Patrik Steorn, “Konstnärligt antimode: Svensk reformdräkt kring sekelskiftet 1900,” in Mode: en introduktion—en tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse, eds. Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg (Stockholm: Raster, 2009), 225–49. 36 Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 183. 37 Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 98. See also Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 101. 38 Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 98. 39 For examples of this rhetoric, see Chapters  1 and 2. Even “modern” women were in the 1920s expected to get married eventually, but, as Emma

22 Introduction Severinsson shows, voices were also heard in women’s magazines that discussed the merits of staying unmarried. Emma Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” LIR. journal, no. 7 (2016). 40 See, for instance, “Min moderna germanska brud,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, March 28, 1927. 41 Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, 5. For a similar argument in the German case, see Lynne Frame, “Gretchen, Girl, Garçonne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal New Woman,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 42 Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, 6. See also Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 89. 43 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7. 44 Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 133. 45 Jean Bobby Noble, Masculinities Without Men? Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). Research on female masculinities, starting with Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s pioneering study Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), build on several landmark feminist and queer studies that argue that gender is a culturally rather than naturally situated construct, upheld by “performative” acts as well as interrelated “compulsory” mechanisms of heteronormativity. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1980); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London; New York: Routledge, 1990). 46 Michelle Ann Abate, Tomboys: A  Literary and Cultural History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009); Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935; Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. 47 See, for instance, Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933; Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016); Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 2nd ed. (Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Valerie Steele and Hal Rubinstein, A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 48 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 46. 49 Ibid., 1. 50 On this argument, see, for instance, Rachel Adams, “Masculinity Without Men,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 3 (2000). 51 Ibid., 473. See also Claudia Breger, “Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of ‘Female Inversion’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005): 81; Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 139. 52 Breger, “Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of ‘Female Inversion’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” 79.

Introduction  23 53 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 14. This historical asymmetry between feminine men and masculine women is discussed also by Breger. 54 Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 17. 55 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 16. 56 Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 17. 57 I use quotes to emphasize the historical use of the terms “masculine” and “feminine,” particularly in this case in regard to the 1920s. In other words, I do not use these terms ontologically (looking for an essence of female masculinity, or as a way of creating new classifications). Rather, I am interested in exploring why and how ideas of masculinity have guided historical gender negotiations, forcing a range of cultural practices into a binary system of categorization. However, because an overly frequent use of single quotes may become tiresome to the reader, I will not use them inexorably, as the general premises of the investigation will hopefully remain clear. 58 Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), XXIII. 59 Ulrika Stahre, Beundrad barbar: amasonen i västeuropeisk bildkultur 1789– 1918 (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2004); Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London; New York: Routledge, 2011); Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” 60 “sexum suum superatura videbatur.” On the education of Wendela Skytte, see Jenny Ingemarsdotter, Ramism, Rhetoric and Reform: An Intellectual Biography of Johan Skytte (1577–1645) (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2011). For the full quote in Latin, see “Ett liv i lärdom och dygd: en studie av två äreminnen över Wendela Skytte (1608–1629),” in Stella: Arbetsrapporter (Uppsala: Avdelningen för vetenskapshistoria, Uppsala universitet, 2005), 69. 61 Jens Rydström and David Tjeder, eds., Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009), 231. 62 Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 101. Accusations of mannishness have nevertheless also been directed at working class women, such as the physically accomplished “rowing ladies” of Stockholm, who performed a sort of water taxi service in Stockholm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As historians show, these accusations seem to have occurred mainly in the late nineteenth century, when male competitors wished to outmaneuver female workers from Stockholm’s waterways. Christine Bladh, ed., Rodderskor på Stockholms vatten (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2008), 22. 63 Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 102; Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 56. 64 Helena Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2015). 65 Yvonne Hirdman, “Key Concepts in Feminist Theory: Analysing Gender and Welfare,” FREIA, no. 34 (1996): 8–15. In her analysis of modernity’s “gender system,” Hirdman also shows how powerful the pattern of segregation has historically been and how it remained a constitutive principle of the twentieth-century Swedish welfare state and labor market.

24 Introduction 66 Rydström and Tjeder, Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria, 228. 67 For an example of such rhetoric on “mannish” and emancipated women, see Gustaf Otto-Adelborg, “Till kvinnornas psykologi,” Svenska Dagbladet, April 12, 1922. 68 Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction, 133. 69 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 28. 70 Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 170. 71 Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 5; Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 175. 72 On associations in sexology between female homosexuality and female masculinity, see Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman”; Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935; Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. 73 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair; Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. 74 Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 167. 75 This rhetoric was common in the Swedish satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix. 76 Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 7; Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 49; Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 108. As Halberstam points out, the reading of past representations of female masculinity as signs of lesbianism “covers over the multiple differences between earlier forms of same-sex desire.” Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 46. 77 Anna Clark, “Twilight Moments,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005). 78 Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 110–25. 79 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 49. 80 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair; Liv Saga Bergdahl, Kärleken utan namn: identitet och (o)synlighet i svenska lesbiska romaner (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2010); Eva Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935 (Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2016); Karin Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla. . . ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i ‘Ensamhetens brunn,’ ” lambda nordica 3, no. 11 (2006); Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. 81 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair. 82 For research on the Swedish women’s rights movement, see notes above on the “new woman.” For film and theater studies, see Tiina Rosenberg’s study on female to male cross-dressing in the context of theater and opera; Byxbegär, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Alfabeta/Anamma, 2004); Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 199–200. See also Jens Rydström, “A Well of Desire: Female Same-Sex Sexuality, 1880–1950,” in Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, ed. Jens Rydström (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 83 Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 89.

Introduction  25 84 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 15. 85 Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 104, 31–32. 86 Ibid., X, 4. 87 Ibid., 199. 88 Ibid., 187. On queer theory’s investment in antinormativity, see also Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” differences 26, no. 1 (2015). 89 Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 186. This added discursive layer of normality and deviance originated in nineteenth-century scientific efforts to establish sexual statistics and typologies, but the notion of normal gained its real ideological momentum in the twentieth century, as Doan argues, when the term began to be conflated with moral and medical value statements (Ibid., 168–73). 90 Ibid., 192. 91 Quoted in Ibid., 44, 192. See also David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 92 Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 131–32, 87. To exemplify such an approach, challenging the practice of configuring genders as “polarized” and sexualities as “antithetical,” Sharon Marcus shows, in her study of relationships between women in the Victorian era, how homoerotic bonds were at this time neither seen as deviant nor wrong but were, in fact, actively promoted by family, society and church as an integral part of womanhood and female relationships. In contrast with scholarship that has approached romantic relationships between women in this period from the perspective of the category of lesbian, Marcus thus shows through historical contextualizing how desires and unions between women that are seen as potentially “queer” by us were in the Victorian era simply not organized by a normal/deviant structure. Ibid., 89; Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. 93 Pelle Snickars, “Det medialiserade samhället,” in Industriland: Tolv forskare om när Sverige blev modernt, eds. Jenny Andersson and Jan af Geijerstam (Stockholm: Premiss, 2008), 175. On the new habit of “going to the movies,” see also Carina Sjöholm, Gå på bio: rum för drömmar i folkhemmets Sverige (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2003), 37–50. 94 That periodicals constituted arenas of gender negotiations is supported by Margaret Beetham’s argument that the periodical, marked by its “radical heterogeneity” through a mix of genres and contents, “refused, and still refuses, a single authoritarian voice.” Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 11. On gender and the media, see also Rachel Ritchie et  al., eds., Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption (London; New York: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group, 2016); Maggie Andrews and Sallie McNamara, eds., Women and the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present (London; New York: Routledge, 2014); Felski, The Gender of Modernity. On the history of women’s reading and women’s magazines in a Swedish context, see Ulrika Holgersson, Populärkulturen och klassamhället: Arbete, klass och genus i svensk dampress i början av 1900talet (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005); Anja Hirdman, Tilltalande bilder: genus, sexualitet och publiksyn i Veckorevyn och Fib aktuellt (Stockholm: Atlas, 2001); Lisbeth Larsson, En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning

26 Introduction och svensk veckopress (Stockholm: Symposion, 1989); Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” 95 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, 7. 96 Ibid., 10. 97 Snickars, “Det medialiserade samhället,” 175. 98 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 5; Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997); Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). 99 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 9. See also Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 32. 100 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 777. Quoted in Doan, Disturbing Practices, 4. On popular culture as a political force, see also Teresa De Lauretis, “Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg’s ‘M. Butterfly’,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (1999). For examples of studies that have used the press and other popular media as source materials in exploring the cultural history of gender and sexuality, see especially Lisa Z. Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012); Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture; Alison Oram, Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2007). 101 Orsi Husz and Amanda Lagerqvist, “Konsumtionens motsägelser: en inledning,” in Förbjudna njutningar: spår från konsumtionskulturens historia i Sverige, eds. Peder Aléx and Johan Söderberg (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001), 26. On the development of advertising in interwar Sweden, see Kenth Hermansson, I persuadörernas verkstad: marknadsföring i Sverige 1920–1965: en studie av ord och handling hos marknadens aktörer (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002). 102 Larsson, En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning och svensk veckopress, 115. 103 Charme: den moderna damtidningen was published 1921–33. In this study I have focused mainly on the volumes 1923–26. In regard to Idun, published 1888–1963, I have surveyed issues in the range 1919–30. Both Idun and Charme targeted a broad spectrum of middle class modern women, but as Lisbeth Larsson points out, Charme was the most commercially orientated women’s magazine at the time, devoted to independent and urban young women. Ibid., 127. Charme did not only address wealthy women, however, as Emma Severinsson notes, but also common office girls of the lower middle classes with little means for consumption. Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” 100. Idun addressed housewives as well as career women from the perspective of a range of cultural, social and political aspects of women’s emancipation. On Idun, see also Margareta Stål, “För quinnans framåtskridande: Idun de första 25 åren,” in Nya röster: Svenska kvinnotidskrifter under 150 år, ed. Anna Nordenstam (Möklinta: Gidlund, 2014), 89, 105. On Charme, see also Emma Severinsson, Moderna kvinnor: Modernitet, femininitet och svenskhet i svensk veckopress 1920–1933 (Lund: Lunds universitet, 2018).

Introduction  27 104 Anna Bohlin, “Tidevarvet och K.J.,” in Nya röster: Svenska kvinnotidskrifter under 150 år, ed. Anna Nordenstam (Möklinta: Gidlund, 2014). 105 In the case of Filmnyheter I have focused mainly on the volumes of 1924–28. The magazine Filmnyheter:  aktuell, omväxlande, lättläst (full title) was issued 1920–29 but has been less studied in historical scholarship, as Tommy Gustafsson notes, than Filmjournalen, another popular Swedish film magazine at the time. Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 35. In the context of films, I have focused primarily on film context (debates, reviews, star portraits), rather than specific films. This distinction matters because the contents of films and film magazines differed in several ways. As film historians have pointed out, moral debates often associated movies with deplorable decadence, but the controversial content that movies were accused of existed in reality more often in reviews and film programs than in the actual films. Ibid., 63; Ulf Zander, “Etermedia och film,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Signum, 2009), 96–98. On the magazine Filmjournalen, see also Eva Blomberg, Vill ni se en stjärna? Kön, kropp och kläder i Filmjournalen 1919–1953 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006). 106 In the case of Svensk Motortidning I have surveyed the volumes of 1921–30. 107 Abate, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. 108 On Margareta Suber’s novel Charlie, see, for instance, Kristina Fjelkestam, “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden,” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 13, no. 1 (2005); Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla. . . ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i Ensamhetens brunn”; Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 49–55. For further references, see Chapter 6.

Bibliography Abate, Michelle Ann. Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009. Adams, Rachel. “Masculinity Without Men.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 3 (2000): 467–78. Aléx, Peder, and Johan Söderberg, eds. Förbjudna njutningar: spår från konsumtionskulturens historia i Sverige. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Andersson, Therése. Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014. Andrews, Maggie, and Sallie McNamara, eds. Women and the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present, vol. 18. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Behling, Laura L. The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935. Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Bergdahl, Liv Saga. Kärleken utan namn: identitet och (o)synlighet i svenska lesbiska romaner. Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2010. Björklund, Jenny. Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Bladh, Christine, ed. Rodderskor på Stockholms vatten. Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2008.

28 Introduction Blomberg, Eva. Vill ni se en stjärna? Kön, kropp och kläder i Filmjournalen 1919–1953. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006. Bohlin, Anna. “Tidevarvet och K.J.” In Nya röster: Svenska kvinnotidskrifter under 150 år, edited by Anna Nordenstam, 135–50. Möklinta: Gidlund, 2014. Borgström, Eva. Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935. Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2016. ———, ed. Makalösa kvinnor: könsöverskridare i myt och verklighet. Stockholm: Alfabeta/Anamma, 2002. Breger, Claudia. “Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of ‘Female Inversion’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005): 76–106. Buckley, Cheryl, and Hilary Fawcett. Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women’s Fashion from the Fin de Siecle to the Present. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Cahn, Susan K. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport. 2nd ed. Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 1994. Centerwall, Sture, Yngve Lorents, and Gotthard Johansson, eds. Bonniers konversationslexikon. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1922. Clark, Anna. Desire: A  History of European Sexuality. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. “Twilight Moments.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005). Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. De Lauretis, Teresa. “Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg’s ‘M. Butterfly’.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (1999): 303–34. Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ———. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London; New York: Routledge, 1993. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Eskilsson, Lena. Drömmen om kamratsamhället: Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på Fogelstad 1925–35. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Finkelstein, Joanne. The Fashioned Self. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. Fjelkestam, Kristina. “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden.” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 13, no. 1 (2005).

Introduction  29 ———. Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002. Florin, Christina, and Lars Kvarnström. Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap: genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1950. Stockholm: Atlas, 2001. Frame, Lynne. “Gretchen, Girl, Garçonne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal New Woman.” In Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum, 12–40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. 1992. Gustafsson, Tommy. En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet. Lund: Sekel, 2007. ———. Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. ———. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hermansson, Kenth. I persuadörernas verkstad: marknadsföring i Sverige 1920– 1965: en studie av ord och handling hos marknadens aktörer. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002. Hirdman, Anja. Tilltalande bilder: genus, sexualitet och publiksyn i Veckorevyn och Fib aktuellt. Stockholm: Atlas, 2001. Hirdman, Yvonne. Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010. 1989. ———. “Key Concepts in Feminist Theory: Analysing Gender and Welfare.” FREIA, no. 34 (1996): 1–47. Hirdman, Yvonne, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds. Sveriges historia: 1920–1965. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012. Holgersson, Ulrika. Populärkulturen och klassamhället: Arbete, klass och genus i svensk dampress i början av 1900-talet. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005. Horak, Laura. Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Husz, Orsi, and Amanda Lagerqvist. “Konsumtionens motsägelser: en inledning.” In Förbjudna njutningar: spår från konsumtionskulturens historia i Sverige, edited by Peder Aléx and Johan Söderberg. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Ingemarsdotter, Jenny. “Ett liv i lärdom och dygd: en studie av två äreminnen över Wendela Skytte (1608–1629).” In Stella: Arbetsrapporter. Uppsala: Avdelningen för vetenskapshistoria, Uppsala universitet, 2005.

30 Introduction ———. Ramism, Rhetoric and Reform: An Intellectual Biography of Johan Skytte (1577–1645). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2011. Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880– 1930. London: Pandora, 1985. Larsson, Lisbeth. En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning och svensk veckopress. Stockholm: Symposion, 1989. Laver, James. A Concise History of Costume. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Lewis, Brian, ed. British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Lindeqvist, Karin. “ ‘Den där lilla . . .’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i ‘Ensamhetens brunn’.” lambda nordica 3, no. 11 (2006): 7–25. Lundgren, Kristina. Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014. Lybeck, Marti M. Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Manns, Ulla. Den sanna frigörelsen: Fredrika-Bremer-förbundet 1884–1921. Kulturhistoriskt bibliotek; Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1997. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey and Martin B. Duberman, 281–93. New York: Meridian Books, 1989. Noble, Jean Bobby. Masculinities Without Men? Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Oram, Alison. Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. Österberg, Eva, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, eds. Rummet vidgas: kvinnor på väg ut i offentligheten 1880–1940. Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002. Peiss, Kathy Lee. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60. Ritchie, Rachel, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, and S. Jay Kleinberg, eds. Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption, vol. 23. London; New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Rosenberg, Tiina. Byxbegär. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Alfabeta/Anamma, 2004. Rydström, Jens. Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Rydström, Jens, and David Tjeder, eds. Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009.

Introduction  31 Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97. Severinsson, Emma. “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 97–118. ———. Moderna kvinnor: Modernitet, femininitet och svenskhet i svensk veckopress 1920–1933. Lund: Lunds universitet, 2018. Sigel, Lisa Z. Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012. Sjöholm, Carina. Gå på bio: rum för drömmar i folkhemmets Sverige. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2003. Snickars, Pelle. “Det medialiserade samhället.” In Industriland: Tolv forskare om när Sverige blev modernt, edited by Jenny Andersson and Jan af Geijerstam, 171–201. Stockholm: Premiss, 2008. Söderberg, Johan. Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Søland, Birgitte. Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Sölvén, Arnold. Kätterier i kvinnofrågan. Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924. Stahre, Ulrika. Beundrad barbar: amasonen i västeuropeisk bildkultur 1789– 1918. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2004. Stål, Margareta. “För quinnans framåtskridande: Idun de första 25 åren.” In Nya röster: Svenska kvinnotidskrifter under 150 år, edited by Anna Nordenstam. Möklinta: Gidlund, 2014. Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Steele, Valerie, and Hal Rubinstein. A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Stein, Jordan Alexander. “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities.” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (2013): 855–69. Steorn, Patrik. “Konstnärligt antimode: Svensk reformdräkt kring sekelskiftet 1900.” In Mode: en introduktion—en tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse, edited by Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg, 225–49. Stockholm: Raster, 2009. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Tolvhed, Helena. På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990. Göteborg: Makadam, 2015. Ulvros, Eva Helen. “Den nya kvinnan.” In Individer i rörelse: Kulturhistoria i 1800-talets Sverige, edited by Birgitta Svensson and Anna Walette, 89–118. Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2012. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Wallenberg, Louise. “Designing Desirable Men: Fashion, Style and Masculinity in 1930s Cinema.” In Star and Seam, edited by Dirk Laundwert. Antwerp: MoMu Press, 2011. Weinbaum, Alys Eve, ed. The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Wheelwright, Julie. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. London: Pandora, 1989.

32 Introduction Wiegman, Robyn, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions.” differences 26, no. 1 (2015): 1–25. Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Rev. ed. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. 1985. Zander, Ulf. “Etermedia och film.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Lund: Signum, 2009.

Part I

Telling Stories Film, Fashion and “Funny Complications”

1 The M Word Modern or Masculine?

“The modern young woman”—aren’t we tired of that expression? The girl of today, the garçonne type, the jazz girl—who is she, of whom are they speaking?1 —Filmnyheter, Dec. 6, 1926

By the mid-1920s Swedish reporters at times expressed fatigue when addressing the subject of the modern girl. Most things written about her—“the new woman, the modern young girl, the new grandmother, or whatever they call her”—were simply, as declared by one observer, “rubbish.”2 Yet, while acknowledging that the subject had been drawn out ad nauseam, the stories nevertheless kept coming, frequently accompanied by illustrative visual materials, such as photographs of fashionable garçonne girls, film stills of cross-dressed actresses, caricatures of such actresses and endless cartoons depicting young, short-haired women as indistinguishable from young, short-haired men. The essence of modernity is, in fact, its “visuality,” wrote one reporter, concluding that never before had society been so immersed in pictures of all sorts, not only in books and newspapers but also in the form of films, which had contributed to a “sharpened visual sensibility.”3 Because this new visuality seemed to focus particularly on the undetermined and gender ambiguous look of “the modern young woman,” the question asked in a Swedish film magazine in 1926—“Who is she?”—continued to generate new answers.4 As a symbol of progress and a new era, the fashionably masculine “modern girl” had emerged in Swedish popular media in the 1920s as one of the most visually striking symbols of modernity. With her short hair and confident attitude, she contributed in important but overlooked ways to the formation of a modern self-image in and of Sweden as well as an emerging urban identity in Stockholm.5 However, images of gender ambiguous “garçonne types” (whose characteristics I will come back to) nevertheless also raised concerns at the time with the stability of a normative gender order based on male masculinity and female femininity.

36  Telling Stories In this context, popular media, such as movies and magazines, provided a space to explore a more diverse set of female masculinities that went beyond the stereotypes of mannish feminist or fashionable flapper. Popular topics included not only the “masculinization” of women’s fashions, but also female to male cross-dressing at the movies. Drawing on a range of Swedish fashion and film periodicals, this chapter traces how varieties of female masculinities came into play in the 1920s as a diversifying cultural force that was variously seen as a threat to society’s gender order and a sign of modernity. Could one imagine la garçonne as a devoted homemaker? As a loyal, Swedish mother?6 If the modern garçonne type was “harmless,” as one film magazine chose to characterize her, was it then harmless to desire her—or to be her?7 Whether still or moving, pictures offered in this context many options for interpretation, including the possibility that female masculinity could be chosen and performed.8 Fascinated by this modern fluidity of gender, Swedish entertainment magazines published in the 1920s numerous pictures of cross-dressed as well as garçonne-styled female movie stars. By deliberately conflating cross-dressing (women wearing male clothing) with masculinized fashions (women’s clothing in masculine styles), some reporters invited their readers to speculate on the future extent of women’s ongoing masculinization, where the cross-dressed actress offered a fateful vision of modernity’s dissolution of all gender difference.9 The popularity of cross-dressing as a theme was, of course, not new to the 1920s, but built on a well-established theatrical tradition, which, beyond its carnevalesque elements, had also created scenic spaces for ambiguous genders and desires.10 Through the rise of new media such as movies and mass-produced magazines, it can be argued that these queer spaces had expanded considerably by the 1920s. However, as historians have pointed out, the “queerness” of the cross-dressed movie star at this time has often been overstated: As Laura Horak shows, cross-dressed characters that have been read by contemporary scholars in terms of lesbian identity were, in the early years of cinema and well into the 1920s, instead seen as “wholesome” entertainment.11 Yet, in the wider context of an increasingly consumer-orientated Western culture that encouraged people to embrace their desires, concerns were at the same time raised in regard to young women’s vivid interest in movie stars and fashion: “Women were met with a rising consumer culture that whetted their desires,” as Lisa Z. Sigel writes, “and a society that denounced them for their engagement with those desires at every turn.”12 To Swedish reporters, the modern girl or woman was many things at once: modern and masculine, decadent and odd, and, for better or worse, a symbol of an American entertainment culture that seemed increasingly to define the dreams and desires of young women. Whether perceived as desirable or deplorable, Stockholm’s emerging big city status was measured at the time not only against the cosmopolitan centers of New York,

The M Word  37 Paris, London and Berlin, but also against the look of the modern, Swedish girl. The visuality of modernity’s new and gender ambiguous girls was also seen as connected, somehow, to women’s political emancipation and increasing social independence. In Sweden, this was the time when a new “utopian reformism” was being discussed, formulated most famously by Social Democrat Per Albin Hansson in the mid-1920s in terms of the “people’s home” (folkhemmet).13 This social agenda was founded in its own paradoxes, as gender historian Yvonne Hirdman has pointed out, building on the one hand on a vision of democracy and equality, but at the same time deeply imbued with a patriarchal and gendered way of thinking, expecting men to be the builders and constructors of the new people’s home (as men were presumably active in the public arenas of politics, economy and science), whereas women were expected to create a “homely atmosphere,” including family issues, healthcare and social welfare.14 The role of cross-dressed movie stars and young garçonne types in this homely Swedish vision of modern progress tended to be, as this chapter argues, both unstable and unclear. In examining the gender negotiations inherent in the stories of fashionable, young women in the 1920s, this chapter traces how the M words “modern” and “masculine” were charged very differently in different contexts, both positively and negatively. First, I  discuss how Swedish reporters approached the phenomenon of modern flappers, jazz girls and garçonne types as a matter merely of harmless fashions, and how “the girl of today” was defended as masculine in style only.15 Second, I turn to the darker stories of urban decadence presumably played out in the nightclubs and art studios of Berlin, where the masculinity of the monocled girl in tuxedo was described as odd and suspicious. Third, I examine the female-to-male cross-dresser in cinema, presented in Swedish media both as source of “funny complications” and as a disturbing vision of a female masculinization process out of control.16 I begin by outlining the Swedish context, focusing particularly on the urban setting of Stockholm in the 1920s.

Arriving in the City Swedish women could vote in general elections for the first time in 1921.17 This marked the end of a long suffrage campaign, but not the end of the women’s movement. Founded in 1922 by a group of university-educated feminists, Kvinnliga medborgarskolan (The women’s citizen school) set out to teach women how to exercise their new democratic rights, whether in politics or work life.18 Meanwhile, in the hope of gaining access to the new age, thousands of young women slaving away in the countryside as farm girls and milkmaids left their homes and traveled to cities, near or far, looking for jobs in factories, hospitals, shops, restaurants, hair salons or in private homes as maids.19 Many arrived in Stockholm. As Sweden’s

38  Telling Stories capital, this was not only the home of the Royal Castle but also the home of new palace-looking movie theaters as well as a growing noisy motor fleet of thousands of automobiles and motorcycles.20 In terms of population, Stockholm, with about 400,000 inhabitants in the early 1920s, constituted a fraction of the million-sized cities of London or Berlin, but such relative numbers mattered little to people who had just arrived in the city.21 As vividly described by novelist Agnes von Krusenstjerna in her 1924 novel Tony, narrating the fate of a young woman arriving from a smaller town to Stockholm, the very pace of the capital was different: Everyone rushed along “as if something had happened,” fighting their way through traffic while passing “colossal windows” displaying “the splendors of the great bazaars of the world.”22 However, access to these splendors remained conditioned: Women earned considerably less than men, and despite their new visibility in popular media, the World War had not entirely erased the cultural memory of the previous century when “any woman who loitered in the streets [.  .  .] was likely to be taken for a prostitute.”23 Reports in the press of women struggling to avoid being molested or attacked on their way home indicate that women still moved through public spaces on different terms than men.24 Still, even though the city offered low wages and poor housing conditions, it also provided an escape from the endless plights of the even lower-paid farm work in the countryside. Educated, middle-class girls could hope for a career in public service: In 1923 the parliament passed a law that granted women the right to hold public offices (unless they got engaged, married or pregnant).25 Increasing numbers of office girls, dressed in “slightly masculine” styles, could thus by the mid-1920s be seen hurrying daily from private to public spaces in the Stockholmian cityscape.26 However, despite new ideals of equality and celebrations of the modern woman in popular media, the independent standing of these female employees also made them vulnerable to attacks in the press that described them as “mannish” or as representatives of a “neutral” gender.27 The metropolitan mixing of men and women nevertheless raised thoughts on the grounds for a system of double standards, separate wages and unequal rights (see Figure 1.1).28 Writing in a major daily paper in 1925, a female doctor brought attention not only to the unfair wages in factories (a woman earned about two-thirds of a man), but she also defended the right of the factory girl to enjoy herself, arguing that it was only natural that young women should have some fun in their own free time—and even hold off on marriage.29 Why hurry into the hardships of motherhood, children and a demanding husband when two working girls could instead “rent a place together” (as they indeed often did, as she had seen for herself), make it their home and enjoy life for a while, dancing and going to the movies.30 They would not have much money to spend, but still, as concluded by the doctor, “Human beings

The M Word  39 need entertainment.”31 Such support of a female, urban independence would have been unthinkable only a decade or two earlier. However, observers of the city typically did not produce arguments in “human” terms but in gendered ones, particularly with regard to the habits and looks of young women. To cartoonists and satirists, the theme of the masculinization of women (and, sometimes, the feminization of men) gave rise to an entire genre of jokes, playing with the confusion that arose from a perceived elimination of all visual gender difference.32 In 1927, a cartoon in the satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix related the surprise of a man who asks a young man for a cigarette—who turns out to be a young woman: “How annoying when you ask a man for a smoke and it turns out to be a woman who does not smoke!”33 The funny or awkward aspect of this particular situation did not stem from the fact that the woman did not smoke (an increasingly common female habit at this time), but that the man had failed, at first, to identify the gender of the short-haired stranger. Yet, his failure was presumably not his fault; rather, it was the young woman who had broken the “cardinal rule of gender,” which in Jack Halberstam’s argument consists of one simple but important rule— being “readable at a glance.”34 The central position of the modern girl or woman in early interwar culture was thus related not only to her new democratic rights but also, as satirists were well aware, to her new looks. As Yvonne Hirdman writes, “the pre-war woman, with her long hair, distinct waist, long skirts [. . .] and big hats, belonged to another world compared to the young ‘flapper’ with her short skirt, short hat-less hair and boyishly slim figure.”35 To many in the 1920s, this new style appeared masculine as much as modern, particularly on account of the short hair—a legacy of the war, as surmised by observers across Europe at this time.36 Having experienced the war from the sidelines, Sweden had been less affected by its social turmoil, but Swedish commentators nevertheless adduced “the great upheaval” when explaining why women’s habits and looks had become “manlier.”37 Yet, as Birgitte Søland has argued in a Danish context, the momentum of change was rooted not only in the war but also in modernity itself, in terms of new cultures of consumption and an expanding entertainment industry.38 This cultural momentum is evident also in the case of Sweden where the visual media of films, magazines and advertising came to work both as signs and conveyors of modernity, bringing the latest fashions and trends to innumerable smaller and bigger towns across the country. Technological progress, movie theaters, automobiles, sports and jazz clubs all contributed to a sense of rapid modern progress.39 As increasing numbers of young women and men were able to participate in modernity’s new consumer culture, discussions of “why” change had occurred (and references to the war) eventually began to fade from public interest, whereas the question of how gained importance— how to dress, how to act and be, and in the case of women, how to be without (being) a man.40

40  Telling Stories

Figure 1.1 Election workers in Stockholm 1924 (the second national election in Sweden when women could vote)

Source: Photo: unknown. Stockholms stadsarkiv (SE/SSA/1887/Allmänna valmansförbundet/ F3:10). CC-BY.

Learning how to engage in public life presented particular challenges for women, as they for the most part lacked female predecessors. As Hirdman points out, a limited range of models was available to the

The M Word  41 modern, job-seeking woman, beyond “mom,” “sister,” “vamp” or indeed “man.”41 Since men dominated the worlds of politics, sports, academia and business, the young woman who attempted to join them could not do so without negotiating, on some level, her identity in relation both to public configurations of masculinity and to society’s expectations of feminine decorum. It was precisely in this context that the “modern woman” became such an important concept and tool for guidance. The expanding opportunities for women in Stockholm and other cities to find work, go to the movies and consume goods (or at least dream of consuming) meant, of course, that there was not just one model of modern womanhood around, and not just one way of exploring—or transgressing— gender, but many.42 In entertainment media, various typologies of modern women became a popular method of navigating this new cultural geography. While these maps of modern womanhood were often intended to amuse, as seen in the cartoon published by SöndagsnisseStrix in 1925 that differentiated women “by hair” (the “rebel haircut,” the “reader’s hair” and “athletic fringes,” among others), they also functioned as entertaining guides for those uncertain about, for example, which hairstyles were modern and yet not too masculine.43 While crude typologies served a need at the time to make sense of the modern woman by sub-dividing her and defining her, whether as “jazz girl,” “sports girl,” “vamp” or something else, they offered little guidance to those interested in the nuances of current fashions and choices.44 In contrast, the narrative, or storytelling, approach to the who and the how of modern womanhood allowed for various modern paths to be followed more closely, whether in a film, a new novel or through an up-to-date portrait of a movie star in a magazine. Occasionally, stories established new types: When Victor Margueritte’s bestseller novel La Garçonne was published in Sweden in 1923, the title was translated to Ungkarlsflickan (The bachelor girl), but the original French term la garçonne nevertheless became very popular in Swedish media, referencing women’s decadent and/or masculinized fashions, styles and habits.45 Thus, it is important to keep in mind that various female types—and transgressions—were discussed not only in reference to the general terms “masculine” or “masculinized” but also in the context of newer labels with more uncertain meanings.46 In addition to a certain fluidity of labels and language, the nature of the imagined transgressions of modernity’s new garçonne types shifted in character over time. As shown by Kristina Fjelkestam in her survey of Swedish interwar novels, la garçonne was associated in the early 1920s not with (sexual) deviance but, rather, with dancing flappers and the perceived decadence of a heterosexual leisure scene.47 However, later in the interwar period, certain kinds of masculine New Women of literature were haunted by a more damning sexualized shadow, generally unnamed but discussed by Fjelkestam in terms of the “mannish lesbian.” This figure appeared now and then in Swedish novels as a shady character with

42  Telling Stories emancipist opinions; a “monstrous” type known from late-nineteenthcentury sexology, which had discussed how feminism and female homosexuality might be connected.48 Nevertheless, as Fjelkestam also points out, the boundaries between these two models of female sexual agency— the modern and heterosexually defined flapper/garçonne and the feminist “mannish lesbian”—were blurry, and these types were, in fact, often represented by similar attributes and manners, linked to the epithet “new” or “modern” woman (the label of garçonne was particularly fuzzy in this regard as I will come back to).49 Beyond novels, the Swedish public could study the types and adventures of modern women in a range of popular entertainment magazines, reporting of the latest fashions and trends in big cities like New York, London, Paris and Berlin.50 However, as admitted by some, the cosmopolitan status of Stockholm was highly questionable: Visitors were even reported to have had dismissed the Swedish capital as little better than an unremarkable small town.51 Nevertheless, Stockholm-based reporters pointed to a number of rapid transformations: In 1924, the fashion magazine Charme declared that one could in fact these days see “two Stockholms”; the old Stockholm, defined by its old churches, the city hall and the wooden houses in the southern quarters, and then the new Stockholm with its apartment houses, open squares, busy traffic and, most notably, the bright “fireworks” of billboard signs across the city.52 Stockholm was, in Charme’s conclusion, an expanding city full of surprises, and soon foreign visitors would be “under the impression that Stockholm is a big city.”53 To further emphasize Stockholm’s rising cosmopolitan status, Charme and other magazines featured detailed reports of modern young women and their new hairstyles and habits—driving automobiles, sporting and pursuing careers.54 In this manner, Stockholm was mirrored in as well as by the modern woman. Despite increasing gender concerns, the modern city was thus typically explored and showcased in Swedish print media through the modern young woman and her scene, the urban world of film, fashion and fun. Swedish reporters nevertheless remained aware of Stockholm’s reputation as a small town: As succinctly concluded by Bonniers Veckotidning in 1928, in relation to Stockholm’s fashion shows: “What Paris wants, Stockholm must do.”55 The close relationship between fashion, film and movie stars moreover gave rise to some confusion among critics in regard to the prevalence in real life of the much-talked-about modern female “types,” whether labeled garçonne, flapper, jazz girl or something else. On the one hand, “the type” (unspecified) was well known and could be spotted in restaurants and in the streets of Stockholm, as stated by an advertisement for the new film Kvinna eller man? (Woman or Man?) in the daily newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen in 1926.56 On the other hand, such eccentricities as women wearing tuxedo jackets and ties with their evening dress “were most likely seen on stage in Stockholm,” as

The M Word  43 declared by the morning paper Svenska Dagbladet in 1926. Yet, as the same article went on to explain (looking back at the year 1926), the “masculinizing style of women’s fashion appeared stronger than ever, almost arrogant.”57 Such contradictory statements were not uncommon at the time—to stress the impact of women’s masculinized fashions on the one hand and to downplay what was considered its most extreme expressions on the other. In this way Stockholm could be seen as modern without being decadent. However, not everyone agreed that such a balance between modernity and (female) masculinity had been achieved. Stories in the press of ugly and deplorable new women reflected fears that young women pursuing educations and careers would end up mannish looking rather than fashionably boyish.58 This fear of mannishness can be discerned in many stories of modern women, particularly in terms of distinctions made between masculinity as fashion and masculinity as transgression (whether political or sexual, or both). The tension between these different interpretations of female masculinity is present in all of the stories to be discussed in the following, whether in the shape of concerns that fashionable young city girls would never want to marry, or fears that “hypermodern” women donning tuxedos and monocles constituted somehow a source of decadence and depravity.

Subway Sadie—Masculinity by Fashion Swedish film magazines in the 1920s constituted a lively arena for discussions of fashion, modernity and the modern girl.59 Answering the question in 1926 of who the “genuinely modern” girl really was, the film magazine Filmnyheter used a recent Hollywood production, Subway Sadie, as an example.60 The article featured a photograph of a young woman, the actress Dorothy Mackaill, in a modern cloche hat, having a cup of coffee on the run. Leading a fast-paced, metropolitan life, Mackaill knew both how to enjoy and manage her big city life: She would typically stay out late dancing, then rise early, drink plenty of coffee, rush off to the subway and fight her way through the crowds, all without complaining, as she was “a child of the city.”61 The city in this case was New York—an exciting model for any Swedish reader dreaming of the life of the truly modern young woman. Mackaill was, according to this report, a perfect example of that “jazz girl, the girl of today and the garçonne type,” but, as the reporter hastened to add, the latter was meant “not in a bad way,” but merely as a reference to “dress, hair and figure.”62 In any case, being a “genuinely modern” woman really meant only one thing, as this critic concluded—“she works.”63 As evident in the narrative of this article, the actress Mackaill was not necessarily distinguished from her film role “Subway Sadie.” The point here was to portray a modern young city woman—devoted to her career

44  Telling Stories but also knowledgeable of “skin care and clothes.”64 However, on the point of career choices, Filmnyheter’s reporter noted a difference between fiction and reality: While Subway Sadie in the movie quit her career when she met a millionaire whom she married, Mackaill herself continued to work, even after having married. Through such double exposure, the conflict of choosing between family and career was hinted at while the urban lifestyle of a modern young girl was still foregrounded. This conflict of choice was well known to Swedish women from other sources as well, including short stories in popular media, where the typical career woman (having chosen her independence over marriage) was often depicted as lonely and somewhat mannish-looking.65 In this context, movie stars such as Mackaill offered guidance as well as hope: Not only was she a symbol of an exciting cosmopolitan modernity but she also functioned as a handy guide to modern womanhood—independent and fashionably garçonne-like without mannish tendencies. As will be further discussed in Chapter 2, such tendencies could typically refer to someone engaged in feminist agitation and rallies, someone who was not “flirtatious,” someone interested in “reforming women’s manner of dressing,” and/or someone who looked like a “butch-type.”66 The star Mackaill, hurrying through the subway in perfect style, was ultimately presented both as an icon of beauty and at the same time, the typical modern girl.67 Film historian Richard Dyer has discussed this paradox of elevation and commonness in terms of “the way in which [the stars] articulate the business of being an individual.”68 As suggested by the focus in Swedish 1920s film magazines, this “business” appears to have been particularly challenging to women; being modern, but not “in a bad way.” In the case of Mackaill and her role in Subway Sadie, readers were in the end presented with a vision of a modern girl who enjoyed certain modern but traditionally male freedoms, pursuing her career during the day and roaming the city at night, while also performing a cheerful femininity that always paid attention to style and never complained.69 The (masculine) independence of the character Subway Sadie was furthermore ameliorated by the fact that she did not refrain from marriage. Sadie/Mackaill was, in other words, portrayed as a good modern girl— independent and always in style. By implication, New York, with its crowds, clubs and coffee drinkers, was held up as a corresponding model for Stockholm to emulate—a genuinely modern city. While Paris dominated Swedish novels at this time as the city of female self-fulfillment, New York and other American cities dominated in the context of movies—two-thirds of the films that premiered in Sweden in the 1920s were American.70 The individuality and equality of the “mass culture” of America was seen as both a promise and a threat by Swedish observers: On the one hand, critics feared that Swedish culture would become shallow and soulless and that modern women would ultimately reject family and homestead, but at the same time, women’s magazines

The M Word  45 appreciated the seemingly free, egalitarian and independent lifestyle of the American flapper.71 As stated by the fashion magazine Charme in 1924, it was impossible to discern by the looks of “Miss Flapper” whether she worked downtown or on Fifth Avenue, or whether her father was the owner of a Rolls Royce or a second-hand Ford.72 America’s Miss Flappers nevertheless shared one goal, as the magazine concluded—to find a man. The independence of American young women was thus ultimately presented as unthreatening because it was seen as a temporary phase prior to a higher goal (marriage).73 Fashion magazines like Charme devoted numerous articles not only to the look of modern women but also to their ability to stay on the right side of masculinity in a world full of “masculine” activities. Advising young women was not made easier by the vagueness of foreign terms and labels, such as “garçonne girls” or “bachelor types.” In the daily press, la garçonne often referred to a masculine look or specific outfit that involved a tuxedo suit (a tailored jacket and a skirt, but not trousers), and typically also a short hairstyle and certain attributes such as monocles and a cigarette.74 The assessments of this garçonne style varied among Swedish commentators. When the actress Tora Teje appeared in 1925 in a theater play in Stockholm dressed in a “garçonne suit” made of black velvet, with her haircut short in an “Eton crop,” reviewers in the press appreciated the “artistic effect” while also noting that Teje’s look could be associated with various “depraved types created by modern society”75 and “hyper-modern circles of decadence.”76 Because the garçonne label was in this manner associated with suspicious urban lifestyles, Swedish commentators sometimes felt the need to differentiate la garçonne from bachelor girl: As explained by Charme in 1923, a “bachelor girl” (ungkarlsflicka) referred merely to an independent girl who earned her own living, whereas “garçonne girl” additionally suggested an indulgent lifestyle, focused on pleasure and decadent entertainment.77 On the whole, stories in Swedish film- and fashion magazines of modern girls enjoying their city lives presented a model of a new and active modern womanhood, which was fashionably garçonne-like, but not mannish.78 However, women were also warned of paying too much attention to style and self-fashioning, a transgression verging on the masculine in its focus on self rather than family. A Swedish cartoonist in 1928 thus depicted how two fashionable women in sleek dresses were holding onto something precious in their arms, not babies but a lapdog and a summer parasol: Yet, “what does it really matter,” as the caption sarcastically read, “if women become more and more masculine if their maternal feelings are still intact?”79 Masculine selfishness could thus be construed as the new “baby” of the modern woman. If seen as migrating moreover from the realm of consumption into other areas of modern decadence, this garçonne-styled selfishness could be perceived as a sign of something even worse, related not only to gender but also to sexuality.

46  Telling Stories

Masculine by Monocle: The Bad Ways of the “Hyper-Modern” Despite claims that the typical garçonne type was charming and harmless, a closer look at the debates indicates growing concerns. As “hundreds upon hundreds” of young men and women poured out onto the streets of Stockholm to enjoy themselves, concerns were raised with regard especially to the women.80 The recurring question was whether these “hyper-modern” girls could be imagined as mothers and wives.81 Could one imagine a garçonne-styled grandmother? A  working mama with a shingled haircut? As it happened, she could be imagined, but mostly as an amusement: Looking up at its shingled, monocled, smoking and laidback mother, an astonished child thus exclaimed in a 1925 cartoon, “It must be Dad!”82 The playful boyishness of the modern girl was, in other words, not expected to mature into “masculine” womanhood or some kind of “third sex.”83 However, the containment of gender transgressions by youth (“boyish” had always been less threatening than “mannish”) was increasingly troubled by suggestions that all kinds of women, of all ages, wanted to be modern.84 Of course, if everyone wanted to be as modern as the garçonne girl, and the meaning (and masculine implications) of la garçonne were unclear, the future of womanhood was unclear too. To some observers, the ways of modernity’s new garçonne types were not unclear at all: In 1924, the fashion magazine Charme reported in some detail on how Berlin was tarnished by illegal “locales” that hosted “orgies” of “fiery music, women, champagne, cocaine and opium.”85 A  drawing of a woman dressed in a chunky “garçonne-styled” winter coat and a slender man dressed in a “dandy” male coat, further illustrated the gender confusion of Berlin’s modern crowd. Two years later, the decadence of the Berlin metropolis was brought up again in Charme, in an article that reported from “artist cafés” where young, pale men “posed” as deep thinkers together with girls of two kinds that were “the exact opposites of each other”; “young women with low heels and a masculine exterior” and “young powdered women adorned in the latest fashions.”86 Such depictions, referring in this case monocled garçonne types and painted flappers, invoked two different kinds of gender transgressions, both failing to achieve a balanced modern womanhood—the one, too masculine, the other, too feminine. Yet such modern failures also ensured a continued fascination with the “locales” of big cities and the (bad) ways of modern women and men.87 In 1926, a conservative Swedish publication reported that a nightclub in Stockholm, the so-called Grotta Azurra (The Azurra Cave) was frequented by “exotic men” as well as “women who were least of all ‘ambiguous’ ” who could be seen “caressing each other at the tables.”88 However, despite such rumors of decadence, the first generation of nightclub owners in Stockholm complained of the provinciality of the Swedish people, and the number of

The M Word  47 “decadent” clubs in the Swedish capital in the 1920s appears to have been few and far between.89 Charme and other magazines nevertheless continued their scrutiny of Stockholm’s metropolitan status. Reporting from Bella Napoli in 1924, one of Stockholm’s “especially charming” dance palaces, Charme described how the place was crowded with young people at night, enjoying themselves and dancing all night long, just as in any modern, big city.90 Charme’s reporter particularly noted the many dancing women, and how they danced not only with men but also with each other, in couples. While this practice was “forbidden” at most other Stockholm restaurants, it was a common thing at Bella—girls dancing with each other.91 However, no harm was done, as surmised by the reporter, since gentlemen would often join the girls at their table later in the evening. As concluded by Charme, such women thus needed not be “la garçonne types just because of this!”92 Whether “this” referred to dancing “with each other,” or perhaps to dancing with male strangers—or both—la garçonne operated once again as a marker of potentially immoral behaviors and even of sexual ambiguity. Most disturbing, as suggested by a cartoonist in 1927, was the impression that modern girls did not really seem to need men anymore: Depicting two smoking young women at a party engaged only with each other, a disillusioned male observer concludes that “they sure can smoke, but at least they can not procreate.”93 Other satirists suggested outright that modern girls who were more interested in their new “feminine right to vote” and their “masculine habits” of enjoying cigarettes and drinks would eventually lose interest in motherhood as well as in men.94 Beyond satire, the threat of women with such “masculine habits” was also discussed in the daily press. When, for instance, literary critic Nils Erdmann in 1926 discussed Berta Rück’s novel The Clouded Pearl (published in Swedish with the title En modern flicka), he presented a decidedly bleaker image of modernity than many recent Hollywood productions had done. As a deplorable shadow of New York’s “Subway Sadie,” the novel’s main character Miss  Verity was described by Erdmann as a wreck, “hunting nervously for pleasures day and night,” consuming men without wanting to marry, smoking, dancing and shaping herself to be “a modern young lady of the most unwomanly type.”95 Erdmann had also noted another suspicious character in the novel, the strange Miss Oddley, dressed in green leather and equipped with a monocle as well as a cigarette holder. To Erdmann, the odd Miss  Oddley, also known as “Miss  Monocle,” appeared as “the very definition of unnatural”: Paraphrasing a passage in the novel, Erdmann noted how Miss Oddley’s dress, monocle, posture and entire persona, including her talk about theater plays and the recent novel La Garçonne, seemed to be “artificially grown at fashion institutes, art studio parties and—yes, in opium dungeons.”96 Certain modern styles were, in other words, not

48  Telling Stories merely about “fashion and looks” but also about new kinds of female personas, pointing to a new category of “hyper-modern” women with little or no interest in having children.97 Their sexual agency—configured as heterosexual in the vibrant nightlife scene of flappers and jazz music, and something “unnatural” in the bohemian milieu of theater plays and art studios—was presented as an especially threatening and fascinating facet of modern womanhood.98 Thus, even though Swedish media for the most part associated la garçonne with harmless trends and fashions, she could also be seen as a source of strange habits and even queer desires, grounded not so much in feminism but in modernity itself—girls holding off on marriage, girls dancing with each other, girls dressing in suits, girls reading La Garçonne. Their masculinity was neither defined exclusively by fashion, nor by a sexual type, but rather by a new sort of modern female agency. Resisting the logic of typology, the “masculine” garçonne girl thus tended to be depicted in Swedish media in the 1920s as neither “monstrously” mannish nor on par with the heterosexually defined feminine flapper. She was often associated with masculinity but in new ways that had yet to be defined, particularly in relation to the key term “modern.”99 Swedish satirists suggested that her independent, modern style would appeal not only to girls but to all kinds of women, young and old, rich and poor, urban or rural.100 Moral anxieties surrounding the potentially bad ways of modern garçonne types were thus fuelled not primarily by concerns about specific forms of deviance or decadence but by a growing understanding that the issues at stake affected everyone.

The “Most Modern” of Them All: From Dressing to Cross-Dressing Considering the metropolitan focus of Swedish entertainment magazines, one would have also expected substantial interest from the domestic film industry in exploring the lives of city people. However, this was not the case. Unlike film magazines, eager to write about the gender-ambiguous garçonne types on display in the modern urban landscape, Swedish films in the 1920s tended to be set in the countryside or in small-town milieus.101 Such thematic discrepancies can be explained partly by the international scope of film magazines, reviewing many foreign films, and partly by the priorities of the Swedish film industry, which, especially in the early 1920s, favored the format of romantic nationalism.102 As a result, the number of Swedish films that involved garçonne-styled or cross-dressed city girls was relatively modest compared to the popularity of this theme in domestic film magazines (a notable exception was the bold, central theme of the 1926 film The Girl in Tails, to be discussed later). Paradoxically, as Tommy Gustafsson points out, moral debates at this time associated movies in particular with a limitless modern decadence, but the raw

The M Word  49 violence and sexual content that movies were accused of existed more often in reviews and film programs than in the actual films.103 Film reviews that discussed cross-dressing inevitably focused on performances of gender, but they also addressed the wider topic of modern womanhood. Images of cross-dressed characters were in this context sometimes used as titillating illustrations of the look of the “modern girl.”104 The cross-dressed woman in cinema could, of course, be considered a phenomenon confined to a playful and imaginary realm outside reality, and in this way she posed no real threat to a gender order based on difference; she could be enjoyed both as an amusement and as an exciting but unlikely future scenario. However, because of a widespread notion that change was not only possible in modern society but part of its definition, the cross-dressed actress was not entirely harmless, and her look continued to haunt speculations regarding the future of the modern woman. Swedish film magazines discussed cases of cross-dressing both in foreign and domestic films. As reported by Filmnyheter in 1926, the Italian film L’ultimo Lord (given the title Kvinna eller man? in Swedish) had become the “talk of the town” in Stockholm due to the remarkable performance of lead actress Carmen Boni, whose character posed as a man.105 The film, “sold out for weeks” in Stockholm, was a classic story of cross-dressing, where the heroine has to change her gender temporarily as a way of achieving her goal (winning the approval of a wealthy but estranged grandfather in this case).106 Swedish reviewers were impressed with Boni’s acting, described as balanced and convincing, but they also took care to emphasize the femininity of Boni herself.107 However, many still pictures from the film only showed the actress in male attire, which created a conspicuous discrepancy between image and text (the latter insisting that the actress was a wonder of feminine charm and grace). For instance, unlike the happily coffee-drinking “Subway Sadie,” Boni’s character could be seen slouching in an armchair, clutching a bottle and staring sadly in the direction of the floor. Using this particular photo when describing “six modern girls” (all collected from the movies), Filmnyheter described Boni, with her “confusing exterior,” as the “most modern” of them all.108 In a paradoxical conclusion, Boni’s brooding character was characterized as a “refined, tender, well-bred girl, imaginable as a mother to a bunch of lovely children, as a support to a husband, as an obedient daughter, as a blushing object of a suitor’s attention.”109 Such queer dissonance was not unusual within the spreads of film magazines at this time, since a photograph, conditioned by “its frozen time and circumscribed space,” did not by itself reveal a resolution to the story.110 Operating from an assumption of “natural” gender difference, the accompanying text thus needed to ameliorate or counter the implicit visual message that masculinity could be chosen and performed.111

50  Telling Stories In 1926, Swedish film got its own cross-dressing success through the film Flickan i frack (The girl in tails), featuring a female student stealing her brother’s tailcoat to wear at the student ball. The film was promoted as a light-hearted comedy, and most reviewers were not particularly horrified by the rebelliousness of Magda Holm’s character Katja Kock, whom they insisted was above all charming and perky.112 However, the many film stills of a cross-dressed Holm engaged in a range of “masculine” activities, such as drinking and smoking cigars, introduced an element of visual ambiguity in regard to the argument of Holm’s perky harmlessness. As noted by Tommy Gustafsson, some critics in the daily press characterized the entire film as rather “bizarre.”113 The perceived bizarreness was, as Gustafsson argues, related not to the cross-dressing per se but to a case of cross-dressing that did not exaggerate the performance of the cross-dresser. Traditionally, the comedy of the genre was based on a disguise that was obviously failing, but Holm’s acting was neither overstated nor exaggerated.114 In the narrative of the film, her cross-dressing was indeed not meant to fool anyone but was enacted as a protest: Disappointed with her father, who had spent money on clothes only for her brother, Katja decides to attend the ball dressed in her brother’s expensive tails—an act which creates a scandal in the small town. In a key scene of the movie, Katja engages confidently in conversations with the surprised guests, and finally she enters the dance floor where she dances briefly with a girl. However, film historians have cautioned against overdetermined interpretations of such “queer moments” in early interwar cinema.115 As Laura Horak shows in her study on crossdressed women in American cinema cross-dressed-themed films in the 1910s and early 1920s were rather construed as “wholesome” entertainment.116 Only in the late 1920s, as “codes for recognizing lesbians” began to circulate among the general public (“codes that included, but were not limited to, male clothing”), did the transgressive meanings of crossdressing with which we are familiar today, as Horak argues, become more established.117 Yet, Horak also points out that cross-dressing has never meant one specific thing, even in one limited period of time, which in turn further underscores the importance of examining specific cases and contexts.118 In the Swedish early interwar context, one has to consider that the interest in movies like Flickan i frack (The girl in tails) arose not only in relation to the specific film plot but also in the context of a rising awareness at this time of a system of masculine signifiers that women appropriated and played with. Photographs of cross-dressed or merely garçonne-styled actresses were often utilized in speculations on the future of femininity and modern womanhood. In 1926, for instance, the magazine Filmnyheter characteristically left unanswered the question of whether the short-haired, slim American actress Pauline Starke should be seen as “a representative of woman-type or man-type.”119 Reviewers

The M Word  51 meanwhile struggled to balance the masculinity of cross-dressed characters with other, more feminine qualities: Elizabeth Bergner, who had starred cross-dressed in several adventure films, was thus described as having a “unique” style: brittle yet tough, weak yet strong-willed, original yet modern.120 The popularity of female-to-male cross-dressing in Sweden in the 1920s arose also in the context of women’s ongoing emancipation, as women entered public life and transgressed on a daily basis the boundaries of a traditionally defined homebound womanhood. The cultural interest in cross-dressed female actresses seems in this context to have been reinforced by the multi-layeredness of their performances—a modern girl, perhaps even a garçonne type, playing the part of a resourceful woman posing as a man.121 These layers of “masculine” performances could nevertheless be presented as a form of thought-provoking entertainment rather than a threat. As Katie Sutton argues in her German study in the context of performance and cross-dressing, representations of the trouser role (Hosenrolle) “responded to the need of German audiences to engage on a non-threatening level with women’s masculinization.” At the same time, as Sutton concludes, cinematic texts also “opened up powerful new means of representing cross-gender identification and same-sex desires.”122 These new means of identification were sometimes even more conspicuous in film magazines than in the actual films: Unlike the brief and transitory queer moments in moving pictures, the “frozen” quality of photographs could hold a moment of queerness indefinitely.123 To female magazine readers and movie fans, the visual culture of modernity offered a chance to explore female masculinity in a context that was largely condoned by mainstream media. Occasionally, hopeful female readers even sent photographs of themselves to film magazines, elegantly cross-dressed, hoping to be discovered by an influential film director.124 Writing to the magazine Filmnyheter in 1927, an eighteenyear-old girl from Stockholm characteristically confessed that she had no experience in either theatre or film-making, but that she was “absolutely unhappily in love with film” and that she had performed at school plays where she had played both “a boy and a garçonne.”125 With no other experience, having played a boy could thus be inferred as a merit by prospective movie fans hoping to “get into the movies.” This would in all likelihood not have been the case if female-to-male cross-dressing had been presented negatively in Swedish media, which underscores Laura Horak’s argument that “the specter of sexual inversion did not haunt the cross-dressed women of cinema’s first decades.”126 Yet, the attention to and emphasis on the femininity of female-to-male cross-dressers in Swedish film magazines also indicate concerns with the stability of modernity’s gender order. In this context, cinema provided both a platform and an outlet for modern fantasies, and possibly something more: As Louise Wallenberg writes, “the film as a medium admittedly offers a means for

52  Telling Stories escapism, but it also offers ideas, inspiration and perhaps even a will to change.”127 Some observers in the 1920s were well aware of these aspects of ideas and inspiration in connection to cinema and cross-dressing: Noting the success of the Italian actress Carmen Boni, who had recently starred as a cross-dressed character in the celebrated film L’ultimo Lord (Kvinna eller man?), the fashion magazine Charme wrote in 1926 that the subject of the film held a “special interest to every young woman.”128 The “subject,” according to Charme, was about exploring “more fully” a male persona, beyond the “emblems” of the garçonne fashion—“the collar, tuxedo dress, the boy haircut and the cigarette.”129 Exactly how young women should go about exploring this subject was left unanswered. However, the framing of cross-dressing as interesting and modern arguably added a new dimension to the meaning of female masculinity: While the emancipated “new woman” had been construed as ugly and mannish in the tradition of suffragette satire, a space was now being created where women could approach, or explore for themselves, “masculine” qualities as attractive and desirable aspects of modern womanhood. This space of attraction was not limited to cinema’s movie stars: Writing to Filmnyheter in 1927, a young woman described how struck she had been by her classmate who had played a boy in a school play, and a garçonne girl in another, captivating in both cases the entire audience by her “irresistible” style.130 Even though such performances can be seen as playful more than queer, they arguably did create new opportunities to explore the queerness of gender, whether in terms of desire or identification, or both—the wanting to be like, and the wanting to have—with a range of unclear distinctions between the two.131 While entertainment culture thus seemed to encourage boundless desires as well as a blurring of gender borders, not everyone appreciated in the 1920s this rising dissolution of known cultural distinctions. Concerns were occasionally raised in the Swedish daily press that the youth would somehow confuse equality with sameness, inner as well as outer. When speaking at a graduation ceremony at a girls’ school in Karlstad in 1920, a concerned bishop thus urged all young women to show restraint and consider that nothing had ever been alike or the same between men and women, physiologically or mentally.132 In the following years, a multitude of voices warned against women’s “masculinization,” seen as a threat to the nation if women would ultimately reject marriage and motherhood. Women who attempted to join the building of the “people’s home” (folkhemmet) thus exposed themselves to different types of accusations: Older women could be described as “mannish” in their selfish focus on work rather than marriage (a theme that I will return to in Chapter  5), whereas the style and attitude of younger women, seen as engaged in consumption rather than marriage, could be described as “masculine” when associated with American decadence, or worse,

The M Word  53 “bohemian” depravities. These warnings were often issued from within a normative framework that positioned “true” womanhood as both eternal and as fragile. Whether a certain cross-dressed—or merely shorthaired—woman was considered a representative of a new “woman-type” or “man-type,” she was above all a symbol of a modern world that had reached Sweden with full force.

Concluding Remarks In conclusion, the fashionable garçonne girl pointed to an ambiguous appeal; neither boyish nor mannish, her “type” turned out to be as alluring as it was difficult to contain, referring in Swedish popular media variously to fashion, a metropolitan lifestyle or sexual ambiguity. The youth and playfulness of this type of cosmopolitan girl nevertheless seemed to ensure her harmlessness, even though critics warned that such girls might grow up into selfish women, uninterested in marriage and motherhood. Deterring examples were related in terms of reports from depraved Berlin clubs as well as critical reviews of novels portraying “modern women” dwelling in a bohemian world of art, leather jackets and possibly drugs. By the mid-1920s, the performative aspects of masculinity were highlighted from yet another perspective when several films (foreign and domestic) featuring female-to-male cross-dressing premiered in Swedish movie theaters. Impressed by the convincing acting of the lead actresses, film critics set out to analyze not only the details of the women’s masculine gender performances but also their presumed “true” femininity. This attention to the “real” femininity of the female-to-male cross-dresser indicates concerns with the stability of modernity’s gender system. Adding to the confusion, galleries and typologies of “modern girls” sometimes mixed photographs of fashionable garçonne types (wearing women’s clothing in masculine styles) with cross-dressed movie stars (wearing male clothing), where both were used as examples of women’s ongoing masculinization. Concerns with the future of the modern young woman arose not only from an effort to encode the visually ambiguous woman as either masculine or feminine but also from the interaction of this effort with the political as well as commercial imperatives of becoming modern as a nation. On the one hand, Swedish reporters wished to paint Sweden and Stockholm in modern colors, and emphasized that there was no turning back to a bygone era predating the World War. On the other hand, the emerging ideals of the Swedish so-called “people’s home,” where men were metaphorically seen as builders and constructors and women as interior decorators, dictated that even the modern and emancipated woman understood how her moral obligations belonged first and foremost to home and family. In this context, concerns were raised that modernity’s garçonne types, having tasted the fun of jazz clubs, sports and other activities, would never be interested in marriage and having children.

54  Telling Stories While embracing modernity, Swedish critics thus tried to establish a difference between “bachelor girls,” self-supporting and hard-working, and “garçonne types,” flaunting their strange fashions and decadent desires. Drawing the line between “modern” and “decadent,” or “masculine” and “feminine,” turned out to be a delicate exercise. The rise of a new movie star or a new hairstyle often inspired Swedish reporters to embark on a larger effort to catch the essence of modern womanhood as well as the meaning of modernity. In this context, popular media provided a space to explore a more diverse set of female masculinities that went beyond the stereotypes of mannish feminist or fashionable flapper. While the modern girl or woman was occasionally dismissed as too shallow or too masculine, she was generally taken seriously—even when connected with the most conspicuous aspects of gender transgressions and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Having explored in this chapter several popular discourses on the masculine modern woman, describing her variously as fashionable (garçonne-like in style only), decadent (garçonne-like in terms of masculine habits and desires) or funny (the performances of cross-dressed actresses), the next chapter will focus on efforts to control and restore the boundaries of femininity.

Notes 1 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December  6, 1926, 12. “ ‘Den modärna unga flickan’—äro vi inte trötta på det uttrycket? Flickan av idag, garçonnetypen, jazzflickan—vem är det man vill åt, vem talar man om?” 2 “Den nya fabriksarbeterskan,” Dagens Nyheter, February 1, 1925, Sunday Supplement. “den nya kvinnan, den moderna unga flickan, den nya mormodern, vad det nu är man kallar henne” 3 “Vem är modernast: Ekman eller Schanche?” Stockholms-Tidningen, November 7, 1926. “filmen har skärpt iakttagelseförmågan ytterligare” 4 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December 6, 1926, 12. 5 The “masculine” modern woman has remained little explored in Swedish historical scholarship, even though cultural representations of the New Woman in relation to modernity have been investigated, particularly in the context of political history and literature. See, for instance, Kristina Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002); Jens Rydström and David Tjeder, eds., Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009); Ebba Witt-Brattström, ed., The New Woman and the Aesthetic Opening: Unlocking Gender in Twentieth-Century Texts (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2004); Yvonne Hirdman, Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010). See also Emma Severinsson’s doctoral thesis, Moderna kvinnor: Modernitet, femininitet och svenskhet i svensk veckopress 1920–1933 (Lund: Lunds universitet, 2018). See Chapter 2 for further references in the context of fashion and modern femininity. 6 Questions popularly explored in the satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix. 7 “En tip-top bild ur Dollarmillionen,” Filmnyheter, November 2, 1925, 7.

The M Word  55 8 On the use and impact of images in modern culture, especially in the context of gender and sexuality, see, for instance, Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London; New York: Routledge, 1993); Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Lars M. Andersson, Lars Berggren, and Ulf Zander, Mer än tusen ord: bilden och de historiska vetenskaperna (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2001). 9 “Sex moderna unga flickor,” Filmnyheter, September 26, 1926, 8–9. 10 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London; New York: Routledge, 2011); Tiina Rosenberg, Byxbegär, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Alfabeta/Anamma, 2004). 11 Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 12, 52. 12 Lisa Z. Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012), 11–12. 13 Yvonne Hirdman, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds., Sveriges historia: 1920–1965 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 200–2. Per Albin Hansson appears to have used the phrase “the people’s home” for the first time in 1925 (though others had used it before then, with shifting meanings). See also Hans Dahlqvist, “Folkhemsbegreppet: Rudolf Kjellén vs Per Albin Hansson,” Historisk Tidskrift 3 (2002): 459. 14 Quoted in Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 202. “skapa trevnad och trivsel” 15 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December  6, 1926, 12. These terms, flapper, jazz-girl, la garçonne (and others), tended to be used interchangeably in Swedish media, referring generally to modern city girls interested in jazz, films and other entertainments. However, the “garçonne” label denoted also more specifically “masculine” fashions or “masculinizing” trends in women’s fashions (as I will come back to). 16 The phrase “funny complications” (lustiga förvecklingar) was used in advertisements for the Italian film L’ultimo Lord, with the Swedish title Kvinna eller man? (Woman or man?) that premiered in Stockholm in 1926. See Stockholms-Tidningen, October 25, 1926, 3. 17 Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 127. 18 Ulrika Knutson, Kvinnor på gränsen till genombrott: grupporträtt av Tidevarvets kvinnor (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2004). 19 Yvonne Hirdman, Genus: om det stabilas föränderliga former (Malmö: Liber, 2010), 131–32; Johan Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001), 50; Linda Lane, Trying to Make a Living: Studies in the Economic Life of Women in Interwar Sweden (Göteborg: Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen, University, 2004); Anna Williams, Tillträde till den nya tiden: fem berättelser om när Sverige blev modernt (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2002). 20 Carina Sjöholm, Gå på bio: rum för drömmar i folkhemmets Sverige (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2003), 40; Gert Ekström, Svenskarna och deras automobiler (Hudiksvall: Winberg, 1983), 63. 21 The transformation of Stockholm from a modestly sized capital town to an expanding modern city started already in the 1870s, as large numbers of people from the countryside migrated to the city in search for work in the many recently established factories. During the following decades the development of Stockholm reflected the transformation of Sweden from an agricultural economy to an industrialized nation. However, this did not mean that the

56  Telling Stories Swedish population on the whole was suddenly urbanized and concentrated in metropolitan centers. By 1920, the total population of Sweden was six million, with a majority, more than four million, living in the countryside. The trend of migration was nevertheless consistent. In 1920, the population of Stockholm was about 400,000; ten years later this number had risen to half a million. By 1940, Stockholm had doubled its size relative the turn of the century. Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 54–55. 22 Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Tonys läroår: episoder ur en ungdom (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1924), 26. “Plötsligt skar så en av de stora affärsgatorna igenom den smala gränden. Då var det, som om ett vinddrag rusat genom luften. Man fick akta sig för bilar, som ibland stockat sig i en kö, människor sprungo förbi och sågo ut, som om det hänt något, fast de endast skulle tillbaka till sina göromål, och här fingo ej de små matvarubutikerna plats, här funnos kolossala fönster, innanför vilka ett för befolkningen avpassat urval av de stora världsbasarernas härligheter låg och lockade.” 23 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 16. 24 “Få Stockholmsdamerna gå ifred på gatan?” Charme, November 15, 1926, 30. 25 Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 50; Hirdman, Genus: om det stabilas föränderliga former, 153. Some occupations, such as priesthood and the military, were exempted from the law of 1923 that gave women right to state employments. 26 “Det var en gång—ett genmäle om modern kvinnlighet,” Idun, February 12, 1922, 160. “kläda sig en smula maskulint” 27 Emma Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 110. For specific examples, see also note 66 below. 28 Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 98. 29 “Den nya fabriksarbeterskan,” Dagens Nyheter, February 1, 1925, Sunday Supplement. 30 Ibid. “två och två kunna slå sig tillsammans i ett rum” 31 Ibid. “Nöjen måste människan ha.” 32 This phenomenon was not entirely new: As Yvonne Hirdman shows, cartoons of “mannish” women, indistinguishable from men, were published as early as in the 1870s in Swedish print media. Hirdman, Genus: om det stabilas föränderliga former, 119. Like the British satirical weekly magazine Punch, the Swedish periodical Strix (Söndagsnisse-Strix from 1924) worked to promote a range of cultural stereotypes; the masculine garçonne-girl was one. On Punch, see Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 222n11. 33 “Förargligt,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, May 18, 1927. “Det är förargligt när man ber en herre om eld och han är en flicka som inte röker.” 34 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 23. 35 Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 89–90. “Förkrigskvinnan med sitt långt uppsatta hår, sin markerade midja och sina kjolar som slutade vid eller nedanför vristen, sina stora kvarnhjulshattar, kommer onekligen från en annan värld än den där unga ‘flappern’ med sin korta kjol, sitt hattlösa korta hår och sin pojkaktigt slanka figur.” 36 As discussed in scholarship in other national contexts, women were during World War I  given new responsibilities in the public arena, which in turn enforced new standards of female clothing as well as renewed discussions of granting women equal democratic rights. See, for instance, Mary

The M Word  57 Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 37 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 2. “En världsomvälvning har ställt kvinnan inför manliga uppgifter, varigenom alla hennes vanor måste bliva manligare och varav dräkt och hårklädsel icke kunna förbliva oberörda.” As a neutral country, Sweden had not been part of the war as a warring state and had therefore not been directly affected by its horrors, beyond testimonies and stories published in the press. Indirectly, however, World War I shaped gender relations in Sweden, too. The fact that women were at all considered and in some cases admitted into “male-dominated sites of social action” did to some extent work to challenge traditional conceptions of the “masculine state and public sphere,” as Madelene Lidestad concludes. Madelene Lidestad, Uppbåd, uppgifter, undantag: om genusarbetsdelning i Sverige under första världskriget (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Almquist & Wiksell International, 2005). 38 Birgitte Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–17. Tracing how young Danish women embraced the ideals of modernity in the 1920s, Søland investigates how young women of all classes, in urban as well as rural settings, used movies as a source of inspiration to adopt new active lifestyles that radically differed from the old bourgeoisie ideals of female domesticity and passivity. 39 Pelle Snickars, “Det medialiserade samhället,” in Industriland: Tolv for skare om när Sverige blev modernt, ed. Jenny Andersson and Jan af Geijerstam (Stockholm: Premiss, 2008), 175; Johan Fornäs, Moderna människor: Folkhemmet och jazzen (Stockholm: Norstedt, 2004); Mikaela Kindblom, Den svenska drömfabriken: historien om Filmstaden i Råsunda (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2015). 40 On Sweden’s growing consumer culture in the interwar period, see Orsi Husz and Amanda Lagerqvist, “Konsumtionens motsägelser: en inledning,” in Förbjudna njutningar: spår från konsumtionskulturens historia i Sverige, ed. Peder Aléx and Johan Söderberg (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001). 41 Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 100. 42 As Katie Sutton points out, this new visibility of women in the public space did not necessarily reflect the majority of women’s experiences, still defined by domestic responsibilities rather than equal career opportunities. Yet, the new visual culture of movies and magazines did make the ideals of modern life more widespread and available, at the very least in the shape of dreams and ideals. Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 5. 43 “Damfrisyren 1925,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, October  14, 1925. “samhällsomstörtarfrisyr,” “läsarhår,” “atletlugg” One aspect tended to remain unstated in these kinds of typologies of modern women—their whiteness. Whether labeled feminine or masculine, the modern woman was generally assumed to be white-skinned, but as fashion and cultural historians have shown, this did not mean that anxieties were absent with regard to race; on the contrary. Like other Western print media at this time, Swedish entertainment periodicals were immersed in a structural racism that especially targeted dark-skinned people and Jews. Critical of American entertainments such as dancing and jazz (referred to as “nigger music” in Stockholm’s daily press), Swedish satirists and critics frequently connected racial concerns with a general contempt for Americanism and modern trends at large. On racial stereotyping in a

58  Telling Stories Swedish interwar fashion and film context, see Kjell Jonsson, “Den allmänna nedbusningen—mellankrigstidens folkbildare kritiserar det populära,” in Lychnos: Årsbok för idéhistoria och vetenskapshistoria (Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991). See also Therése Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014); Tommy Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet (Lund: Sekel, 2007). 44 For an example of this kind of popular categorizing into female “types,” see “Kvinnotyperna på modet,” Charme, April 1, 1924, 20–21, listing, among others, “the vamp” (vampen), “the bohemian girl” (bohêmeflickan) and the sports girl (sportflickan). On the popularity of typologies of women in the 1920s, see also Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Rev. ed. (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 124. 45 On the reception of La Garçonne (the novel) in Sweden, see Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 67–68. 46 The word “maskulin” (masculine) had appeared in the Swedish language in scientific as well as literary usage from the mid-nineteenth century, denoting male characteristics or the male sex. During the interwar period this label came to be used also in relation to women, flourishing along side older denominations and mythologies, including the heroic “Amazon” or the less common “maninna” (virago or emancipated woman). On these etymologies, see Svenska Akademiens ordbok, s.v. “maskulin” and “maninna.” 47 As noted by Kristina Fjelkestam, quoting a passage in La Garçonne (1922), the modern independence and sexual agency of this type of bachelor girl was only a French wordplay away from garce—prostitute. See Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 14. On the flapper in “the heterosexual leisure scene,” see Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 209–52. 48 Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 95. 49 Ibid., 96. 50 For instance, “Londonbrev i svart och vitt,” Bonniers Veckotidning, January 17, 1925, 31. 51 Kristina Lejdström, Grotta Azzurra, 2nd ed. (Everöd: Recito, 2016), 14. 52 “I ljusreklamens tecken,” Charme, April 1, 1924, 5. “reklamfyrverkeriet” 53 Ibid., “Får det fortgå på samma sätt som hittills, få besökande utlänningar för sig att Stockholm är en storstad.” 54 “Stockholmskan bättrar sig,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1926, 14–15. 55 “Paris vill och Stockholm måste,” Bonniers Veckotidning, April 8, 1928, 38. 56 This was the Italian film L’ultimo Lord (given the Swedish title Kvinna eller man?). Advertised in Stockholms-Tidningen, October 25, 1926, 3. 57 Svenska Dagbladets Årsbok, (Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, 1926), 192. “Det maskuliniserade draget i kvinnodräkten framträdde under året starkare markerat än någonsin, stundom nästan arrogant.” 58 Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” 110. On debates on “new women” in the Swedish context prior to the 1920s, see Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 21–29. See also this volume, Introduction. 59 Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige; Eva Blomberg, Vill ni se en stjärna? Kön, kropp och kläder i Filmjournalen 1919–1953 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006).

The M Word  59 60 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December 6, 1926, 12. The American film Subway Sadie premiered in Sweden in 1926 and was given the Swedish title Vår tids flickor (The girls of our time). 61 Ibid. “storstadsbarn” 62 Ibid. “jazzflickan, flickan av idag och garçonnetypen” 63 Ibid., “men det sista icke i ond mening sagt utan endast som karaktäristik av kläder, hår och figur. [. . .] Hon är genuint modärn. Det betyder: hon arbetar.” 64 Ibid. “sakkunnig om sina kläder och sin hudvård” 65 Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” For an example of satire on this theme, see, for instance, “Guds beläte,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, Sept., 7, 1927, 9, portraying a bitter headmistress with lesbian tendencies. 66 “Miss Jane Burr i Stockholm,” Svenska Dagbladet, December 13, 1922, 9; Gustaf Otto-Adelborg, “Till kvinnornas psykologi,” Svenska Dagbladet, April 12, 1922; “Farliga kvinnor och ofarliga,” Tidevarvet, April 18, 1925, 4. 67 Incidentally, many Hollywood stars appeared in advertisements for massproduced health and beauty products. In 1926, Dorothy Mackaill could, or instance, be seen in ads for toothpaste in the Swedish press. Svenska Dagbladet, May 16, 1926, 19. 68 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 16. 69 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December  6, 1926, 12. “Att vara modärn betyder att inte sjåpa sig, att vara vid gott humör.” This kind of cheerful flapper comes across as a precursor to the postmodern “cool girl,” famously described in Gillian Flynn’s cool girl monologue in Gone Girl: A Novel (New York: Crown, 2012). 70 Martin Alm, “Bilden av Amerika,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Signum, 2009), 185. On Paris as “the city of cities” in novels, see Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 51. 71 For an example of such critique of the Americanization of culture, see Arnold Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan (Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924), 92–93. See also Alm, “Bilden av Amerika,” 185–86. 72 “Miss Flapper,” Charme, February 1, 1924, 18–19. 73 However, even this “temporary” phase of sexual freedom was seen as problematic by many Swedish critics. As Yvonne Hirdman points out, the skepticism against the shallow “new” or modern woman of the 1920s was related to the risks involved at this time for women exploring their sexual freedom— a time when abortions were illegal, contraceptives unavailable and the shame of having a child out of wedlock devastating. As Hirdman concludes, the façade of the old moral system had perhaps fallen, but the old structure remained intact, which meant that love and marriage remained to women the only path to dignity. Yvonne Hirdman, Den socialistiska hemmafrun och andra kvinnohistorier (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1992), 196–97. 74 La garçonne and flapper were often used interchangeably in Swedish media (see also note 1). The magazine Filmnyheter defined flapper as the “confident, slim, short-haired, smoking young girl; a phenomenon that had appeared after the war” (den säkra, magra, kortklippta, cigarettrökande unga flickan, som är en företeelse efter kriget). “Filmen riktar språket,” Filmnyheter, January 12, 1925, 5. 75 “ ‘Storstädning’ på Dramatiska Teatern,” Svenska Dagbladet, September 13, 1925, 3. “lastbara typer som det moderna samhället alstrat” 76 “ ‘Storstädning’ på Dramaten,” Dagens Nyheter, September  13, 1925, 11. “hypermoderna dekadentkretsar”

60  Telling Stories 77 “Självförsörjande flickor,” Charme, February 1, 1923, 6. See also “På tvåhundra i månaden,” Svenska Dagbladet, October  11, 1924, 2. The bad reputation of la garçonne was reflected also by another comment in this morning paper in 1924, which stated that a modern girl should certainly have role models, “but they should not be in the form of Pola Negri or La Garçonne” (Du skall ha ideal och förebilder, men de behöver inte precis utgöras av Pola Negri eller La Garconne). Svenska Dagbladet, November 6, 1924, 11. The fascination with the lives of self-supporting girls persisted throughout the decade: In 1930, Svenska Dagbladet reported from a new “hyper-modern” exhibition in London devoted to the phenomenon of the bachelor girl, where visitors could even take a peek into a typical bachelor girl apartment, equipped with an electrical stove, an electrical curling iron, a fridge and many other conveniences. “Ungkarlsflickornas utställning,” Svenska Dagbladet, November 22, 1930, 12. 78 Youth was an important factor in this context—to be masculine in a “boyish,” and thus unthreatening sense. See also note 84 of this chapter. 79 Söndagsnisse-Strix, July 13, 1928. “Vad betyder det att kvinnotypen blir mer och mer maskulin, så länge moderskänslorna dock alltjämt lever kvar?” 80 “Bland jazzens habítuéer,” Charme, August 1, 1924, 20–21. 81 This was a popular theme in the satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix. See, for instance, “Nativitet,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, February 22, 1928. “frun leker ungkarl till fram emot fem, röklysten, lyxloj och mattögd av fasta, utan en endaste barnsäng en gång—så lyder numer för Kaj och för Asta hypermodärna kvinnans sång” 82 “Modern av idag,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, March 25, 1925. The haircut known as the “shingle,” which unlike the “bob” was cut short in the neck, became popular in Sweden in the mid-1920s (and much-debated in the press). See also Chapter 2. Cartoons depicting the modern daughter, mother and grandmother (confusingly similar in style and interests) were very popular in Söndagsnisse-Strix. See, for instance, “Den nya ungdomen,” SöndagsnisseStrix, August 25, 1925. 83 These types of concerns with the gendered status of the modern woman were addressed in a short story that ran in Bonniers Veckotidning in 1926, where unmarried career women were accused of being members of a “third sex” (tredje kön). “Shinglad,” Bonniers Veckotidning, October 24, 1926, 47. See also Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 55. 84 As Laura Doan points out in the British 1920s context, “boyishness denoted a certain fashionable youthfulness that was never threatening” (since “boys” did not have full masculine power). Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 105. 85 “Ögonblicksbilder från Berlin,” Charme, November 15, 1924, 22. “eldande musik, kvinnor, sekt, kokain, opium—orgien kan börja.” The Swedish press followed closely what was happening in Berlin and reported on a range of topics, from the invention of automated traffic lights to new revelations on the depravities of the decadent underworld (“Berlin just nu,” StockholmsTidningen, October 24, 1926, 15). The latter subject captivated the imagination of many observers at this time, and as Patrice Petro notes in the German context, “numerous artists and writers responded to modernity by imaginatively reconstructing Berlin as demonic, as alienating and as female.” Patrice Petro, “Perceptions of Difference: Woman as Spectator and Spectacle,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 41. 86 “Bland konstnärsbohêmen i Berlin,” Charme, June 1, 1926, 28. “dels unga kvinnor med låga klackar och det förmanligade yttre, som åtminstone den

The M Word  61 tyska konstnärsflickan älskar att anlägga, men också deras raka motsatser— unga pudrade eleganter, klädda efter senaste skräddarsnitt” 87 See also Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 88 Fäderneslandet, April 10, 1926: “herrar av omisskännligt exotiskt utseende och damer som minst av allt äro ‘tvetydiga’ unga män sitta och smeka varandra.” Quoted in Lejdström, Grotta Azzurra, 54. As Lejdström shows, Grotta Azzurra (established in 1923) was a popular music and art club in Stockholm. 89 Ibid., 14, 17. As Lena Lennerhed notes, homosexual women were later in the interwar period advised by RFSU (the Swedish Federation for Sex Education) to go to a restaurant called Bäckahästen. Lena Lennerhed, Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia (Hedemora; Uppsala: Gidlund, 2002), 161. 90 “Bland jazzens habítuéer,” Charme, August 1, 1924, 20. “extra charmanta dansbanor” 91 Ibid., 30. “På en del stockholmsrestauranter är det som bekant förbjudet för damer att dansa med varandra, men på Bella Napoli förekommer detta ofta.” 92 Ibid. 30. “Herre gud, de behöva ju inte vara ‘la garçonne’-typer för det!” 93 Söndagsnisse-Strix, August 31, 1927. “Röka kan dom, men föröka sig har dom inte så lätt för.” 94 “Min moderna germanska brud,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, March 28, 1927. The stakes were perceived by many to amount to nothing less than the future of the nation. In 1934, the “population question” culminated in Gunnar and Alva Myrdahl’s famous study Crisis in the Population Question (Kris i befolkningsfrågan), but concerns had been raised also in the 1920s. Annika Berg, Den gränslösa hälsan: Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009), 148. 95 Nils Erdmann, “Moderna kvinnor,” Nya Dagligt Allehanda, March  26, 1926. “modern ung dam av den mest okvinnliga typ” 96 Ibid. “som framkallats i ett skönhetsinstitut, vid ateljéfester—och ja, opiumhålor” 97 “Nativitet,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, February  22, 1928. This theme was also popular in films that explored modern young women, e.g. “Madame vill inte ha barn,” Filmjournalen, December 26, 1926. 98 See also Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, 209–52. 99 In the British context, the modern “look” was associated not just with fashion, as Laura Doan has similarly observed, but also with a new, bolder attitude among modern girls: “Along with the ‘look’ came an attitude of rebelliousness and pleasure seeking—flaunted by the smoking of cigarettes— a new athleticism and an apparent sexual freedom.” Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 102. 100 See for instance, the many cartoons and typologies of modern women published in the 1920s in the satire magazine Strix (Söndagsnisse-Strix from 1924), a periodical that frequently joked about the blurring of social distinctions. Moreover, an expanding leisure culture of restaurants, dance halls, cafés and movie theaters seemed not only to draw people out of their homes en masse but also to blur class as well as gender distinctions—a development that worried conservative critics. On this point, see also Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 40. 101 Ibid., 130; Ulf Zander, “Etermedia och film,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Signum, 2009), 98, 527n25. 102 Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 130; Zander, “Etermedia och film,” 98, 527n25.

62  Telling Stories 103 Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 42. See also Zander, “Etermedia och film,” 98; Elisabeth Liljedahl, Stumfilmen i Sverige— kritik och debatt: hur samtiden värderade den nya konstarten (Stockholm: Proprius, 1975). 104 “Sex moderna unga flickor ur filmens brokiga skara,” Filmnyheter, September 26, 1926, 8–9. 105 “Veckans krönika: Samtalsämnet i stan,” Filmnyheter, November 1, 1926, 4. The Italian film L’ultimo Lord premiered in Stockholm in 1926 with the Swedish title Kvinna eller man? (Woman or man?). 106 Ibid. Having reached her goal, Boni’s young man becomes a woman again, and, true to the genre, gets the prince of her dreams (literally in this case, in the form of a Danish prince). On the historical use of cross-dressing in cinema, see Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934. 107 “Sex moderna unga flickor ur filmens brokiga skara,” Filmnyheter, September 26, 1926, 8–9; “Veckans filmpremiärer,” Våra nöjen, September 25, 1926, 15. 108 “Sex moderna unga flickor ur filmens brokiga skara,” Filmnyheter, September 26, 1926, 9. “Carmen Boni är den ‘modernaste’ av dem alla—en flickgosse av rent förvillande exteriör.” 109 Ibid. “som mor för en skara bedårande ungar, som stöd för en make, som lydig dotter, som rodnande föremål för en tillbedjares uppvaktning” 110 Diana Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” in On Fashion, eds. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 228. 111 By using terms like “charming,” “cheerful” and “graceful,” reporters downplayed the visual masculinity present in cinematic photography that conveyed too much determination and gravitas. Yet, at the same time, the quality of being determined, or “knowing what she wants,” was seen as a modern as much as a masculine feature—unless this determination was too conspicuous. Passing over further comment on Carmen Boni’s “confusing exterior,” Filmnyheter thus concluded that the “strong will” of Boni was foremost noticeable in her eyebrows. “Sex moderna unga flickor ur filmens brokiga skara,” Filmnyheter, September 26, 1926, 9. 112 “Sex moderna unga flickor ur filmens brokiga skara,” Filmnyheter, September  26, 1926, 8; “ ‘Flickan i frack’—en munter och älskvärd svensk komedi,” Filmnyheter, September, 6, 1926, 4. 113 Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 199. 114 Ibid., 200. 115 Ibid., 204. As Laura Horak notes in her study on cross-dressed women in American cinema, scholars have “overstated the connection between femaleto-male cross-dressing and deviant sexual identities during the first decades of the twentieth century.” Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 3. 116 Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 52. 117 Ibid., 2. 118 Ibid., 3. 119 “Pauline Starke: Som representant av typen kvinna eller man,” Filmnyheter, December 13, 1926, 1. 120 “En ny version kvinna eller man?” Filmnyheter, March 7, 1927, 6. 121 Deliberately confusing such distinctions, Italian actress Carmen Boni was thus presented (jokingly) as a “garçonne-type out of the ordinary”

The M Word  63 in reference to her cross-dressing in the film L‘ultimo Lord (Kvinna eller man?). “Veckans filmpremiärer,” Våra nöjen, September 25, 1926, 15. “En garçonnetyp så det förslår.” 122 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 20. 123 Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” 228. See, for instance, the photograph of two women (one cross-dressed) in “ ‘Ponjola’ Anna Q. Nilssons ‘pojkfilm,’ ” Filmnyheter, March 24, 1924, 3. 124 “En flicka i frack och andra som vilja filma,” Filmnyheter, January 31, 1927, 12; “Beneuse de Hälsingborg vill ha filmengagemang,” Filmnyheter, March 10, 1924, 11. 125 “Filmen lockar våra ungdomar,” Filmnyheter, January 17, 1927, 13. “Jag är absolut olyckligt förälskad i Filmen! [. . .] bl.a. har jag spelat ‘grabb’ och ‘la garçonne’.” 126 Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, 6. 127 Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg, eds., Mode—en introduktion: en tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse (Stockholm: Raster, 2009), 254. “filmen som medium erbjuder förvisso tidigt en tydlig eskapism, men den erbjuder också uppslag, inspiration och kanske också viljan att kunna förändra.” On the history of movie-going in Sweden, see also Sjöholm, Gå på bio: rum för drömmar i folkhemmets Sverige, 65–75. 128 “Inte kvinna men ej heller man. . .,” Charme, November 1, 1926, 40. “varje nutida ung kvinnas speciella intresse” 129 Ibid. “Ämnet är ju intressant. Det ger uppslag åt en kvinna att anta en mer utstuderad manlig skepnad än garconnetypens emblem, kragen, smokingdräkten, gossfrisyren och cigaretten, ger anledning till.” 130 “Filmen lockar våra ungdomar—flera aspiranter anmäla sig,” Filmnyheter, January 17, 1927, 13. 131 As Jackie Stacey has argued, “female identification contains forms of desire which include, though not exclusively, homoerotic pleasure.” Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 29. On this point, see also Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” 211–28. 132 “Kvinnans och mannens likställighet,” Upsala Nya Tidning, June 11, 1920.

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64  Telling Stories ———. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London; New York: Routledge, 1993. Ekström, Gert. Svenskarna och deras automobiler. Hudiksvall: Winberg, 1983. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Fjelkestam, Kristina. Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002. Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl: A Novel. New York: Crown, 2012. Fornäs, Johan. Moderna människor: Folkhemmet och jazzen. Stockholm: Norstedt, 2004. Fuss, Diana. “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look.” In On Fashion, edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. 1992. Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. 1968. Gindt, Dirk, and Louise Wallenberg, eds. Mode—en introduktion: en tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse. Stockholm: Raster, 2009. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Gustafsson, Tommy. En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet. Lund: Sekel, 2007. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Hirdman, Yvonne. Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010. 1989. ———. Den socialistiska hemmafrun och andra kvinnohistorier. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1992. ———. Genus: om det stabilas föränderliga former. Malmö: Liber, 2010. 2001. Hirdman, Yvonne, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds. Sveriges historia: 1920–1965. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012. Horak, Laura. Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Husz, Orsi, and Amanda Lagerqvist. “Konsumtionens motsägelser: en inledning.” In Förbjudna njutningar: spår från konsumtionskulturens historia i Sverige, edited by Peder Aléx and Johan Söderberg. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Jonsson, Kjell. “Den allmänna nedbusningen—mellankrigstidens folkbildare kritiserar det populära.” In Lychnos: Årsbok för idéhistoria och vetenskapshistoria, 111–38. Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991. Kindblom, Mikaela. Den svenska drömfabriken: historien om Filmstaden i Råsunda. Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2015. Knutson, Ulrika. Kvinnor på gränsen till genombrott: grupporträtt av Tidevarvets kvinnor. Stockholm: Bonnier, 2004.

The M Word  65 Krusenstjerna, Agnes von. Tonys läroår: episoder ur en ungdom. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1924. Lane, Linda. Trying to Make a Living: Studies in the Economic Life of Women in Interwar Sweden. Göteborg: Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen University, 2004. Lejdström, Kristina. Grotta Azzurra. 2nd ed. Everöd: Recito, 2016. Lennerhed, Lena. Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia. Hedemora; Uppsala: Gidlund, 2002. Lidestad, Madelene. Uppbåd, uppgifter, undantag: om genusarbetsdelning i Sverige under första världskriget. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Almquist & Wiksell International, 2005. Liljedahl, Elisabeth. Stumfilmen i Sverige—kritik och debatt: hur samtiden värderade den nya konstarten. Stockholm: Proprius, 1975. Petro, Patrice. “Perceptions of Difference: Woman as Spectator and Spectacle.” In Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum, 41–66. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Rosenberg, Tiina. Byxbegär. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Alfabeta/Anamma, 2004. Rydström, Jens, and David Tjeder, eds. Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009. Severinsson, Emma. “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 97–118. ———. Moderna kvinnor: Modernitet, femininitet och svenskhet i svensk veckopress 1920–1933. Lund: Lunds universitet, 2018. Sigel, Lisa Z. Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012. Sjöholm, Carina. Gå på bio: rum för drömmar i folkhemmets Sverige. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2003. Snickars, Pelle. “Det medialiserade samhället.” In Industriland: Tolv forskare om när Sverige blev modernt, edited by Jenny Andersson and Jan af Geijerstam, 171–201. Stockholm: Premiss, 2008. Söderberg, Johan. Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Søland, Birgitte. Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Sölvén, Arnold. Kätterier i kvinnofrågan. Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Williams, Anna. Tillträde till den nya tiden: fem berättelser om när Sverige blev modernt. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2002. Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Rev. ed. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. 1985. Witt-Brattström, Ebba, ed. The New Woman and the Aesthetic Opening: Unlocking Gender in Twentieth-Century Texts. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2004. Zander, Ulf. “Etermedia och film.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Lund: Signum, 2009.

2 “La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”

Surely there are still some men who want real women? Unite in a crusade, manly men, against garçonnes and viragoes!1 —Söndagsnisse-Strix, August 10, 1927

Calling out for the nation’s “manly men” to unite in a crusade against “garçonnes and viragoes,” the satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix joked in 1927 once again about the current absence of “real women.”2 Yet, from the perspective of Swedish satirists and cartoonists, the slim, shorthaired and boyish garçonne girl needed not be banished too hastily from the public arena—she had, after all, served satire very well, providing a gold mine of jokes on the gender-confused modern world. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, the story of la garçonne was also, as it seemed, coming to an end. As reported by one entertainment magazine in February of 1929, “womanliness” (kvinnligheten) was now making a comeback, shifting the focus of fashion from “the straight lines of the boy look” to the femininity of long skirts and “accentuated figures.”3 By fall in the same year, Stockholm’s major department stores reported that the garçonne style was now “entirely dead.”4 Triumphant headlines celebrating the return of femininity thus suggested that a victory had been won, though without which battles had been fought or why. What had happened to the “harmless” garçonne girl? This chapter turns to a series of debates on femininity and “womanliness” in Swedish popular media that preceded the confident declarations made in the late 1920s about the demise of the garçonne style. From the perspective of concerned commentators writing in women’s magazines earlier in the decade, the garçonne look had added new fuel to an already complex debate revolving around the modern woman and the challenges she faced: how to preserve her femininity in a world of “male tasks” (manliga uppgifter) how to shift from sportswoman in the day to “seductress” (förförerska) at night, and, ultimately, how to be modern but never mannish.5 Even though the answers in many cases were attempts to strike a balance between new and old expectations, the sum of advice leaned

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  67 towards caution, as this chapter will show, admonishing the modern young woman to cultivate above all her beauty and grace, defined as key elements of femininity. The resulting rhetoric of moderation comes across as strikingly similar to the phenomenon of “tomboy taming” in the nineteenth century when girls were expected to shed their rambunctious ways in preparation for a bourgeoisie life of passive femininity.6 However, there are also important differences to consider, such as the rise of mass communications and the central role fashion came to hold in the 1920s when new trends and pictures of movie stars quickly reached large groups of people. The frail pre-war woman with her long heavy skirts had now been replaced in Sweden by the ideal of the sporty “modern woman” who enjoyed her cars, cigarettes, independence and freedom of movement.7 At this point, concerns with the future of femininity were no longer limited to adolescent tomboys in bourgeoisie families but included any and all “modern” women. Having explored popular discourses on the masculinity of the modern woman in the previous chapter, this chapter turns to the efforts to restore her femininity. By analyzing strategies in Swedish women’s magazines to “moderate” the modern woman, I show how fashion advice in particular often evolved into far-reaching and complicated discussions regarding the meaning of norms, gender and modernity. Turning first to early interwar Swedish discussions of the meaning of beauty, I then trace how various methods of moderating the modern woman evolved, methods that were intended to teach her the meaning of beauty as well as femininity. In this context, I  explore several more specific debates, related, for instance, to the much-discussed issues of short hair or trousers for women, and how these debates related to similar concerns in other national contexts. I also trace the popularity of certain key concepts in these debates, such as “grace” and “coquetry.” These examples address the wider issue of the fate of female masculinity in the interwar period: Why did some “masculine” garments and styles eventually become part of femininity (such as sportswear) and why were some described as “doomed” (such as the tuxedo)?8 How did theoretical discussions of womanhood inspire practical fashion advice—and vice versa? How did this dialogue on fashion and its implications ultimately interrupt age-old perceptions of femininity while also setting new boundaries? How much, in other words, could femininity be “stretched” before it was perceived as crossing into masculinity? Expanding on research that has investigated emerging modern ideals of femininity in early interwar Sweden, especially in the context of advertisements and movie stars, this chapter traces how the meaning of womanhood was formulated at this time not only in relation to the femininity of Hollywood stars but also in opposition to the undefined status of female masculinity.9 Thus, whereas Chapter  1 explored ideas in the 1920s that modernity’s garçonne types were modern and fashionable,

68  Telling Stories this chapter focuses on discourses on femininity intended to counter such blurrings of traditional gender categories.

Debates on Beauty and Fashion The role of fashion in modernity’s gender negotiations has always been paradoxical: On the one hand, as Elizabeth Wilson writes, fashion emerged in the twentieth century as essential “to the world of modernity, the world of spectacle and mass-communication,” enabling a toying with gender ambiguities and sexual codes.10 Yet, on the other hand, it was precisely this unruliness of fashion that caused anxieties over the seemingly unraveling orders of gender and society. Wilson’s remark that “[c]lothing marks an unclear boundary ambiguously, and unclear boundaries disturb us” seems particularly relevant in the context of fashion debates in the 1920s.11 To many observers at this time, no boundaries were more unclear than those exhibited by young, modern women with their short hair and strange fashions. In the Swedish debate, even bishops, politicians and professors became engaged in the discussion of fashion and women’s dress, debating, for instance, whether women in short skirts or women in trousers should be considered more outrageous.12 Still others warned not of fashion’s rebelliousness but of the effects of a commercialized mass culture that recognized women foremost in their capacity to please and to be pleasing to be looked at. In her 1931 novel Astarte, novelist and cultural critic Karin Boye recognized, on the one hand, the liberating aspects of modernity to women, but, at the same time, she was also critical of a modern culture obsessed with consumption (inviting young women to blindly follow the commercialized goddess of beauty, Astarte).13 More recently, cultural historians have discussed how fashion, however playful, has also tended to function “as a commodity that promotes a normative ideal of femininity” and how this normative ideal has been shaped in the twentieth century moreover by an embedded sexual norm, center-staging heterosexuality at the cost of other desires.14 Thus, in exploring how and why certain styles or fashions were eventually declared doomed or dead in the interwar years, it is crucial to consider not only the unruliness of fashion but also how this process of center-staging certain norms and ideals has unfolded, and how the meaning of femininity has been defined not only in opposition to masculinity but also as a prerequisite for heterosexuality. In the 1920s, fashion debates were related to concerns with female masculinity through a number of very specific questions and answers: Is short hair unfeminine? Should women wear trousers? Can grace be learned? The answers frequently evolved into lengthy discussions that focused on womanhood, modernity, beauty and, more importantly, how these were related.15 Even though advisory discourses in magazines do not tell us how women actually did things or how they lived their lives, the consolidating

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  69 narratives on modern femininity at this time do tell us something about norms and expectations regarding how women should act, look and perform their beauty care. As the historian Johan Söderberg points out, norms are indeed “real too,” as they determine the boundaries “between the approved, the dubious and the unacceptable” and how such boundaries shift over time.16 In the Swedish context of the 1920s, a range of new and well-established magazines set out to guide young women on these boundaries of modern life, whether in regard to matters of health, style, fashion, sports or other topics imagined to be of interest to the modern woman.17 Occasionally, critics set out to discuss not only specific fashions or trends but also the phenomenon of norms per se—what they meant and how they seemed to be culturally mutable and ever-changing. As declared by the family and entertainment magazine Bonniers Veckotidning (BVT) in 1926, fashion had made it impossible to speak of any “fixed norm” in regard to what was “beautiful or ugly, inappropriate or appropriate”—the only guiding force left was “a sense of tact” but unfortunately this sense “varied too,” from year to year.18 This particular article on society’s changing ideals featured a photograph of a new kind of plastic mannequin (“not made of wax”), described as “abstract and smooth” and ready to display any new fashion. Thus, as suggested by BVT and many other publications at this time, change was perhaps inevitable, but it could still be made intelligible on the smooth surface of the female body (or mannequin).19 To novelist Karin Boye, a keen observer of the interconnected cultural, political and technological developments, the mannequin (see Figure 2.1) constituted a crucial but not necessarily liberating symbol of modernity. In her novel Astarte (1931), she explored the allure as well as the emptiness of a modern consumer culture that seemed to first and foremost value the (female) exterior.20 Yet, Boye also recognized the many paradoxes of fashion, producing uniformity while inspiring diversity, mixing spectacle with tradition, crossing boundaries while also enforcing them. In Astarte she thus described how machines in factories mass-produced pretty laced dresses that were later bought by the same factory girls who had operated the machines; how the city with its big glass windows and electric lights created new desires and yearnings; how the multitude of colors and materials inspired new arts of self-fashioning; how women’s legs no longer needed to be covered in shame, and how female spearthrowers and short-distance runners in trousers were laughing from the pages of sports magazines.21 Boye thus configured modernity and fashion as neither good nor bad but as a matter of choice and change: Life in the city could be exhilarating but, at the same time, shallow, reduced to a desire for “hair products, magazines and car brands.”22 With regard particularly to Astarte’s female followers, Boye identified a risk that “choice” would in the end simply become a matter of silk stockings, lace and velvet, shaping not just any kind of femininity but a certain kind, focused above all on appearance.23

70  Telling Stories

Figure 2.1 Mannequins. Interior shot from Nordiska Kompaniet (NK), Stockholm, 1928 Source: Photo: Erik Holmén, Nordiska museet.

In the decade leading up to Boye’s observations, the meaning of beauty and the boundaries of femininity had been carefully negotiated in relation to modernity as well as masculinity. In 1924, the fashion magazine Charme characteristically reassured their readers that the modern woman had not become “masculinized” but was “more beautiful than ever.”24 The habit of configuring (female) masculinity as the opposite of beauty appeared also in specific recommendations on how to dress and look. However, because the boundary between “modern” and “masculine” was not always clear, a seemingly simple piece of advice could give rise to complicated discussions. A  well-known example in this context is the case of women’s short hair—a trend that reached Sweden with full force in 1924 and caught many experts and hair salon owners by surprise.25 To fully grasp the “revolutionary” impact of short, female hairstyles in the 1920s, one must consider that short hair on a woman to many observers at this time still constituted the ultimate interruption of femininity, associated with “the beautiful adornment of long, wavy hair.”26 However, when discussing whether women’s short hair should be considered “unfeminine” or not, Swedish commentators suggested by the mid-1920s that the new popular haircuts, the bob, the shingle and

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  71 the shortest of them all, the Eton crop, should above all be considered modern.27 After all, as Charme concluded already in 1924, numerous short-haired Hollywood stars had shown that the new haircuts could be both beautiful and feminine.28 Others were less convinced, and warnings were issued that shorthaired women would be physically masculinized, specifically by becoming bold or by growing mustaches.29 Similar concerns had been raised in Weimar Germany, where the Bubikopf had become the object of passionate debate “as if the fate of modernity depended on women’s hair length.”30 Swedish observers were particularly astounded by the speed at which this trend took hold: In 1923, the female population of Stockholm was still wearing their hair long; in 1924, women of all ages ventured out seemingly en masse to hair saloons “to be relieved of their hair burden”; in 1925, the Swedish royal princesses Märta and Astrid were reported to wear shingled cuts; and in 1926, Charme claimed that a guest at any restaurant in Stockholm would find that “ninety percent of all women were short-haired.”31 This unprecedented shift toward short hair, which until recently had been considered masculine by definition, even inspired the editors of the Nordic Family Dictionary to include an entry on shingled haircuts in a supplement to the 1926 edition. The wording reflects a lingering consternation and regret regarding the recent developments: Shingled and bobbed haircuts are fashions that started a triumphal procession in 1924 from America to Europe in the women’s world, and the fact that women in this manner and by their own free will have sacrificed the beautiful adornment of long, wavy hair is part of the ongoing masculinization of women’s fashions in the aftermath of the world war. Convenient for those employed in the industry, short hair requires care by a hairdresser and unfortunately also machine cutting of neck hair.32 The entry iterates several points made in the press: the association of short hair with an ongoing masculinization of women in the aftermath of the war, the international scale of the trend and the convenience of short hair to the modern, working woman. To what degree short hair was still masculine remained an unsettled issue. The complexity of the matter was revealed in part by the careful but often conflicted advice that was formulated in a range of popular magazines. For instance, when BVT recommended women in 1926 “to cut,” the magazine also warned that women should not strive to appear masculine “at all costs” but take care to shape their short hair in an appropriate (feminine) manner.33 In order to neutralize this scissor-happy threat to femininity, many observers insisted that short hair should be associated with modernity rather than masculinity (or the war). Even though some women, according to BVT, such as women in sports, feminists and women of “the third

72  Telling Stories sex” had worn their hair short even before the war, it was the modern woman who had finally made it popular.34 Thanks to the “lifestyle and occupations” of the modern woman (“sports, all kinds of physical culture, and a youthful mobility”) short hairstyles had “caught on” after the war and had become the most modern choice.35 By thus placing shingled haircuts on the side of an individualized sporty modernity, this writer established a distance from political (feminist) as well as medical (“third sex”) associations. Modernity itself, not the war or divergent female masculinities, was declared as the force of the fashion. Still, not even fashion experts were entirely convinced that short hair was so easily compatible with femininity—hence the need for detailed instructions and advice. On the one hand BVT claimed in their special issue on hair in 1926 that the answer to the question “Is the boy-haircut unfeminine?” was “decidedly no,” but at the same time the magazine emphasized how women needed to embrace their need for “coquetry,” defined as the only thing “invariable” about women, even in a time of “masculine tasks.” The purpose of “the good spirit of female coquetry” was, as moreover suggested by BVT, completely unambiguous: “to please men.”36 Fortunately, men found short-haired women charming, as BVT concluded, and all was therefore well. Or was it? The common description of women as coquettish was, of course, not an invention of fashion experts in the 1920s but, rather, a continuation of a longstanding topic on female vanity.37 Yet, the loud reminders at this time of women’s coquetry (and its purpose) suggest concerns with the stability not only of femininity but also of heterosexuality.38 These concerns were often reflected in advice on haircuts, which returned again and again to the lingering suspicion that short hair was, after all, not feminine enough. To distinguish between different levels of coquetry, BVT suggested that short haircuts could be divided into “masculine,” “feminine” and, somewhat curiously, “neutral.” Whereas the masculine, close-cropped style was described as “stiff” and “sober,” the slightly longer feminine short hairstyle was described as “airy, mobile and wavy,” compatible with “round faces with soft, feminine features.”39 Following this argument, the masculine, “sporty” form would benefit serious, employed women, like doctors, nurses and teachers, as they needed a practical hairstyle. However, even these women needed to avoid “emulating” masculinity at all cost, allowing it to overtake their “own characters” (as women). Between the feminine “soft and airy” and the masculine “stiff and sober,” the magazine also recommended a “neutral form” which was a combination of short hair and long hair at the neck (in the form of a bun or a curl).40 This kind of softening of the masculine haircut was recommended for the woman with a shingled cut who planned to attend evening parties that required “full dress” (fake hair at the neck could, in this case, make the short haircut disappear). After all, as BVT concluded, girls would do anything to look beautiful at parties,

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  73 and for this reason boy haircuts tended to be transformed into “girl heads” in the evenings.41 While fashion writers thus reassured their readers that short hair was modern, feminine and beautiful, they undermined their arguments first by establishing a scale where the shortest hair was deemed the most masculine and the most questionable—such as the close-cropped Eton-style that was, in fact, recommended for use only in the morning and in sports— and second by recommending women to adjust their hair to create longer styles in the evening in order to achieve feminine beauty.42 What emerges here is an attempt to manage not only the length of women’s hair but also an ongoing “category crisis,” discussed by Marjorie Garber in terms of “a failure of definitional distinction.”43 As Garber suggests, such crises are not necessarily limited to a category crisis of male and female but, rather, constitute a “crisis of category itself.”44 From this perspective, BVT’s invention of “neutral hair” was the result of a situation where “a clear choice between opposites” had been revealed to be, as Garber writes, “not only a construct but also—more disturbingly—a construct that no longer works to contain and delimit meaning.”45 While hair in itself thus could no longer guarantee the “eternal” characteristics of femininity, BVT tried to reassure their readers that short-haired (or “neutralhaired”) women were still women—coquette and intent on pleasing men. The tension between feminine beauty and short hair was never quite resolved in popular fashion advice, even though the argument of practicality continued to resonate strongly in a Swedish society that was increasingly oriented towards the politically condoned ideals of health and efficiency.46 When advertising a beauty contest in 1924, the fashion magazine Charme characteristically explained that the goal of the magazine had always been to “increase the understanding of feminine beauty and its meaning to the individual and to humanity,” and in order to do so the magazine intended “to show that it is not merely the powder whip and paint stick that enhances and heightens beauty but it is above all gymnastics, hygiene and sports that create lasting beauty, youth and charm.”47 Fascinated with the life of this sporty city woman, many observers thus defended short hair above all in terms of its practical benefits: Having less time on her hands, the employed city woman simply needed a hairstyle that was easily washed and managed.48 Still, as powerful and popular as the argument of practicality was becoming in Swedish society at this time, it did not necessarily help the individual girl who found herself struggling with competing frameworks of judgment. When, for instance, the head nurse of a hospital in Stockholm made it clear in 1927 that young women with shingled haircuts were not welcome to her nursing school, it was on the grounds that short hair was unpractical (since short hair would not keep the nurse’s hat in place).49 While this argument was ostensibly about practicality too, the hostile rhetoric on the subject indicates an uneasiness that reached

74  Telling Stories beyond hygiene issues. As declared more succinctly by a male observer, the thought of a nurse with a shingled cut was simply “grotesque.”50 This kind of antagonism directed specifically at the nurse with shingled hair was grounded in an aspect of femininity that had to do with women’s role as caregivers (rather than their “coquette” ways). By tradition, nursing was “a calling” (as emphasized also by the head nurse in Stockholm), and this calling involved considerable self-sacrifice. As a consequence of regulated boarding and meals privileges, nurses in Stockholm in the 1920s were essentially confined to the hospital grounds around the clock. Whether young or old, the nurse was thus expected to devote her life to the selfless care of others, and such devotion simply did not fit with a “masculine” hairstyle associated with female independence and (selfish) urban entertainment.51 The unsettling aspects of women’s short hair thus originated in a number of dichotomies that could not be easily bridged: long hair continued to symbolize sweetness, beauty and caregiving, whereas short hair symbolized sports, modernity and work life.52 While the label of masculine was more easily attached to the latter set of parameters, signaling specific action-orientated activities, the label of feminine came into play in the context of beauty and “true” womanhood. As much as this indicates a preservation of a traditional gender order, the matter of beauty and the modern woman was not as easily resolved as that. Because short hair was associated with movie stars as well as modern efficiency, few Swedish commentators suggested that short hair was wrong or unattractive. Referring to recent fashions in London, Paris and Berlin, many commentators in fact showed both that they themselves were modern and that Sweden, as a nation, was at the front lines of modernity—unlike countries that were “behind” such as Hungary, India and Japan, where women still wore their hair long, as noted by a film magazine in 1926.53 Failing to be “modern” (as a nation) was thus almost as bad as failing to be “feminine” (as a woman). Yet, because no one could explain in a definitive manner how to navigate successfully between these two pitfalls, the market for detailed fashion advice continued to thrive. As it turned out, women’s short hair was far from the only challenge on the horizon.

Should Women Wear Trousers? (and What to Wear at the Office) Even though trousers were considered male garments in the 1920s, the number of exceptions to this rule was, as reported by Swedish media, steadily rising, especially in relation to outdoor activities. Not only did entertainment magazines celebrate trouser-wearing sports girls engaged in various athletic endeavors, but department stores in Stockholm suggested in advertisements that women’s sportswear were quite fashionable.54 However, beyond the context of sportswear, the matter was less

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  75 straightforward. When an entertainment magazine in 1929 asked people in Stockholm whether the time had come to accept trousers for women more generally, the respondents were conflicted. One man admitted that the idea did not seem entirely far-fetched—young women in trousers could certainly be cute in a “quaint” manner, but he added that the sight would probably be “grotesque” in the case of adult women.55 Another male respondent suggested that women hiking in trousers were fine but not walking the city streets. By contrast, a female respondent argued that trousers would suit the modern woman perfectly, with her slim figure and short hair. The survey having thus reached a slightly inconclusive result, the interviewer concluded that the city of Stockholm could very well be imagined as crowded by trouser-wearing women in the future—of all types, ages and backgrounds. However, because of the jesting tone of the entire article, this last speculation was safely contained in the realm of entertainment rather than serious argument. Following women’s entrance into the public arena, taking on new kinds of employment and responsibilities, the matter of trousers for women was sometimes also discussed in a more serious tone, touching on the delicate matters of equality, clothing and work. In 1923, the women’s magazine Idun argued that the lack of uniform female dress in the work place caused not only practical problems but also a stressful situation for many women.56 A  photograph of a female painter climbing a ladder, dressed in trousers and a work-coat, illustrated how the individual woman was nevertheless able to find her own solutions, but the discussion in the article emphasized another point: that the matter of workrelated dress transcended the individual level and needed other, more universal and accepted solutions. A  new khaki-colored trouser-outfit, developed around this time in a Swedish textile factory, was reported to have won the approval of the government, and as moreover reassured by the women’s magazine Idun, this new outfit was both “perky and pretty, and equipped with elements of feminine decoration.”57 Member of parliament Kerstin Hesselgren, who headed the trade inspection, had even proposed, as the article went on to explain, that women should be allowed to use this kind of outfit not only in outdoor work but also indoors, for factory work. By publicly supporting trousers from a position of official authority, Hesselgren thus brought the matter of women’s trousers to the highest political level. Beyond the practical dimension of having the same freedom of movement as men, Idun also addressed the social and symbolic aspects of clothing in public life. From the feminist perspective of this magazine, female office clerks were in need of some kind of formal outfit too, since the office was a place for “neatness” and “unity” rather than “unchecked individuality.”58 The employed woman represented, as argued by Idun, something beyond herself, but, unlike her male colleague, she did not have access to clothing that reflected her public and professional role.

76  Telling Stories Idun thus recognized that women who needed to communicate respect and authority ran into a challenge: As long as women lacked the equivalent of a suit, they would be judged by their competence in fashion and shopping rather than by their work skills. However, unlike the Swedish “reform dress” movement in the late nineteenth century, which considered fashion as a major villain in the continued subordination of women in society, Idun did not critique fashion per se—only the lack of formal clothing for the employed city-woman.59 Idun’s observations were, of course, made in a fashion context that had changed considerably since the turn of the century. Whereas the reform dress movement had arisen as a response to the bourgeoisie ideal of the frail woman, weighed down by unhealthy dresses that made her immobile, the 1920s ideal of the sporty “modern woman” revolved around a health discourse that celebrated women’s freedom of movement. Still, as pointed out by Idun, this new and sporty era had not necessarily solved women’s clothing problems at the office, which also were affected by factors beyond functionality. In 1929, Idun specified the challenges that the female office clerk unfortunately still faced. Just as the modern man, the modern woman valued “time, money and social respectability”; however, she had to spend considerable amounts of time and money on finding the appropriate clothing, whether she was interested in fashion or not.60 This situation, as the article went on to explain, caused anxiety and stress for many, as valuable time had to be spent on shopping. Women thus needed “the equivalent” of a man’s suit, easy to buy, neat and comfortable to wear, inspired perhaps, as suggested by a female doctor, by the sportswear worn by the younger generation. That this kind of formal female outfit was not developed suggests that a limit had been reached in the “stretching” of femininity. While it may seem surprising that this limit should have been reached in the middle-class context of the office rather than in connection to the hard labor of tobacco fields (where the new khaki-trousers was used), the reasons become clear if one considers, as Idun did, the wider functions of clothing: Because the matter of what to wear at the office connected equality not only to health and functionality but also to a system of visual signifiers of power and authority, female access to this system presented a challenge that went beyond practical considerations.61 To feminist opinion-makers and female businesswomen alike, the subjects of suits, trousers and formal dress continued to be delicate since any new proposition in this field could still be associated with the onceridiculed “mannish” feminists of the reform dress movement. When, for instance, the famous American journalist Jane Burr visited Stockholm in 1922 and explored the city wearing her “knickerbockers” (knee-length trousers), the morning paper Svenska Dagbladet found it necessary to anticipate the skeptics of “the Swedish bourgeoisie” by explaining that: “Miss  Burr wants nothing else but to be seen as an ordinary human being, which she is. She is a decent self-supporting woman [. . .]. She is

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  77 not mannish, she is no butch type, she does not want to reform women’s manner of dressing.”62 Burr was simply, as the article concluded, a perfectly “gracious and feminine” woman, even though she was also “temperamental, willful and bright.”63 This pattern of defending the confident modern woman by underscoring her femininity was common in fashion magazines as well, where writers celebrated Stockholm’s independent career women while also taking care to describe how these women were keen on “improving themselves”—especially in the areas of shopping and beauty care.64 Women who were seen as disinterested in fashion and in their own appearance were described in the press not only as too focused on their work, but also as tragic and “mannish” types destined for a life in solitude.65 While entertainment magazines generally showed little interest in addressing the political functions of clothing, the occasional anecdote sometimes made perfectly clear what was at stake. As reported by Charme from Paris in 1923, a fashionable lady at a café had declared that she would not believe that women would ever gain an “autorité sérieuse,” or have a political future, as long as they did not have practical pockets in their clothes. However, she had also added that: “Fortunately this will never happen—it would be too ugly!”66 Even though this alignment of ugliness with pockets was delivered as an entertaining anecdote, the general association of a female “autorité sérieuse” with ugliness drew upon misogynistic caricatures of the emancipated woman that had never really faded from public discourse.67 The implication that there was (still) no political future for women without pockets constituted more than a dress-related challenge to individual women; as a symbol of power and male authority, pockets (and men’s formalwear more generally) represented a structural hierarchy that left women with a familiar choice: If they chose the symbols (and wardrobe) of formality and authority, they ran the risk of being defined as unwomanly, and if they chose instead the path of feminine “coquetry,” they risked being accused of shallowness and unprofessionalism.68 The many jokes about trousers, pockets and hairstyles in the 1920s thus remained part of a wider discussion concerning the relationship not only between femininity and masculinity but also between femininity and feminism. As superficiality was pitched against depth, equality against sameness, and beauty against authority, the question remained how—and in what garb—women should approach work life and positions of power—and if they even should.

Moderating the Modern Woman The (questionable) femininity of the modern woman remained a topic of concern throughout the 1920s in Swedish popular media, whether in regard to her hair, her clothing or her “nervous anxiety” to participate “everywhere.”69 Neither the larger questions of norms and the

78  Telling Stories meaning of beauty, nor the specific ones about hair length and trousers seemed entirely conclusive in regard to women’s new standing in society. Fortunately, from the perspective of concerned male as well as female observers, a new balance could be achieved if the attitudes and desires of modern women were appropriately moderated. Fashion magazines and an expanding beauty industry contributed in this context to far-reaching expectations for women to pay attention at all times to their looks and to carefully cultivate their femininity.70 Thus, even though women in Sweden did gain democratic and judicial equality during the interwar era, their subordination was instead upheld, as Eva Blomberg argues, by norms related to body ideals and fashion.71 At the same time, as Therése Andersson points out, the new visibility of women can also be seen as part of a modern emancipatory project: By the 1920s, young women were claiming their right to be visible and present in the public arena in ways that would have been unthinkable for their mothers and unimaginable for their grandmothers.72 In this context, wearing make-up and short skirts, which until recently had been seen as deeply immoral, was turning into something else—a modern act of independence and feminine self-fashioning. Still, because only certain types of self-fashioning were recognized as feminine, other types, particularly those perceived as masculine, were increasingly seen as targets of moderation.73 During the 1920s, several ways of guiding and directing young women thus developed across a range of contexts, from fashion to sports and work life, which worked variously to contain, compensate or control their potential gender transgressions. While overlapping in practice, I will discuss these methods of moderation one at a time, in order to highlight the characteristics of each. Containment By the mid-1920s, Swedish print media was brimming with celebrations of the modern sportswoman and her achievements, whether at the soccer field, the running track, or even in the particularly masculine arena of racecar driving (as I  will discuss further in Chapters  3 and 4). One reason that this athletic woman was not necessarily critiqued for her many “masculine” activities was that her actions could be seen as contained in both time and space. However, as explained by the morning paper Dagens Nyheter in 1926, women needed to know how to “shed their skin” as effectively as possible, from “sportswoman and comrade” before five o’clock to “housewife” and “seductress” after five.74 Thus, even though the celebrations of female physical achievement can be seen as a radical expansion of the boundaries of femininity, they did not come without reservations. For a sportswoman to gain public approval she also needed to show that she could successfully transform herself back to

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  79 a more feminine self, focused on beauty and her personal care.75 As concluded by Dagens Nyheter women thus needed to consider “two lines” of purpose, shifting between “masculine garçonneries” in the day and “sweet femininity” in the evening.76 While somewhat schizophrenic, Karla Jay, Katie Sutton and others have shown that this idea of timely transformations enabled observers to feel that breaches of the feminine decorum was tolerably contained.77 In the Swedish context, where “sporty” and “modern” were used almost synonymously in the 1920s, this idea of containment was crucial. However, because not all “masculine” outfits or activities could be “shed” as easily as a pair of trousers, other strategies of feminine preservation was also coming into play at this time in popular media. Compensation Unlike participation in a soccer game or tennis match, women’s entrance into universities and work life constituted a particularly challenging containment problem from the perspective of feminine decorum. However, these types of “masculine” aspirations could instead be seen as tolerable if appropriately compensated by corresponding amounts of feminine charm and grace. Swedish women were in this context admonished to learn from their ambitious but more feminine American sisters, such as Jane Burr mentioned earlier. When a delegation of American businesswomen visited Stockholm in 1930, the morning paper Svenska Dagbladet emphasized how these women were no “mannish copies” of their male business colleagues; on the contrary, as stated by the reporter, the business version of “Miss America” was all about “kindness and charm” and she exhibited nothing “calculating or hard.”78 The message to the female readership was thus clear: As long as the modern woman showed her adherence to a femininity defined by kindness and charm, even a masculine career choice such as bank manager could be accepted. In this spirit of preserving the femininity of career women, the magazine BVT’s special issue on women’s short hair similarly urged the modern woman not to use her masculine career choice as an excuse to neglect her hairstyle.79 Because efforts to distance career women from associations with “mannishness” were often interwoven with efforts to distance them from feminism, the relation between the older women’s movement and a younger generation of “modern women” was by the 1920s increasingly fraught with tension. Noting in 1925 how her female students had in fact begun to reject feminism altogether, Lydia Wahlström (one of the pioneers of the Swedish suffrage movement) speculated that her students felt that they needed to “compensate” in this manner for the “unwomanly” activity of studying.80 This was essentially the same observation made a few years later by Joan Riviere in her paper “Womanliness as Masquerade,”

80  Telling Stories where she discussed, as Katie Sutton writes, how intellectual women used femininity as a defensive mask to “hide their anxieties about behavior or careers considered by the wider society to be ‘masculine.’ ”81 In the Swedish debate, young women’s literal use of “masks” at this time—in the form of cosmetics and other beauty products—was controversial too, as it seemed to draw attention to a selfish and even immoral female individuality, which pulled them away from woman’s natural place—at home, with her family.82 From this perspective, young women’s explorations of beauty and femininity can be read, as Therése Andersson has pointed out, not only as an effort to deflect from their “masculine” interests and habits but also as part of an emancipatory project of its own that rebelled against conservative expectations of women to stay out of sight.83 The individual woman navigating this modern gender landscape thus needed to brace herself for two kinds of accusations—being too feminine or too much of a feminist. In Sweden, the feminist magazine Tidevarvet critiqued in 1925 what they saw as an egoistic and false femininity, while also acknowledging its efficiency: Should men really fear the well-read feminist who only wanted “justice” (rättvisa), or should they rather beware of the pretty but manipulative career woman, interested only in her own personal power (makt) rather than equality for all?84 In the following discussion of “dangerous” and “harmless” women, Tidevarvet accused the pretty career woman of being selfish and deceptive: “If you weren’t so flirtatious and well-dressed you would most certainly be labeled mannish or a feminist.”85 Having achieved a well-paid managing position in the city, the “flirtatious” woman declares that she “conquers through personal qualities” and therefore does not need feminism and outdated feminist rallies. Oddly enough, as suggested by Tidevarvet, it was only the feminist with her methods of protest and agitation who was at risk of being accused of power-hungry manners, whereas the charming and well-dressed woman was merely aligned with a cheerful modernity.86 By the mid-1920s, the “flirtatious” career woman could be studied across a range of Swedish popular media, from films and magazines to advertisements that urged women to consider it their duty to look their best and to buy the necessary products to this end.87 This message, connecting beauty with duty, was further enforced by the dominant health discourse in Sweden at this time, which highlighted women’s primary duty to be healthy in order to foster future generations.88 Together, these commercial and political discourses admonished the modern woman to be constantly self-aware. Because “femininity” in this context was subdivided across a range of categories, covering health issues, the body, nutrition, posture, the gaze and other aspects, the sum of advice in fashion and women’s magazines ultimately created a detailed image of an ideal gender performance. This ideal version of womanhood was held together not only by an abstract idea of femininity but also by several

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  81 specific concepts, such as charm and grace.89 By embracing and refining these qualities, a woman showed above all that she was in control of her feminine self and, perhaps more importantly, her masculine self. Control (by Grace) Following a common rhetorical pattern in Western media in the 1920s, Swedish fashion commentators frequently discussed the concept of grace as a particularly important aspect of being in control as a feminine woman.90 The function of grace was essentially, as the popular magazine BVT explained, to remove unpleasant edges from a woman’s appearance, making her charming and appealing in social life—something that did not seem to come naturally to all women. Fortunately, as the same magazine encouragingly stated in 1926, “Grace can be learned!”91 In order to learn how to walk, dance, sit, smile and converse gracefully, BVT also underscored that a woman needed to be prepared to sacrifice considerable amounts of time and energy and submit herself to a “relentless self-discipline.”92 Attention to detail, physical exercises, early mornings, scrubbing, massages, detailed facial care, trimming of eyebrows and lashes, a strict diet and a constant self-awareness—these were the requirements of the graceful woman. Paradoxically, considering the amount of “grueling work” demanded by women who wished to achieve grace, the goal of the required exercises was to eradicate any trace of strong will.93 Thus, in stark contrast to the edgy garçonne look, the graceful woman was expected to communicate nothing but softness and sweetness. This ideal was essentially a continuation of the nineteenth-century practice of teaching girls how to achieve harmonious movements and beautiful posture, which was likewise expected to be accomplished by a regime of disciplined training. As Karin Johannisson has shown in her study on fin de siècle womanhood, the goal of these exercises was to give the impression of frailty, following bourgeoisie ideals of female domesticity and submissiveness.94 While the goal of feminine frailty had been exchanged two decades later for a modern, healthy and sporty womanhood, individual women were still expected to present a graceful appearance—particularly if they wished to deflect suspicions that they had been masculinized by the new and athletic times. The resulting efforts in the culturally experimental era of the 1920s to control and refine the qualities of grace were in many ways more far-reaching than the nineteenth-century practices of “taming” rambunctious tomboys.95 First of all, admonitions on how to be or become appropriately graceful in early interwar media were directed not only at tomboyish girls but all kinds of women, young as well as adult, and their task was moreover presented as an especially fateful challenge in a new world of “masculine” careers and tasks. Second, the resulting advice on this matter was distributed in the 1920s through a range of new popular media that reached

82  Telling Stories not only well-to-do bourgeoisie families but large sections of the growing middle-class. Third, these wide-reaching discussions on hair, clothing or women’s sports were formulated in a new visual context, where photography and advertising in many cases further emphasized the ideal of feminine grace, presenting the modern woman as progressive and yet harmless, devoted to her beauty care as well as her household duties.96 The efforts to contain, compensate and control female gender transgression ultimately worked against a blurring of mainstream media’s binary gender system. By the rhetoric of advertisements as well as fashion magazines, “men,” “male” and “masculine” continued to be associated with qualities required in public positions, such as leadership and authority, whereas “women,” “female” and “feminine” remained tied to beauty, charm and grace.97 As Charme summarized a fashion report in 1926, “gracious feminine refinement” is the opposite of a “correct manly style.”98 These distinctions, and the importance of upholding them, was frequently motivated by reference to heterosexual attraction: Simply put, as stated by Charme in 1923, women are attracted by the “strength, power and dependability” of “manly men” (manliga män) while men prefer “feminine women” (kvinnliga kvinnor).99 The configuration in this manner of masculine and feminine qualities as separated and welldefined thus worked to enforce not only a normative gender system but also a sexual one, where women were expected to desire certain masculine qualities but not be them. Paradoxically, as pointed out by Katrina Rolley, these rules of gender and attraction also created queer spaces of desire: Even though female readers of fashion magazines were not expected to desire other women, they were encouraged to study and enjoy them—at least for the duration of a magazine read. Fashion magazines have in fact always been invested with a subversive dimension, as Rolley points out, that thrives thanks to the “impeccable (heterosexual) credentials” of these magazines.100 However, in the 1920s, the attention surrounding masculine fashions or the garçonne style did not in itself implicate that the general public considered female masculinity to be “queer.”101 For sure, many observers were increasingly frustrated with the way young people chose to dress and look and wondered how this would affect Sweden as a nation, particularly in regard to the matter of birth rates.102 Yet, such worries do not necessarily mirror today’s thinking in terms of sexual identities, but rather reflect an unease with the apparent unruliness of fashion and modern culture.103 In this context, “queer” need not mark any particular type per se, but rather the unclear boundaries that were being pushed. Even more to the point, it can be argued that the efforts in the 1920s to control the boundaries and meaning of “femininity” were both driven and disturbed by rising difficulties to establish what it was that these boundaries were supposed to contain in the first place.

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  83

“The Garçonne Style is Doomed”? Predictions of the end of the story of la garçonne were a recurring topic in Swedish media from the mid-1920s if not earlier. As finally reported by one entertainment magazine in February of 1929, femininity had now made a comeback, which meant that fashion’s “mannish” period was over.104 By fall, Stockholm’s major department stores reported that the garçonne style was now “entirely dead.”105 However, having foreseen this comeback for femininity in 1926, Charme also pointed out that not everything about the garçonne style was doomed—after all short hair was a product of the modern times and would never go out of fashion completely.106 As it would turn out, Charme was right—women did not return to pre-war hair lengths or long, impractical dresses, and Swedish media continued to praise fashions that were sporty and practical (see Figure 2.2).107 The fact that some “masculine” aspects of clothing thus could be incorporated into a modern, mainstream femininity was the result of far-reaching processes of democratization and urbanization that had changed women’s visibility and roles in society.108 Still, by the late

Figure 2.2 Four models in overalls holding advertisement balloons for Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) in Stockholm in June 1929. The models were showing a new “summer-suit” (sommarkostym) for women made by Camp-Ahla Source: Photo: Erik Holmén, Nordiska museet.

84  Telling Stories 1920s, many particular aspects of the garçonne style did fade out, such as the extremely short Eton crop and the female tuxedo and monocle, once perceived as both elegant and decadent. As pointed out by Johan Söderberg, the garçonne style was partly a victim of fashion’s inner generational logic—younger generations wanting to differentiate themselves from older ones.109 In addition, by the early 1930s an increasingly conservative political climate across Europe would push back what was seen as radical trends in modern culture, trends that symbolized decadence and feminism rather than those womanly duties that mattered to the nation state—motherhood and homemaking.110 Yet, long after the demise of la garçonne, fashion magazines and the film industry continued to challenge the boundaries of the approved and the expected. Movie stars like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich appeared on magazine covers in various masculine attire, particularly trousers, which in time contributed to an increasingly accepted and less ridiculed notion of women wearing them.111 At the same time, indications that “not everything” about the garçonne style would die out also continued to fuel anxieties and discomfort with fashion’s inability to mark its boundaries distinctly rather than ambiguously.112 In her German study, Katie Sutton has shown how different articles of clothing met with different fates: while the tailored suit was in the later Weimar era successfully “incorporated into a new, more functionally oriented female clothing norm,” the tuxedo was eventually “unable to continue bearing the weight of its masculine associations.”113 Similar processes of differentiation evolved in Sweden, where the ideals of practicality and “modern functionalism” continued to be recognized as powerful influences in architecture as well as in clothing, providing, in the latter case, a space for women’s tailored suits as well as sports outfits.114 Beyond these arguments of modern progress and efficiency, Swedish reporters’ comments on the masculinization of women’s fashions had also from the start reassured their readers that norms and ideals had, in fact, always contained exceptions and ambiguities, especially in the context of fashion. As noted by a writer in a film magazine in 1926, even the Ancient Greeks had known female types that were not exactly feminine: What was the childless and boyish Diana with her “unwomanly traits” and “masculine inclinations” if not an example of an Ancient type of la garçonne?115 Such examples worked not only to defuse concerns with current fashions but also, more specifically, to establish the garçonne type as an exception—after all, neither masculine goddesses nor crossdressed Hollywood stars were at the end of the day expected to change the foundations of femininity or the majority of Swedish women. In conclusion, the masculine styles in women’s fashions in the 1920s symbolized, on the one hand, a playful modernity but, at the same time, women were recommended to be careful and to soften the edges of fashions that were seen as exaggerated. The story of the Swedish garçonne

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  85 girl finally came to an end in the late 1920s when new gender stories came into the forefront, stories that no longer focused on the masculinity of female modernity but, rather, on the femininity of the modern woman.

Concluding Remarks As I have shown in this chapter, in the 1920s, anxieties over the masculinization of women’s fashions inspired jokes and satire as well as countless of magazine articles providing detailed, and often conflicted, advice to the modern, young woman. While many celebrated the ideals of sports and practical clothing, the modern woman was also expected to “shed” her masculine ways in time for her evening activities, whether she was attending a party that required grace and charm or stayed at home, tending for her family. However, as pointed out by feminist commentators, the modern career women had to spend considerable amounts of time on finding nice outfits suitable for work, as she lacked a formal outfit that corresponded to the male suit. Meanwhile, the genre of fashion advice developed in Swedish print media through a number of questions and answers, ranging from the philosophical (What is beauty?) to the practical (Should women cut their hair?). The answers contributed to an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and parameters of femininity, or to be more exact, modern femininity. In this context, the garçonne style was presented as a playful but mostly harmless foreign trend, but, in time, fashion experts also admonished women not exaggerate the masculine look. The uneasiness surrounding the garçonne style was particularly evident in discussions on short hair. On the one hand, the “stiff” and “sober” masculine style was presented as a viable, modern option for the sports or career woman. At the same time, this kind of active woman was also cautioned not to forget her womanliness. Moreover, doubts lingered that the emancipated (and short-haired) modern woman would ever want to settle down and get married, let alone become a mother. This anxiety was rooted not only in concerns with gender and hair length but also with a rising sense of instability regarding the boundaries of sexuality. Even though the garçonne look was not explicitly associated with sexual deviance in Swedish mainstream media in the 1920s, discussions were beginning to appear regarding young women’s ability “to please men.” The resulting flood of advice directed at the modern, young woman was intended to moderate her masculine tendencies as well as reassure concerned observers; while transgressions in sports could be seen as contained (in time and space), women’s masculine career choices could similarly be tolerated if properly compensated by femininity, defined by key concepts such as grace, charm and coquetry. Through detailed instructions on how to achieve these qualities, the boundaries of acceptable female behavior were also, in effect, regulated and controlled. However, even though grace and coquetry were assumed to be “eternal” facets

86  Telling Stories of womanhood, the need for advice on these matters also implied that the execution of femininity was easily disturbed and thus needed to be practiced, preferably under the guidance of experts. As correctly predicted by fashion magazines, not everything about the garçonne style was doomed; women continued to embrace the practicality of modern/ masculine clothing, whether in the context of sportswear or city wear. Thus, even though the era of ultra-short Eton crops, elegant monocles and stylish tuxedos came to an end in the late 1920s, fashion continued to mark “an unclear boundary ambiguously.”116 To the individual woman, the modern world had always involved new choices as well as new pitfalls—after the war, failing to be modern had become almost as bad as failing to be feminine. Thus, while cartoonists preferred to place the new or modern woman at a crossroads between either masculinity or femininity (where she tended to go wrong), female consumers in the 1920s and beyond were more likely to find themselves at a modern intersection of multiple choices. As will be discussed further in the next chapter, this was especially true of the early interwar sportswoman who was expected to both win and be sweet, and moreover, as if engaged in a perpetual act of transformative magic, she should be able to shift back and forth daily between “garçonneries” and grace, strength and softness, masculinity and femininity.

Notes 1 “Till nutidens danserskor,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, August 10, 1927. “Nog finns några karlar än, som vill ha riktiga kvinnor; Till korståg ni manliga män, mot garçonner och maninnor!” 2 Ibid. 3 “Kvinnlighetens comeback,” Våra nöjen, February 22, 1929, 21. “Den raka, enkla och pojkaktiga linjen är ej längre salggörande.”; “figurens accentuering” 4 “La Garçonne är död—Leve kvinnan!” Våra nöjen, September 27, 1929, 16–17. 5 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 2; “Före och efter klockan 5: Hur man gör shingeln salongsmässig,” Dagens Nyheter, May 2, 1926, 9. 6 Michelle Ann Abate, Tomboys: A  Literary and Cultural History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009). 7 Yvonne Hirdman, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds., Sveriges historia: 1920–1965 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 89–94. On the international phenomenon of the “modern woman” as a type in the 1920s, see also, for instance, Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Penny Tinkler and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, “Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America: Corsets, Cars, and Cigarettes,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 3 (2008). 8 Questions explored also in Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 9 Therése Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014); Eva Blomberg, Vill ni se en stjärna? Kön, kropp och kläder i Filmjournalen 1919–1953 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006); Roger Qvarsell and Ulrika Torell, Reklam

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  87 och hälsa: levnadsideal, skönhet och hälsa i den svenska reklamens historia (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005). 10 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Rev. ed. (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 12. 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Johan Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001), 47. 13 Karin Boye, Astarte: roman (Göteborg: Lindelöw, 2013). 14 Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, On fashion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 9. 15 Inspiration was often drawn from trends and discussions in American popular culture; Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige; Martin Alm, “Bilden av Amerika,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Signum, 2009). In the 1920s some Swedish observers sensed that Sweden was behind in terms of embracing modern beauty ideals, including make-up and beauty pageants, but also argued that Swedes were quickly adapting; “Kvinnoidealet av idag,” Våra nöjen, August 21, 1926, 12. A few years earlier the fashion magazine Charme had advertised a nation-wide beauty contest, which had received “colossal interest”; “Charmes skönhetstävling,” Charme, July  1, 1924, 10–11. On the modern history of the American beauty industry, see Kathy Lee Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). 16 Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 68. “mellan det godkända, det tvivelaktiga och det oacceptabla” For instance, when Sweden’s first models (mannekänger) were employed by a department store in Stockholm in 1923, they were initially treated condescendingly in the Swedish press, as Söderberg notes. However, ten years later modeling was increasingly accepted as a modern and even desirable occupation for young women. Ibid., 95. 17 Lisbeth Larsson, En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning och svensk veckopress (Stockholm: Symposion, 1989), 115. As Michael Shudson shows in an American context, women’s magazines “quickly became consumption tutors, taking over from mother and grandmother.” Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 182. Quoted in Tinkler and Warsh, “Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America: Corsets, Cars, and Cigarettes,” 135. On women as readers of, and contributors to, women’s magazines, see also Rachel Ritchie et  al., eds., Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption (London; New York: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group, 2016). 18 “De förvandlade idealen,” Bonniers Veckotidning, October  31, 1926, 40. “Någon fixerad norm för vad som är fult eller vackert och opassande eller passande finns knappt. [. . .] Det blir den naturliga taktkänslan som avgör— och märk väl denna taktkänsla är ganska olika beskaffad olika år.” 19 On the modern woman as a mirror of change, see also Yvonne Hirdman, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds., Sveriges historia: 1920–1965 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 98, and Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 20 Boye, Astarte: roman. 21 Ibid., 97, 103, 107–108. On the paradoxes of mass-produced fashion (enabling individuality), see also Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 12. 22 Boye, Astarte: roman, 102. “hårvatten, veckotidningar och bilmärken”

88  Telling Stories 23 Ibid., 108. This critical view on fashion and consumption (concerned that “woman” and “mannequin” would ultimately coalesce into one soulless ideal of femininity in modern culture) was present in other novels as well at this time. See Kristina Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), 26–29. On the arrival of “mass fashion” in the 1920s and concerns that fashion would turn individuality into conformity, see also, Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 178. 24 “Kvinnotyperna på modet,” Charme, April 1, 1924, 20–21. 25 Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 53. 26 Ibid., 59. For the quote on hair, see Verner Söderberg and Eugène Fahlstedt, eds., Nordisk familjebok: konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi, 38 vols. (Stockholm: Nordisk familjeboks förl., 1926), 280. “den vackra prydnad, som det långa, böljande håret utgör” 27 The bob was in its basic shape a straight cut around the head; the shorter shingle cut exposed the hairline at the neck, and the Eton crop referred to an exceptionally close-cropped cut, trimmed to imitate men’s styles; Sabine Hake, “In the Mirror of Fashion,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 187. Because these three haircuts signified an escalating scale of disruption to a norm of feminine softness and grace, as I will come back to, where the Eton crop became known as the most masculine—and extreme—style, it is important to differentiate between them. As Laura Doan points out, “One must be careful about referring interchangeably to these three popular hairstyles of the 1920s because the styles evolved (and overlapped) over the decade. The first short haircut was the bob, which appeared just before and during the war; it reached full fashion in 1924. The shingle was introduced in about 1923 and was in full fashion in 1925; finally, the Eton crop appeared in 1926 and reached full fashion in 1927.” Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 102, 234n34. 28 “Gosshår eller shingle,” Charme, July 1, 1924, 8–9. See also “Bobbad eller icke bobbad,” Filmnyheter, December 15, 1924, 10. 29 “Hos barberaren,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1925, 26. See also Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 54–55. 30 Hake, “In the Mirror of Fashion,” 186. 31 “Hos barberaren,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1925, 26; “Stockholmskan bättrar sig,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1926, 14–15. 32 Söderberg and Fahlstedt, Nordisk familjebok: konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi, 280. “Shingladt och bobbat hår äro moder, hvilka omkr. 1924 gjort sitt segertåg från Amerika till Europa inom damvärlden; och att kvinnor på detta sätt villigt uppoffrat den vackra prydnad, som det långa, böljande håret utgör, är det led i dammodernas efter Världskriget fortgående maskulinisering, därtill bekvämt nog för de i förvärfsarbete sysselsatta, fastän visserligen det kortklippta håret kräfver skötsel genom frisör och dessvärre ofta företagen maskinklippning af halshåret.” 33 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 7, 12. 34 The idea of a naturally occurring “third sex” had been popularized by the famous Weimar sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, but theories of sex/gender inverts (sometimes used synonymously with hermaphroditism and

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  89 homosexuality) originated in the works by nineteenth-century sexologists. Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 18; Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 97. 35 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 6. “ty redan för tjugo år sedan bar ‘det tredje könet’ håret på manligt vis. Men idag [. . .] ligger skälet dock djupare och får framför allt sin förklaring i den moderna kvinnans levnadssätt och sysselsättning, så att den nuvarande frisyren icke blivit ett mod utan en dräkt. Sport, all slags kroppskultur, ungdomlig rörlighet och därmed överensstämmande utseende äro idag kvinnovärldens ideal.” In 1924, a film magazine had similarly reminded their readers that short hair was “not new” since women of the emancipation movement were known to have cut their hair extremely short: “Damerna snaggklippa sig,” Filmnyheter, January 21, 1924, 13. Reports appeared from time to time that claimed that short hair was no longer modern—that it had become “un-modern” (omodernt). Such reports always turned out to be false—short hairstyles kept their popularity throughout the 1920s. Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 59. 36 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 3. “Är gossfrisyren okvinnlig? Nej, det är den sannerligen icke, om den accepteras av kvinnligt kännande damer, som äro uppfyllda av det kvinnliga koketteriets goda ande. [. . .] En världsomvälvning ha ställt kvinnan inför manliga uppgifter [. . .] Oföränderligt är emellertid det kvinnliga koketteriet, som endast känner ett mål, att behaga mannen.” 37 The specific word “coquette” (Swe. kokett, from the French coquet) was introduced into the Swedish language in the eighteenth century and referred to women (too) eager to be pleasing and admired, especially by men. See Svenska Akademiens ordbok, s.v. kokett. In the 1920s, the word was used also in a more positive way, often in the context of emphasizing women’s femininity, despite their participation in sports. See, for example, “Sporten och koketteriet,” Bonniers Veckotidning, January 5, 1923, 42. 38 The underlying question was, as Marti M. Lybeck writes in the German context, “whether women’s emancipation would interfere with the robust reproduction needed by the modern nation state. [. . .] Anxieties about feminine roles fed stigmatization of female masculinity and feminist assertion as asexual and asocial.” Marti M. Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 190. 39 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 14. “Runda ansikten, mjuka, kvinnliga drag, det späda, älskliga ansiktsuttrycket komma bättre till sin rätt med en luftig, rörlig och våglik frisyr än genom den stela, nyktert manliga hårklädseln.” 40 Ibid., 15. “en ‘neutral’ form.” 41 Ibid., 24. “gossfrisyren förvandlas till ett flickhuvud.” 42 For the comment on the Eton crop, see “De förvandlade idealen,” Bonniers Veckotidning, October 31, 1926, 40. 43 Marjorie Garber, Loaded Words (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 109. 44 Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 17. 45 Loaded Words, 109. 46 Karin Johannisson, “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget,” in Lychnos: Årsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoria (Uppsala:

90  Telling Stories Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991); Qvarsell and Torell, Reklam och hälsa: levnadsideal, skönhet och hälsa i den svenska reklamens historia; Ylva Habel, Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State (Stockholm: Aura, 2002). 47 “Charmes skönhetstävlan,” Charme, February 15, 1924, 3: “När Charme för ett par år sedan startades, var den först här hemma att söka väcka förståelse för vad kvinnlig skönhet betyder för individen och för släktet. [.  .  .] Vi ha genom våra råd och artiklar velat visa att det inte blott är pudervippan och sminkstången som förhöjer och befrämjar skönheten, utan att det framför allt är gymnastik, hygien och sport som skapar varaktigt skönhet, ungdomlighet och behag.” 48 “Är det korta håret okvinnligt?” Filmjournalen, no. 1, 1926, 18. 49 “Shingel är opraktisk—på syster,” Idun, December 11, 1927, 1249. 50 Quoted in Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 61. 51 In fact, as reported by Charme in 1924, women with shingled cuts risked losing their jobs in all kinds of work, whether working at offices or as saleswomen. “Långt hår eller kort?” Charme, January 1, 1924, 5. 52 The film magazine Filmnyheter thus argued in 1926 that short-haired actresses were not suited to play sweet housewives, as they simply would not be believable. “Testens betydelse i äktenskapets psykologi,” Filmnyheter, January 11, 1926, 8. 53 “Testens betydelse i äktenskapets psykologi,” Filmnyheter, January 11, 1926, 8. In his “London Letters,” Swedish cartoonist Einar Nerman, based in London in the 1920s, characteristically blurred the lines not only between masculine and feminine but between domestic and foreign, reporting on new and borderless trends—such as short hair—of interest to an urban Stockholmian audience. Einar Nerman, “Londonbrev,” Bonniers Veckotidning, January 17, 1925, 31. 54 See, for instance, “En käck sportdräkt,” Filmnyheter, January 3, 1927; “Det graciösa sportmodet,” Bonniers Veckotidning, April  8, 1928, 40. In 1934, NK’s own magazine Stil declared that sportswear was now completely “legitimate” and that such clothing should be worn and judged by the same standards as other kinds of clothing worn by “normal people” (normalt folk). “Sportdräkterna bli trevligare,” Stil, Fall/Winter Issue 1934–35. On interwar debates on women wearing trousers, see also Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 164–69. 55 “Böra damerna bära långbyxor,” Våra nöjen, July 12, 1929, 28. 56 “Byxkvinnor och köksdamer,” Idun, July 29, 1923, 707. 57 Ibid. “riktigt pigg och söt med sitt lilla inslag av kvinnlig ‘piff’.” Trade inspector Kerstin Hesselgren, Sweden’s first female member of parliament, had organized women in reforestation work during the war and reported in 1918 that the girls had found their trousers practical, and no one had subjected them to ridicule or critique. In her trade inspection report of 1922, she suggested that this practice should be extended to factory work as well, as had been done in England and in America. On Hesselgren and the debate on women’s trousers, see also, Ingrid Bergman, “Kvinnorna och byxorna,” in Kläder: Nordiska Museets och Skansens Årsbok Fataburen 1988, ed. Ingrid Bergman (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1988), 51–52; Ellen Rydelius and Anna Odhe, Kvinnokavalkad: en bilderbok om svenska kvinnors liv 1918– 1944 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1946), 128. 58 “Byxkvinnor och köksdamer,” Idun, July 29, 1923, 707. 59 On the Swedish reform dress movement in the late nineteenth century, see Patrik Steorn, “Konstnärligt antimode: Svensk reformdräkt kring sekelskiftet

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  91 1900,” in Mode: en introduktion—en tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse, eds. Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg (Stockholm: Raster, 2009). 60 “Vi behöva en kavajkostym,” Idun, January 20, 1929, 59. 61 Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 108; Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 164. 62 “Miss Jane Burr i Stockholm,” Svenska Dagbladet, December 13, 1922, 9. “Miss Burr vill nämligen inget hellre än att få räknas som en helt vanlig människa vilket hon också är. [. . .] Hon är icke manhaftig, icke karlavulen, vill icke reformera kvinnodräkten.” 63 Ibid., “behaglig och kvinnlig i sitt uppträdande, men med temperament, viljekraft och klart huvud.” 64 “Stockholmskan bättrar sig,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1926, 14–15. 65 An interesting example of this discourse is provided by Emma Severinsson in her analysis of the short story “Ungkarlskvinnor” (Bachelor women), published in a Swedish women’s magazine (Svensk Damtidning) in 1920. Severinsson shows how the readership was educated in the rights and wrongs of modern womanhood through the example of two female office employees: Hulda, ridiculed by her male colleagues on account of her habit of using men’s cufflinks, a tie, sturdy boots and other traditionally masculine effects, and Ottilia, described as an ugly and overconfident sportswoman. However, whereas Hulda secretly dreams of finding a man and ultimately rebels against Ottilia by buying a pretty spring dress, her friend remains devoted only to her work and sports. The story ends with Hulda marrying her boss while Ottilia loses her friend and remains unmarried. As Severinsson concludes, the message to the reader was clear: Women who do not learn to perform the right kind of womanliness are punished with exclusion and loneliness, whereas those who adjust to the norm are rewarded with happiness and community. Emma Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 109–11. See also Severinsson’s doctoral thesis, Moderna kvinnor: Modernitet, femininitet och svenskhet i svensk veckopress 1920–1933 (Lund: Lunds universitet, 2018). 66 “Indiskreta Parisbrev,” Charme, December 1, 1923, 3. “Lyckligtvis går det inte för sig; det skulle bli för fult.” 67 Jens Rydström and David Tjeder, eds., Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009), 228. For an example of such rhetoric in the 1920s on “mannish” and emancipated women, see Gustaf Otto-Adelborg, “Till kvinnornas psykologi,” Svenska Dagbladet, April 12, 1922. 68 On the effects of this “choice” for women active in politics, higher education or sports (throughout the twentieth century and beyond), see also Barbro Hedvall, Maktens signaler: från plym till naket huvud (Stockholm: SNS förlag, 2012); Lina Carls, Våp eller nucka? Kvinnors högre studier och genusdiskursen 1930–1970 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2004); Vikki Krane, “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, but Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport,” Quest 53, no. 1 (2001). 69 Helena Nyblom, “Kvinnans personliga utveckling,” Stockholms Dagblad, January 4, 1921. “denna eviga nervösa oro efter att på ett tarvligt och dilettantiskt sätt vilja lägga näsan i allt.” Similar arguments (on women’s “anxious” need to participate) appeared especially in the context of sports; see, for instance, “Den olympiska kvinnan,” Veckojournalen, May 13, 1928, 37. 70 Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige; Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen

92  Telling Stories av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960; Qvarsell and Torell, Reklam och hälsa: levnadsideal, skönhet och hälsa i den svenska reklamens historia. 71 Eva Blomberg, “Konsten och garderoben,” in Iklädd identitet: historiska studier av kropp och kläder, eds. Madeleine Hurd, Tom Olsson, and Lisa Öberg (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005), 218. 72 Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige, 11. See also Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. 73 To use the language of Stuart Hill, because young women’s “decoding” of fashion, movies and movie stars (once “encoded” by producers and writers in a certain way) was unpredictable, women’s magazines tried to guide their readership toward an appropriate and harmless decoding. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall (London; New York: Routledge, 1992). 74 “Före och efter klockan 5: Hur man gör shingeln salongsmässig,” Dagens Nyheter, May 2 1926, 9. “Vi nöja oss inte längre med att byta klänning till middag, vi vilja byta skinn så effektivt som möjligt—sportkvinna och kamrat, antingen man är självförsörjande eller ej, före klockan 5—efter 5 hemkvinna eller förförerska, allt efter råd och lägenhet, bara det är något konträrt motsatt förmiddagstypen.” 75 For an example of this argument, see “Sportkvinnan och toalettelegansen,” Damsporten, February 1930, 7. 76 “Före och efter klockan 5: Hur man gör shingeln salongsmässig,” Dagens Nyheter, May 2, 1926, 9. “genom att driva satsen om ändamålsenlighet som främsta estetiska princip skapar det två olika linjer, ett herraktigt garconneri för morgonen och ljuv kvinnlighet för kvällen.” Later in the same year, Charme presented a similar argument, explaining that the garçonne style could be divided into two lines, the extremely masculine style (straight, short and slick, which “looked good on no one”), and the coquette version with curls and adornments. As Charme noted, some women liked to shift between styles, from “tailor-made in the day” to the most “artful creations” at the evening party. “Frisyrens nya modelinje,” Charme, Christmas Issue, no. 24, 1926, 31. 77 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 75–77. In her essay on pilot heroine Amelia Earhart’s attempt to prove her femininity by creating her own fashion line, Karla Jay has discussed these divergent expectations of sportswomen in terms of a “genderized schizophrenia” (still at play). Karla Jay, “No Bumps, No Excrescences: Amelia Earhart’s Failed Flight into Fashions,” in On Fashion, eds. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 91. 78 “ ‘Affärschefen Miss Amerika’ gör vår huvudstad den äran,” Svenska Dagbladet, July 30, 1930, 20. These fashionable examples posed a challenge to a gender system based not only on segregation but also on containment by youth—if young and adult women would use sportswear and trousers, the “quaint” exception seemed to be made into a rule. “De byxor vi redan ha: Några Stockholmsdamer i byxor och hur de trivas i dem,” Dagens Nyheter, November 7, 1926, 10. 79 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 12. 80 Lydia Wahlström, Vardagens religion: korta betraktelser och föredrag (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1925), 34. 81 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 48. 82 Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige, 47.

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  93 83 Ibid. On this point, see also Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, 157; Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 84 “Farliga kvinnor och ofarliga,” Tidevarvet, April 18, 1925, 4. 85 Ibid., “såge du inte så bra ut och vore du inte så välklädd och flirtig och trevlig skulle du alldeles säkert kallas manhaftig eller feministisk.” 86 Ibid. In 1920, the daily paper Dagens Nyheter similarly speculated as to why men seemed threatened by serious career women and why these women seemed less “charming” (“Yrkeskvinnan och männen,” Dagens Nyheter, April  11, 1920). Noting that “helplessness” and “defenselessness” were seen as essential qualities of charm, this reporter argued that it was nevertheless a “perversity” that modern men should want such childishness in modern women—their life-partners. The rising popularity of psychology in the 1920s becomes evident in this habit in the Swedish press of labelling any unwanted behavior as “perverse.” 87 Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige, 48. 88 As Andersson points out, this health discourse in Swedish interwar mass media was also driven by racial arguments connected to fears of “degeneration.” On this rhetoric, see also Karin Johannisson, Den mörka kontinenten: kvinnan, medicinen och fin-de-siècle, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Norstedt, 2005), 90–91. 89 Yet another increasingly common term in this context was the concept of “normal,” as I will discuss in Chapter 5. 90 Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige, 97. 91 B.V.T.-series no. 1. Bibehåll din ungdom och skönhet (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 20. “Grace kan läras.” 92 Ibid. “hårdnackad självdisciplin” 93 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 122. 94 Johannisson, Den mörka kontinenten: kvinnan, medicinen och fin-de-siècle, 55. 95 On the history of “tomboy taming,” see Abate, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History; Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 5–9. 96 In a characteristic advertisement in Stockholms-Tidningen in 1926, a young woman can be seen standing on top of the world, vacuuming her floor in the northern hemisphere using a Volta vacuum cleaner, thus showcasing how Swedish modern progress was perfectly compatible with female domesticity and charm. Advertisement for the Swedish vacuum cleaner Volta Salus III, in Stockholms-Tidningen, October 24, 1926. 97 On advertising and gender, see Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 98 “Modet just nu,” Charme, December 1, 1926, 10–11. “graciöst kvinnligt raffinemang” vs “korrekt manlig stil.” 99 “Problemet om mannen,” Charme, May  1, 1923, 15. “den starke, den kraftige, den som är att lita på” Discussed by Judith Butler in terms of the heterosexual matrix and earlier by Monique Wittig in terms of discourses of heterosexuality, this way of defining men/masculine and women/feminine through and by heterosexuality has effectively positioned the lesbian outside of the category of woman. As Jenny Björklund points out, Swedish literary discourses on lesbianism have in many cases explored this discursive

94  Telling Stories exclusion as an alternative (subversive) force, harboring a potentiality of empowerment and freedom (see also this volume Chapter 6). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London; New York: Routledge, 1990); Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 (1980)); Jenny Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 173. 100 Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley, “Ad(dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbians Looking,” in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Culture, eds. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 178. 101 Elizabeth Wilson, “What Does a Lesbian Look Like?” in A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, eds. Valerie Steele and Hal Rubinstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 173–75. 102 The satire magazine Söndagsnisse-Strix frequently suggested in the 1920s that modern garçonne girls would never want to settle down and have children. On similar concerns in the British context, see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 105. Beyond satire, Swedish policy and social reform experts were also increasingly worried in the 1920s about declining birth rates. As Annika Berg points out, such concerns thus arose long before Gunnar and Alva Myrdahl’s well-known study Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question) published in 1934. Arguments were produced both in the context of eugenics and social reform. Annika Berg, Den gränslösa hälsan: Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009), 148. 103 Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, 110–25. As Laura Doan argues in the British context, the new “masculine” woman with her monocles and tuxedos in the 1920s was more likely to be read as modern (or a case of upper-class eccentricity) than lesbian or queer (at least prior to the “obscenity trial” of 1928, targeting Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness, which brought about public attention on a wider scale to the possible links between “inversion” and female masculinity). 104 “Kvinnlighetens comeback,” Våra nöjen, February 22, 1929, 21. “Modet har åter blivit kvinnligt. Dess manhaftiga period är blott ett minne i modets annaler.” 105 “La Garçonne är död—Leve kvinnan!” Våra nöjen, September  27, 1929, 34. “gossmodet är fullkomligt dött” 106 “Frisyrens nya modelinje,” Charme, Christmas Issue, no. 24, 1926, 31. “Garconneidealet är utdömt” 107 Gustaf Näsström, “Kvinnan av i vår,” Stockholms-Tidningen, May  25, 1932. 108 On this development in other national contexts, see, for instance, Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany; Birgitte Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. 109 Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960, 67. 110 Ibid., 63. 111 Bergman, “Kvinnorna och byxorna,” 53. However, as Katina Bill has shown in a British 1930s context, negative attitudes toward women’s trousers nevertheless persisted—women in trousers could still be accused of being immodest and unattractive, rejecting femininity while adopting masculinity.

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  95

112 113 114 115

116

Katina Bill, “Attitudes Towards Women’s Trousers: Britain in the 1930s,” Journal of Design History 6, no. 1 (1993). Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2. Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 43. Gustaf Näsström, “Kvinnan av i vår,” Stockholms-Tidningen, May 25, 1932. “Antikens kvinnoideal,” Filmnyheter, March  22, 1926, 8. “Att la garçonne inte var främmande för antiken, därom vittnar ju f.ö. den ‘kyska,’ d.v.s. barnlösa och gossaktiga Diana, hennes kyskhet är ingenting annat än okvinnliga anlag, läggning åt det maskulina.” Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2. See also Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 98.

Bibliography Abate, Michelle Ann. Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009. Alm, Martin. “Bilden av Amerika.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Lund: Signum, 2009. Andersson, Therése. Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014. Banner, Lois W. American Beauty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Benstock, Shari, and Suzanne Ferriss. On Fashion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Berg, Annika. Den gränslösa hälsan: Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009. Bergman, Ingrid. “Kvinnorna och byxorna.” In Kläder: Nordiska Museets och Skansens Årsbok Fataburen 1988, edited by Ingrid Bergman, 33–55. Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1988. Bill, Katina. “Attitudes Towards Women’s Trousers: Britain in the 1930s.” Journal of Design History 6, no. 1 (1993): 45–54. Björklund, Jenny. Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Blomberg, Eva. “Konsten och garderoben.” In Iklädd identitet: historiska studier av kropp och kläder, edited by Madeleine Hurd, Tom Olsson and Lisa Öberg, 184–218. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005. ———. Vill ni se en stjärna? Kön, kropp och kläder i Filmjournalen 1919–1953. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006. Boye, Karin. Astarte: roman. Göteborg: Lindelöw, 2013. 1931. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Carls, Lina. Våp eller nucka? Kvinnors högre studier och genusdiskursen 1930– 1970. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2004. Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Finkelstein, Joanne. The Fashioned Self. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. Fjelkestam, Kristina. Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002.

96  Telling Stories Garber, Marjorie. Loaded Words. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. ———. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. 1992. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Habel, Ylva. Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State. Stockholm: Aura, 2002. Hake, Sabine. “In the Mirror of Fashion.” In Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum, 185–201. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language, edited by Stuart Hall, 128–38. London; New York: Routledge, 1992. Hedvall, Barbro. Maktens signaler: från plym till naket huvud. Stockholm: SNS förlag, 2012. Hirdman, Yvonne, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds. Sveriges historia: 1920–1965. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012. Jay, Karla. “No Bumps, No Excrescences: Amelia Earhart’s Failed Flight into Fashions.” In On Fashion, edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, 76–94. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Johannisson, Karin. Den mörka kontinenten: kvinnan, medicinen och fin-de-siècle. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Norstedt, 2005. 1994. ———. “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget.” In Lychnos: Årsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoria, 139–95. Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991. Krane, Vikki. “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, But Do We Want To? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport.” Quest 53, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 115–33. Larsson, Lisbeth. En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning och svensk veckopress. Stockholm: Symposion, 1989. Lewis, Reina, and Katrina Rolley. “Ad(dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbians Looking.” In Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Culture, edited by Peter Horne and Reina Lewis, 178–90. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Lybeck, Marti M. Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Peiss, Kathy Lee. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. Qvarsell, Roger, and Ulrika Torell. Reklam och hälsa: levnadsideal, skönhet och hälsa i den svenska reklamens historia. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005. Ritchie, Rachel, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, and S. Jay Kleinberg, eds. Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption, vol. 23. London; New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Rydelius, Ellen, and Anna Odhe. Kvinnokavalkad: en bilderbok om svenska kvinnors liv 1918–1944. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1946.

“La Garçonne is Dead!—Long Live Femininity!”  97 Rydström, Jens, and David Tjeder, eds. Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009. Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Severinsson, Emma. “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 97–118. ———. Moderna kvinnor: Modernitet, femininitet och svenskhet i svensk veckopress 1920–1933. Lund: Lunds universitet, 2018. Söderberg, Johan. Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Söderberg, Verner, and Eugène Fahlstedt, eds. Nordisk familjebok: konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi. 38 vols. Stockholm: Nordisk familjeboks förl., 1926. Søland, Birgitte. Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Steorn, Patrik. “Konstnärligt antimode: Svensk reformdräkt kring sekelskiftet 1900.” In Mode: en introduktion—en tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse, edited by Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg, 225–49. Stockholm: Raster, 2009. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Tinkler, Penny, and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh. “Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America: Corsets, Cars, and Cigarettes.” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 3 (2008): 113–43. Wahlström, Lydia. Vardagens religion: korta betraktelser och föredrag. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1925. Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Rev. ed. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. 1985. ———. “What Does a Lesbian Look Like?”. In A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, edited by Valerie Steele and Hal Rubinstein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. 1980.

Part II

Changing Stories Negotiating Masculinities in Sports and Automobility

3 “What We Have Learned from Our Sporting Ladies” Making Sense of the Female Athlete

The female athlete stands out as the “most popular phenomenon” of our century, exclaimed the women’s magazine Charme in the Midsummer issue of 1925.1 The “handful of women” who had participated every fourth year in the Olympic Games so far had even begun to “outshine the brightest stars of high society and theatre.”2 Yet, Charme’s reporter also noted a curious paradox: Even though the top females in tennis and swimming were now being celebrated all over the world—to a degree “bordering on worshipping”—the women’s sports movement was still dwelling in the shadows, struggling to survive. How could this be? Charme, a Swedish women’s magazine devoted to fashion and the exploration of modern femininity, suggested several explanations: disinterest (“shoulders had been shrugged”), disbelief (predictions that women’s sports “did not have a future”) and discouragement (by male athletes who became disgruntled when women began to “cheat on their turf”).3 More specifically, as the article went on, female athletes had to fight opinions that sports were “too tough and too strenuous for the female physique,” that women’s sports were “ugly to watch,” and that, more generally, women would do best not to bother with sports at all.4 However, Charme begged to disagree, claiming instead that “What we have learned from our sporting ladies is that female capabilities have been vastly underestimated and that women can get results that are really not so far behind what men have achieved.”5 In this spirit of celebrating a new kind of modern and sporty femininity, the message was clear: Because women were changing, the story of them needed to change too. By focusing on a largely unexplored Swedish interwar material of sports writing on and often by women, this chapter will bring attention to one of the more complex gender stories of the 1920s. This story is tied to deeply controversial subject matter—the physical potential and shape of the female body.6 More specifically, I analyze how the interplay of media’s critique and praise of the “modern sports girl” worked to change the story of femininity, but only to a certain extent. Exploring this borderline, the frontier lines of (ideas of) femininity in the 1920s, will bring light not only to a little-explored area of Swedish sports history

102  Changing Stories but also to the impact and implications of gendered norms in sports more generally, which (still) shape and limit girls’ and women’s access to, and recognition within, many sports. As Judith Butler points out in this context, norms “are not simply imposed on an already formed body, but they constitute part of what makes the formation of that body possible.”7 While both men and women thus are capable of muscular development, historians have demonstrated how traditionally feminine norms of frailty and passivity have positioned the notion of strong women as unnatural or unfeminine.8 Within sports, this tension between femininity and physicality created early on an impossible “set-up” for the female athlete, who could not excel in one area without detracting from the other.9 During the sports-crazed 1920s this dilemma came to the forefront in unprecedented ways as a new visual culture put the modern, record-breaking sportswoman on display, inviting critics to scrutinize her physique as well as her femininity.10 This era provides many examples of the “femininity balancing act,” defined by Vikki Krane as a requirement for the sportswoman to strike a balance between (“feminine”) vulnerability and (“masculine”) confidence.11 Yet, the 1920s was also a time when gender boundaries were challenged and pushed, especially in sports and by sportswomen, as this chapter will show. My investigation of the changing stories of women’s sports in the 1920s draws on rich empirical material that I have structured as follows. First, I introduce the Swedish case, in terms of the development of a national women’s sports movement and its close and overlapping relationship to the emancipation movement.12 Second, I  take a closer look at the role media played in popularizing while also critiquing the female athlete. Whether her body was described as modern, muscular or masculine, she was often utilized as a symbol of exciting progress—a limitless Amazon who nevertheless should pay attention to limits, especially in relation to her femininity. In this context, I also discuss how different kinds of “limits” affected female athletes, whether it be aesthetic limits, sexual limits, or, ultimately, limits of resources. Third, I focus on the controversial issue of women in competitions, particularly why feminist as well as conservative critics in many cases agreed that women should refrain from competing and what happened when they nevertheless did. Throughout the discussion of these issues and themes, it will become clear that the female body became a battleground in the 1920s for the meaning of modernity as well as femininity. On the one hand, popular entertainment magazines, dedicated to a female readership, acted as defenders of certain gender boundaries and feminine qualities such as grace, charm and beauty, but, on the other hand, because these magazines supported an active, modern lifestyle—including sports—they also participated in an effort to expand femininity to include qualities such as strength, stamina and, more generally, greater physical confidence. By studying a wide range of popular publications, I believe that insights

“What We Have Learned”  103 can be gained concerning not only when and why sport was defined as masculine but also how femininity was increasingly defined as sporty. As suggested by the entertainment magazine Veckojournalen in 1928, the “eternal feminine” and the “eternally sporty” had now become one and the same thing.13 Because such ideas on sports (and femininity) have generally gained little attention in historical scholarship, I will first briefly discuss past and present academic work on sports and gender.

The Playing Man: A Few Notes on the Historiography of Sports The rising popularity of sports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and what it meant was closely monitored by contemporaneous observers interested in the conditions of modernity.14 When historian of ideas Johan Huizinga concluded his work on “the playing man,” Homo Ludens, in the late 1930s, he explained that he had been thinking about the theme of the book, “the play element in culture,” as far back as 1903, if not earlier.15 During these decades, Huizinga had become convinced that “play” taught man not only to be free but also how to take risks: “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension— these are the essence of the play spirit.”16 Sports and play thus appear from the beginning as an arena that has offered meaning and value far beyond its momentary entertainment appeal. As Huizinga emphasized, a game is admittedly “not real,” and yet it matters outside of its duration— especially to the winner: Winning means showing oneself superior in the outcome of a game. Nevertheless, the evidence of this superiority tends to confer upon the winner a semblance of superiority in general. In this respect he wins something more than the game as such. He has won esteem, obtained honour.17 While Huizinga did mention “playing girls” as well, his rhetoric reflects a traditional twentieth- (and nineteenth-) century culture of sports writing, where “the playing man” tended to refer literally to a man—a winning “he.” Unsurprisingly, the will to win and the gaining of superiority “in general” has typically been seen primarily as a masculine endeavor. In contrast, female superiority “in the outcome of a game” has presented a challenge not only to a gendered sports rhetoric but also to a gender order that traditionally has presumed female subordination and not superiority. Unlike male athletes, female athletes have not automatically won honor and esteem solely on account of their athletic achievements. This circumstance has also affected how sports history has been written.18 As historian of gender and sports Helena Tolvhed concludes in her study on women’s sports in Sweden between 1920 and 1990, female

104  Changing Stories athletes have historically been neglected in a threefold pattern: first, within organized sports, where women have had access to less training time, money and support (if not outright forbidden to participate); second, by “popular memory” and a sports culture that has more easily created and cherished male “legends” than female, and third, by scholarship. Since neither gender nor sports historians turned their attention to women’s athletic achievements for a long time, this area has consequently tended to “fall between the cracks.”19 However, a gender perspective on sports history need not be limited to a “recovering” of forgotten female athletes; historical and analytical insight also requires, as Tolvhed writes, a consideration of norms and ideals and how these are shaped over time and across different contexts.20 Recent years have seen a growing body of scholarship on sports history from a number of theoretical perspectives and in different historical and national contexts. This scholarship has contributed not only to new insights on sports in relation to gender but also in regard to intersections of sexuality, homophobia, body ideals, race, class and nationalism.21 In the context of this chapter’s theme of “changing stories” in and of sports it is also important to note that the boundaries of what qualifies as a “sport” itself has never been well defined. As Jean Williams writes, “[p]art of the reason that sport and leisure remains interesting to study today is that people still disagree over what, when, where and how people should use (or abuse) their bodies in their pursuit of gold medals, health and pleasure.”22 Yet, some aspects of sports during the twentieth century have become recurring topics of debates, particularly in regard to the balance between competitive and recreational purposes, where the former, as observed by Huizinga, tend to be associated with certain qualities, such as tenacity, courage and willfulness.23 To what extent women could or should be associated with such qualities has also been a recurring source of dissention. Sensing a threat to femininity (and accusations of masculinization), many representatives of the women’s sports movement in the 1920s in America as well as in Sweden and other nations thus recommended a certain level of female “moderation” in the performance of physical activities.24 While this strategy of moderation was particular to a specific historical context, the (expected) display of femininity in women’s sports has nevertheless continued to matter. As noted by Tolvhed and others, the popularity of contemporary female star athletes has tended to decline if they have neglected to smile or appear sufficiently “girlish” (feminine) and instead expressed a more determined (masculine) attitude.25 In her pioneering work on the history of women and sports, Susan K. Cahn concluded that the “cultural contradiction between athletic prowess and femininity” has in many ways remained a contradiction.26 Understanding gender norms in sports thus requires that we look at both how they have changed and how they have remained unchanged,

“What We Have Learned”  105 and, more specifically, why women’s desires to play, run, jump, ski, wrestle and win have frequently been the source of deep-felt cultural anxieties.27 Queer and feminist theory enables us to think in this context about how the female athletic body has historically presented a powerful duality of liberation and repression. On the one hand, sport from its beginning has offered inspiring stories of star athletes conquering new terrains, and, on the other hand, these (female) stars have also been haunted by cultural horror images of “monstrous” Amazons, hermaphrodite freaks and muscular discus-throwers.28 In this context, it has also been shown how the heterosexualization of female athletes has structured and limited the storytelling of women’s sports and how it continues to this day to shape the cultural and commercial expectations of female athletes.29 Even though the language of nineteenth-century sexology, listing and categorizing “abnormal” sexualities, was used sparingly in mainstream media in Sweden in the 1920s, a queer perspective on the debates shows that concerns with the physical normality and sexuality of female athletes were not absent at this time; on the contrary, this was the time when these normative structures of thought in sports were first shaped and put in place.30 Drawing on recent scholarship on the gender history of sports, this chapter places at the center the question of what happened when “the playing man” appeared in the 1920s as a woman, a “sporting lady,” exhibiting a willingness, in Huizinga’s words, “to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension,” and to what extent her body was consequently construed by media as a cultural risk in all its uncertainty.31

The Swedish Case: Visions of a Female Sports Movement In 1921, Swedish women could vote for the first time in general elections. This marked the beginning of a new era for the Swedish women’s rights movement, focused now on the goal of encouraging women to take advantage of their new rights, not only in regard to voting but in all areas of public life—including sports.32 By this time, Swedish popular media presented sports as a truly modern phenomenon, on par with jazz, film and fashion. However, unlike these latter phenomena, often critiqued for their uselessness and shallowness, sports was typically seen as an antidote to modernity’s ills, associated with the stressful big city with its increasingly sedentary work life.33 Swedish observers particularly praised the healthy effects of outdoors activities like mountaineering, hiking and skiing, which moreover went well with patriotic calls to “discover your country.”34 All of these factors—an ongoing urbanization, a changing labor market and national health concerns—constituted important elements in relation to the rise of organized sports in Sweden and its importance not only to the modern man but also, as predicted by many feminist observers, to the modern woman.35 However, just as in the case of the

106  Changing Stories vote, the matter of women’s right to sports would turn out to be less selfevident than the predictions suggested. To understand the subsequent debates in the 1920s, it is important to consider how the rise of sports in the West was related not only to general health concerns but also to growing concerns with the state of masculinity, which in its urbanized (middle-class) version was no longer rooted in physical strength. Within sports, however, men could still cultivate a masculinity based on physical trials and heroic ideals, ideals from which women were excluded.36 This athletic space of masculinity produced arguments far beyond the playing fields. The first generations of Swedish female university students in the late nineteenth century thus had to face contentions that they were physically too weak not only for sports but for an academic career and even for public service in general.37 Swedish feminists did not forget these arguments and decided, following the democratic milestone of 1921, to once and for all disprove the argument of feminine frailty. In 1924, the women’s magazine Idun, devoted to the modern, working woman, organized a “sports parliament,” where the most prominent Swedish feminists were invited to discuss the future of women’s sports in Sweden.38 The outcome of this parliament was a new, all-female sports organization, Svenska Kvinnors Centralförbund för Fysisk Kultur (Swedish Women’s Confederation for Physical Cultivation, SKCFK).39 However, as argued by many during the sports parliament, women’s health would not be served by the more competitive and commercial aspects of sports, which were seen as just another aspect of modernity’s stressful and hectic condition. In the following years, SKCFK set to work with great enthusiasm, organizing hiking trips for female factory workers and physical education courses to foster a new female sports leadership. Yet, as Helena Tolvhed has shown, the organization never achieved the nation-wide impact they hoped, despite considerable efforts and optimism. SKCFK suffered from the beginning from a lack of funding since state support was only given to the national sports association Riksidrottsförbundet (The Swedish Sports Confederation, RF), which was run by men who were either disinterested in or actively opposed to women’s sports.40 On top of, or rather, at the bottom of, these organizational and economic inequalities, doubts remained in society at large whether women should be engaged in sports at all. The growing conundrum was this: If sports required certain qualities, perceived traditionally as “masculine,” and if women were doing these sports, were they doing masculinity or should these qualities be seen as somehow both feminine and masculine, accessible to women and men in equal shares? Just like the intellectual activities of reading and writing had once been uncoupled (more or less) from men and masculinity, it now seemed that physical activities were being similarly negotiated and made available to the female sex, but with some limitations—in the world

“What We Have Learned”  107 of sports, women were welcome to read certain chapters, as it were, but not entire books. As observed by Charme and other magazines, the list of “unsuitable” sports for women was still long in the mid-1920s and included running, jumping and throwing as well as contact sports like soccer and bandy (not to mention wrestling and boxing). Consequently, as Charme’s reporter pointed out in 1925, only two sports remained fully acceptable for women: tennis and swimming.41 The arguments to keep this order were diverse but generally contained medical as well as aesthetical aspects, related in both cases to discussions of women’s physical limits and whether they would be masculinized by sports. While objections to women’s sports appeared widely across Europe and North America during the interwar period, feminist counter-strategies varied in different contexts. As noted by Tolvhed, Swedish feminists of the SKCFK generally refrained from arguments based on race hygiene, common in England and Germany at the time, and they were also reluctant to resort to the argument that women’s beauty would be enhanced by sports, common at American colleges.42 Protocols and debates instead reveal arguments based on democratic notions of equality and fairness, underscoring women’s increasing legal rights to participate in public life while refuting “scientific” evidence of women’s frailty that had obviously been proven wrong. Resorting to family or beauty arguments thus appeared to these feminists as counteracting their efforts to establish a direct link between women and the state that did not depend on their status as wives and mothers.43 However, despite SKCFK’s ambitions, they ultimately failed to gain official recognition (or funding), as their application in 1927 to be admitted as an independent organization under the wing of The Swedish Sports Confederation (RF) was denied. Instead, as Tolvhed has shown, RF decided to form a women’s section where a representative of the SKCFK was included. With neither financial nor organizational resources this women’s section was soon sidelined and left without real influence. At the same time, the old SKCFK continued to suffer from a lack of funding, and by the mid-1930s the organization had ceased to be active.44 During its short lifespan, several questions that had been discussed within the SKCFK had nevertheless caused debates in wider circles. Beyond the “what” and “how” of women’s sports, the question of why women should participate in sports continued to spark interest. To play or to win? For health or honor? In the interest of the individual or the collective? Even though women’s health had been a strong concern within the SKCFK, some women recoiled from arguments based on the essence of femininity. When, for instance, the gymnastics instructor Ester Svalling spoke in 1924 at a Nordic Conference on physical cultivation, she proclaimed that discussions concerning which activities were sufficiently “feminine, gracious and soulful” were both tiresome and irrelevant. In her mind, the very idea that femininity could be at all defined

108  Changing Stories was problematic, as it tended to be used against women, defining them as “unfeminine” as soon as they entered a new area: Femininity seems to be an utterly indefinite quality, judging by the variety of opinions on the subject that have been voiced in this country for the past 80 years, or from the days of Fredrika Bremer, the beginning of the emancipation movement. Almost every area that has been opened up to women has been proclaimed as unfeminine.45 Yet, as Svalling noted, women who had entered such “unfeminine” areas had again and again proven their slanderers wrong. Nevertheless, in a characteristic effort to nuance her feminist stance, Svalling also articulated the commonly heard critique at the time that the emancipist movement of the 1880s–90s had gone too far in their efforts “to eliminate all gender difference.” In contrast, as Svalling went on to explain, demands were now “raised everywhere” that a woman’s emancipist efforts should be “refined and adjusted to her nature.”46 By engaging with ideas on the qualities of this womanly nature, Svalling re-positioned herself with the century-long discussions of femininity that she had moments before dismissed as irrelevant. Sports simply remained a tempting playground for such gender exercises. Not only did sports invite comparisons between male and female bodies but also between purposes of bodies. As Svalling concluded: One should not forget that boys’ sports and girls’ sports serve two different purposes. To girls, sports should be a natural expression of a sound conduct of life, preserving their health, whereas sports to boys contains the added dimension of providing an outlet for their inherited instincts to fight.47 Paradoxically, the will to fight had been one of the cardinal qualities of the Swedish emancipist movement that had finally won the right to vote and hold public office, and even in a limited manner, participate in the Olympic Games. Why this quality now needed to be moderated, hidden or denied in the context of (female) physical activities may seem curious in hindsight if one does not take into account the role popular media played in terms of celebrating while also establishing appropriate limits and goals for women’s sports.

Stories of Bodies: Modern, Muscular or Masculine? By the mid-1920s, the traditional women’s movement was not the only voice that spoke of sports as part of women’s emancipation. Popular magazines like Charme often emphasized how sports offered new opportunities for the modern woman to excel: “And why should she hesitate?

“What We Have Learned”  109 Hasn’t time and progress—and man—given her equality with the stronger sex?”48 In women’s magazines as well as other print media, the progress of the “modern sportswoman” was measured in essentially two ways: by the increasing number of sports where she participated and by her results and achievements in these sports.49 The fact that “the modern Amazon” now engaged with a growing number of “male sports,” was, by Charme’s conclusion hardly surprising: The modern woman had been captured by “the great spirit of sports and now participated lively in all areas, with the possible exception of throwing and boxing, too risky for her delicate skin.”50 Such progress reports inevitably focused on the female body—what it could do, how it could be shaped and how much it could endure.51 While boxing was usually listed as the last sport that women would ever want to engage in, many observers noted that the imagined physical limits of women’s bodies had been repeatedly disproven in recent years. Sports journalist Erik Pallin, a dedicated supporter of women’s sports, thus noted in 1919 that the first woman who had been awarded the new national female sports badge in Sweden had finished the twenty-five kilometer march in over five hours in 1916, whereas the record only a few years later was down to under three hours.52 A remarkable development, as Pallin noted, who predicted women’s physical progress to be similarly extended in the future in all sports. The medical sciences were used in this context not only to establish limits but also to highlight the unknown capacities of the female body. In 1925, Charme reported new statistics gathered by the medical profession that showed how women’s height and weight were increasing, “thanks to physical activities and an improved diet.”53 Moreover, as remarked in the same article, this development seemed to have brought on changing understandings of female beauty: “High ‘masculine’ shoulders are no longer considered disfiguring.”54 A few years earlier the same magazine, always sensitive to changing ideals of femininity, had noted that the modern ideal of being slender and skinny was being challenged by sports as well as art—in the latter case, Charme reported of the success of a Parisian painter who now specialized in painting muscular sportswomen. A portrait of three female soccer players with swelling muscular calves was in this context adduced as evidence that the meaning of “feminine” was changing and now included muscles as well as a “healthy appetite” (in reality, soccer remained one of the most controversial sports for women to engage in at this time).55 Even though the looks and limits of this new and sporty muscular femininity was debated, the Swedish press often described the sports girl in more approving terms than “the pale and skinny jazz girl.”56 While both of these “types” could be seen as gender transgressive in their confident public physicality, the sports girl was more easily defended in the context of national health interests. Thus, in his historical outline of women’s sports in 1919, Erik Pallin applauded how Swedish women since at least

110  Changing Stories the sixteenth century had been active as cross-country skiers and how this national tradition should be encouraged in the spirit of improving “people’s health” (folkhälsan).57 Still, not everyone agreed that the ongoing progress of women’s sports was unproblematic, even for patriotic reasons. When it was first suggested in 1915 that a national sports badge should be initiated for women as well, a heated debate ensued regarding which physical trials this female badge should require and which were too “male.” The motto of both the male and female sports badge, “For Sweden,” suggests nevertheless that women’s physical prowess could be charged, just as men’s, with patriotic purpose and meaning.58 Whether women should defend Sweden’s national honor also in more high-profiled competitions was another matter, as I will come back to. In the following years, a wide variety of Swedish magazines reported at length on astonishing tales of female endurance, ranging from the long-distance skiing feats of Elin Pikkuniemi, a school teacher in the far North, to the glamorous automobile adventures of “motor princess” Eva Dickson.59 Such progress reports invited speculations that a “battle of the sexes” (könens strid) was in the making, as the modern sportswoman seemed to work herself up to men’s level. As noted by Charme in 1924, many female stars already “surpassed most of the mediocre men.”60 Foreign examples, such as the American swimmer Gertrude Ederle’s crossing of the English Channel in 1926, faster than any previous man, seemed to confirm not only a battle of the sexes but even that women could be winning.61 As Katie Sutton has argued, this rapid accumulation of female sports achievements was experienced as threatening, as many observers felt that masculine superiority was now being dismantled not only socially and politically but even physically, thus disturbing “all-powerful notions of ‘natural,’ biological gender differences.”62 From this perspective it may seem odd that women who broke new records were celebrated to the glamorous extent that they were. Yet, as Fiona Skillen suggests in the context of British interwar sports advertising, which frequently displayed bold modern sportswomen, it is possible that “their achievements were viewed as unique rather than ground-breaking.”63 Still, as the numbers of such female sports pioneers and record-breakers increased, the perception of “uniqueness” was arguably challenged.64 The progress of the modern sportswoman was also measured by her ability to distance herself from men and masculinity, instead embracing specifically feminine athletic ideals.65 These ideals generally focused on slender and gracious bodies that aspired to beauty more than victories. When the entertainment magazine Bonniers Veckotidning looked backed in 1929, the modern sportswomen was contrasted with her ugly predecessors: Many of us remember the time when a sports woman was considered nothing but ungracious, unfeminine and unbeautiful. She had

“What We Have Learned”  111 forever renounced every womanly delight. Wherever she walked a cold and hard wind followed her; her stride was heavy and clumsy, her voice hard and sharp and her face coarse and ugly. How different the sports woman now appears to us! We think of her as fresh and rosy, her voice clear and her stride light and springy. [. . .] the common view of her has changed, and she has changed with it.66 This idea of a journey towards beauty and grace, which supposedly had created a greater acceptance of sportswomen, was common in Swedish media at this time, even though it was often unclear what it was that had changed—the “common view” of sportswomen or the women themselves (or both).67 In any case, reports of quantitative improvements in terms of results and records were frequently accompanied by assurances of an adjoining qualitative enhancement of the beauty and femininity of individual female athletes. In these contexts, references to the strength and muscularity of the modern sportswoman were either absent or refuted. What was emphasized was instead how the sporty, springy stride of the modern woman differed both from the masculine and heavy demeanors of earlier generations of sportswomen and from the passive and frail femininity associated with outdated Victorian ideals. As Birgitte Søland and others have discussed, sports now defined the modern girl not only in terms of physical ideals but also in terms of attitudes (happy and energetic), style (fashion-aware and appealing) and health awareness (living a balanced and sound life).68 Similar to other national contexts, images of this modern girl could be studied in Swedish print media, particularly in advertising, where she could be seen engaged in all sorts of modern activities, whether on skis (see Figure 3.1), in airplanes or behind the wheel—active but also dedicated to taking good care of her skin, hair and style (by purchasing the appropriate quality Swedish products).69 In this new feminine space, participating in an appropriate amount of sports was presented as an integral part of modern womanhood. Yet, since the exact contents and boundaries of this space remained unclear, the female athlete continued to be a target of concerned analyses, especially in regard to the aesthetic limits of her new physical visuality.

Aesthetic Limits: “Is Her Every Movement Feminine?” When discussing the future of “our sporting ladies,” Charme made two observations: Women’s physical capacities did not actually seem to have any limits, and yet the resistance towards women in “particularly male” sports (such as running, jumping and throwing) seemed “impossible to break.”70 If this resistance previously had been built around conceptions of women’s frailty, as Charme noted, the limits put on the modern, active woman were now constructed on another ground: “Right or

Figure 3.1 Winter fashion. A  female model wearing a ski outfit for Nordiska Kompaniet (NK), 1929 Source: Photo: Erik Holmén, Nordiska museet.

“What We Have Learned”  113 wrong,” as Charme concluded, “arguments are drawn from aesthetic considerations.”71 These “aesthetic considerations” in the 1920s were formulated not only in relation to imagined muscular Amazons but also, more concretely, in regard to real players in some of the most accepted women’s sports, such as tennis. As suggested by the women’s magazine Idun in 1927, addressing whether women would lose their womanliness through sports, tennis was in fact a very good test case, since tennis was meant to inspire nothing but elegance and grace in its female players (unlike those sports that were “male in their essence,” like the shot-put and discus).72 The question was whether playing tennis actually fulfilled this promise. Doubts could be raised, as explained by Idun’s reporter, because even in tennis women wanted to win, and this will to win could potentially be reflected in their faces and bodies. Most revealing would then be to study the best tennis players—the female star aspiring to the “highest potency” of her sport, and ask whether “her every movement” was still feminine.73 Quoting a French sports writer who had recently commented on a Wimbledon-game, Idun noted that the British tennis star Dorothea Lambert-Chambers was judged very differently from her French opponent, the “gracious and smooth” Suzanne Lenglen: What a contrast between the two! [Mrs Lambert-Chambers] . . . a body without grace, without anything for the eye to appreciatively fall on and recognize as a woman [. . .] a terrible war machine without an inch of fat, just nerves and muscles, not distracted by anything and, above all, not worried about pleasing, with her entire will focused on a single goal: winning.74 In contrast, Suzanne Lenglen was described as “a girl, recently turned twenty, with a feminine body in its first bloom, full of slenderness and grace, treading lightly as if floating slightly above ground.”75 To Idun’s reporter the conclusion was simple enough; even if this particular sports commentator was nationally biased and may have exaggerated his praise of Lenglen, his report showed that elite tennis did not necessarily damage the femininity of its players. Idun in the end chose to see the glass as halffull—not even elite-level sports would inevitably “suffocate” the core of womanhood, defined as “charm and grace.”76 The close scrutiny of female tennis players at this time shows that not even the most celebrated stars were immune to accusations of ugliness caused by their will to win. In 1929, when the entertainment magazine Våra Nöjen (Our Entertainment) in the same vein discussed whether tennis made women uglier, the magazine noted that even the “gracious” Suzanne Lenglen had recently been accused of having an ugly face, a socalled “tennis face” brought on by her focused play.77 In this case, Våra Nöjen interviewed Swedish medical experts as well as tennis professionals

114  Changing Stories who largely refuted this accusation, arguing that it was only natural that the face of a tennis player, a horseback rider, or other focused sportswomen, reflected the “enormous concentration” necessary in these and other sports. These Swedish commentators commented that the term “tennis face” was, in fact, unknown to them, though one speculated that such faces could perhaps be spotted among female throwers during track and field.78 As evident by these comments, aesthetics was only partly about outer qualities; the deeper story revolved around inner qualities—about willpower and focus, as revealed by facial expressions and movement patterns. To historian of ideas Johan Huizinga, whose thoughts on “the playing man” were shaped in these formative years of organized sports, the great value of participating in a game lay, in fact, in this inner process, in terms of “a testing of the player’s prowess: his courage, tenacity, resources, and last, but not least, his spiritual powers.”79 The reason that these qualities—and the will to “test” them in sports—were assessed differently in the case of women was essentially that women’s place in public life was still questioned. In Sweden, the labor market was particularly fraught with gender conflicts during the 1920s, when ideas of gender equality clashed with male union officials’ loyalty to a resource model based on male providers and homebound housewives.80 Consequently, as strong patriarchal interests were opposed to raising women’s salaries or in any way expanding their career opportunities, the value of sports for women was usually not defined in terms of “a will to win.” While articles on men and sports tended to focus on the hardening effects of games and competitions, women’s sports continued to be discussed as a matter of aesthetics, focusing on “feminine” qualities such as grace and charm.81 In another example, one of Stockholm’s most influential sports leaders in the 1920s, Erik Bergvall, head of the Stockholm Stadion, emphasized that the “sports hero” was worshiped not only for his talent but for his willpower and courage, which also constituted important qualities beyond the playing fields: “all this urge to do and to dare will someday be transferred to more important tasks in life.”82 However, Bergvall did not see the point of women exploring their willpower in this manner, arguing that women would be “psychologically broken” if they exercised too hard. Naturally, he did not think that women should be allowed in the Olympic Games where competing was truly a “man’s job.”83 While similarly skeptical of the value of such competitions for women, the leading women of the feminist sports organization SKCFK nevertheless tried to refute Bergvall’s opinions on women’s general physical capacity, as Helena Tolvhed notes, but to little avail.84 The aesthetic considerations of women’s sports were thus in the end structured by expectations that women in sports should not become what men were expected to become: daring and strong-willed.85 Because the element of competing seemed to inspire such qualities in particular, the

“What We Have Learned”  115 question of competitions in women’s sports also remained controversial. Common strategies to contain the risk of breaches of these gendered ideals in Swedish media followed certain patterns that have also been observed in other national contexts. As shown by Katie Sutton, the threat of the masculinized female athlete was commonly defused in German media by juxtaposing a daytime sport image with an evening photograph of the same woman, now dressed up in ladylike “civilian wear.”86 Thus transformed into a more appealing and, presumably, authentic, feminine self, these “narratives of transformation” functioned, as Sutton argues, “by reducing female athleticism to a temporary and thus safe transgression.”87 While such imagery can also be seen as an unruly blurring of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, Sutton rightly points to the controlling purpose of these kinds of stories: “On the one hand, such sources point to a liberating reevaluation and expansion of notions of female physicality and beauty, but at the same time they evince a strong coercive streak, for the threat of masculinization is contained by an overemphasis on the potential of the female athlete to transform herself from masculine athlete to feminine, heterosexual partner.”88 Swedish media adopted similar transformation narratives, including Damsporten i ord och bild (Women’s Illustrated Sports), a magazine established in 1930 to cover women’s sports. As one writer explained, the new feminine style in fashion would surely appeal particularly to the sportswoman as she must long to shed her “functional wear” for something more “elegant” in the evening.89 This expected shedding or swapping of styles signaled to the individual sports girl never to forget her true, feminine gender. During the 1920s Swedish fashion and entertainment magazines developed detailed advice for women on how to perform such transformations, in terms of clothing, creams, perfumes, hairstyles and appropriate ways to act and be.90 While celebrating a “modern” lifestyle, this normative advice relied in many ways on traditional notions of femininity, as Fiona Skillen points out, particularly focused on the importance of respectability and looking good.91 A  new visual culture of fashion and advertising also strongly contributed to the enforcement of this modern “hegemonic femininity,” centered on beauty, charm and heterosexual appeal.92 Sportswomen were often targeted as especially vulnerable to disturbances of this ideal. As characteristically argued by an advertisement for a new cream published in Bonniers Veckotidning in 1928, “our sporting ladies” need to take “special care” to protect themselves from weather and wind in order to preserve their “soft white skin and warm complexion, essential to charm and beauty.”93

Sexual Limits: “Would You Marry a Sportswoman?” In the early days of women’s sports, skeptical observers had felt that there was probably something obscene about women being visible,

116  Changing Stories mobile and physically confident in public.94 Even though the sporty ideal of modern womanhood appeared to have subdued such anxieties by the 1920s, the modern sportswoman was still at times associated not only with physical activity but also with sexual agency. In fact, as Susan K. Cahn writes: “The fear of female sexuality unleashed from feminine modesty and male control runs like a constant thread through the history of women’s sports.”95 What exactly had been “unleashed” was, in the 1920s, not necessarily fully articulated: In matters of sexuality, this was an uncertain time, as Cahn points out, when “the line between sexual liberation and aberration remained blurry.”96 An effective illustration of this point can be found in the first issue of Sweden’s new sports magazine for women, established 1930, Damsporten i ord och bild (Women’s Illustrated Sports). When looking back at the debates, the new magazine brought up two major accusations against “the misunderstood sports girl”: first, that the sports girl was freakishly “mannish,” and second, that she was a “bewitching nymph,” distracting to her fellow male athletes.97 To understand the implications of these paradoxical accusations, we need to take a closer look at the arguments as well as their roots in the “blurry” sexual history of the modern sports girl. To begin with, Damsporten explained that “a great number of people” unfortunately considered the sports girl to be a freak and a “monstrosity” (monstrum), combining womanhood with extreme “mannishness.”98 Showing “no mercy,” her slanderers made her out to be a “sexless figure” lacking “all feminine qualities,” and they targeted her with “insinuations” as well as “lewd attacks.”99 Even though the exact nature of these insinuations remained unarticulated by the reporter, the “remedy” was made perfectly (and sarcastically) clear; if she only turned herself into an “unthinking, flimsy and pretty jazz girl,” all objections “immediately disappeared.”100 However, as was also noted, this attractive sports girl seemed to present yet another risk: As a “luring siren” she would now distract boys from their training, “tempting” them to think about other things than sports. Due to such divergent accusations, the sports girl was left with a difficult task, as Damsporten concluded: She had to “steel herself” and push forward as a “human individual,” navigating wisely “between Scylla and Charybdis.”101 Judging from the remainder of Damsporten’s rebuttal, the accusation of “mannishness” was definitely the worst; this was the “foulest invective” a girl could be subjected to, and Damsporten emphatically declared that the sports girl was “first and last a woman.”102 The offensiveness of the term “monstrum” arose from its association with extreme mannishness: As discussed by Kristina Fjelkestam, the term had been used in Swedish interwar novels to denote the opposite of a true woman, a freakish type embodying an unnatural level of masculinity.103 Even though the stereotype of the mannish sportswoman surfaced now and then also in the context of sports, Swedish popular media often

“What We Have Learned”  117 emphasized how different the modern sports girl was both from earlier generations of “mannish” emancipists and from decadent jazz girls. Still, these distancing efforts suggest in themselves that the sports girl was seen as in need of defensive measures in regard to her moral and sexual integrity. In an American context, Susan K. Cahn highlights how initial concerns with modern sports girls in the 1920s focused primarily on the risk of flapper-incited heterosexual excessiveness. Yet, she also notices a shift in concerns as women’s visuality began to be construed less as a perversion and more as a vital part of their modern femininity. American observers then turned their attention to various risks of heterosexual deficiency in women’s sports. As Cahn writes, one rising worry was that the sportscrazed modern woman would eventually neglect her feminine charms and become unattractive in the eyes of men; another, even more troubling possibility was that she would become unattracted to men, preferring women instead.104 However, as Katie Sutton observes, scholars have in the context of sports history debated to what extent female athleticism was associated in the 1920s more specifically with the stereotype of the “mannish lesbian.”105 While Laura Behling argues in an American context that such associations were common, Susan K. Cahn argues that sexual concerns at least initially seemed to focus more on the matter of heterosexual “excess” than failure.106 In her German study, Sutton points to an ambiguity that surrounds German representations. While noting that “certainly not all critiques of ‘masculinized’ female athletes in the 1920s German media can be attributed to fears of female homosexuality,” she also contends that this was “a possibility with which contemporary audiences were quite familiar.”107 A closer look at the Swedish debates reveals how the image of jazz girl would follow a different cultural trajectory than the stereotype of the “mannish” woman during the 1920s: Whereas the modern jazz girl, known from advertisements, movies and novels, in these years was increasingly accepted by Swedish observers, insinuations of mannishness did not lose their potency as a moral threat, especially to female sports leaders trying to build an image of the female athlete as unthreatening and feminine rather than odd and feminist. In 1930, the women’s sports magazine Damsporten suggested that the label of “mannish freak” constituted the decisively worst type of insult, as noted previously.108 But why was this the worst? One clue can be found in Charme in 1923 in an article that explained what men and women were not attracted to: “What we women feel for a feminine man must be the same as men feel for a masculine woman: consternation along with a desire to ridicule.”109 As Charme went on to explain, women’s “coquette lust” to decorate and paint themselves should be an exclusively feminine matter—a man’s “forceful and determined” face did not need make-up, since his appearance was naturally desired by women if his body was “well-trained and

118  Changing Stories exercised.”110 Yet, as Charme admitted, not everyone managed to fit into to this mold. Consequently, in the context of women’s sports, determination in a sports woman’s face could not translate into admirable willpower (as others would later discuss) but into something else, a strange “tennis face,” an aberration.111 Efforts to preserve determination and athleticism as “masculine,” defining these traits as naturally attractive to women, put women who embodied these very traits in a potentially queer position. Nineteenthcentury sexologists had theorized this position as a matter of “gender inversion,” listing, in the case of women, a range of “masculine” preferences and inclinations, including an erotic interest in other women and a passionate interest in sports.112 Even though the degree of dispersion of such sexological (and later psychoanalytical) theories to the general public in the 1920s has been debated, the defensive focus on the feminine charm of the female athlete, underscoring above all her attractiveness to men, does point to a rising concern that women’s sports posed a risk within a culture that encouraged passion and desire, but only certain kinds—and with moderation.113 From a feminist perspective the “risk” that a confident woman, emboldened by sports, would not conform to society’s patriarchal mold could also be presented as an opportunity. As early as 1888, the author Anne Charlotte Leffler wrote a short story that explored the dreams and desires of a group of female gymnasts and their development of physical confidence, affinity and sense of self-worth.114 Portraying a bold tomboy (a “quasi-boy” with strong opinions), who questions why women would want to get married, Leffler even suggested female same-sex desire and co-habitation as a hypothetical possibility.115 By the 1920s, marriage and sports had also become hot topics in popular media, even though the concern was usually focused on the desirability of the sports girl rather than her own desires. When, for instance, Damsporten asked six men whether they would consider marrying a female sports star or not, the very question shows that the female athlete had remained an oddity within a heteronormative culture that expected women to be attentive foremost to the gaze of men.116 As revealed by Damsporten’s inquiry, most men did not object to girls participating in sports but preferred to marry a woman who could dedicate herself fully to her household duties. Meanwhile, efforts in popular media to feminize the female athlete contributed to an expectation that women were ultimately interested in grace and beauty more than games and competitions.117 Women’s purpose and place in sports thus remained unclear, which was noticed by satirists, who ridiculed female athletes variously for being too feminine and too masculine, interested in the first case in coquette sportswear rather than the actual sport and in the second case in their sport rather than their coquette duties.118 A more complex image could (again) be found in literature, where female authors in the 1920s continued to explore the

“What We Have Learned”  119 desires of modernity’s next generation of “new women.” An episode in Lydia Wahlström’s novel Sin fars dotter (Her Father’s Daughter) from 1920 featured a sports girl whose physical agency was demonstrated not only by a bike, a tennis racket, a hockey stick and ski poles, but also by her initiative to kiss one of her female friends.119 Wahlström was a wellknown feminist and supporter of the women’s sports movement who had herself been in several relationships with women.120 A decade later, in Margareta Suber’s novel Charlie, the same-sex desires and pursuits of tomboyish motorsports girl Charlie were even more pronounced (involving a red sports car and a women’s automobile competition).121 However, neither of these novels portrayed the active sports girl as monstrous or mannish but, rather, as adventurous and physically confident. In the years between Wahlström’s and Suber’s novels, concerns in media with (overly) confident sports girls were expressed in a more critical manner, whether in terms of reminders of the “coarse and ugly” sportswoman of the early emancipation years or in discussions of unsuitable sports, where muscular discus-throwers functioned as deterring outposts. Even though this “mannish” female athlete was not labeled as a sexually deviant “type,” a queer perspective on the debates nevertheless points to a growing cultural anxiety over female athletes who failed to fit into a heteronormative understanding of sports that positioned men as forcefully athletic and women as gracefully modest. Preventing sportswomen from developing the wrong kind of passion involved above all a concerted cultural effort to make her realize the importance of pleasing and being pleasing to watch, even—or especially—when sporting. After all, women did not need sports to be feminine like men needed sports to be masculine; female athletes were feminine and attractive in spite of sports, as suggested by many observers in the 1920s.

Ultimate Limits: “Who Will Solve the Problem of Space?”122 By the late 1920s, it was becoming clear to many observers that the attention in popular media on the modern sports girl did not reflect a similar level of interest within the national sports leadership. Celebrated events like the Women’s World Games held in Gothenburg in 1926 (popularly known as the Women’s Olympics or Damolympiaden) could in fact only be carried through by a scrambling for private donations.123 Without state funding, Sweden’s new, all-female organization for women’s “physical cultivation,” the SKCFK, likewise relied on private donations for its activities, such as the organizing of mountain hikes and physical education seminars. Meanwhile, Swedish female athletes struggled not only for their cultural place in sports but also for space in a more literal sense— access to training facilities and sports fields.124 In addition to the reports of progress and calls for moderation in women’s sports, a third storyline

120  Changing Stories in Swedish print media at this time emerged that addressed the unfair distribution of resources, and the consequences of this inequality for the future of women’s sports. The optimistic visions that had been projected earlier in the decade were thus nuanced in the late 1920s by concerns that women’s sports would fade away if nothing was done. One of the most concerned voices in this context was the popular entertainment magazine Våra Nöjen (Our Entertainment), devoted otherwise mostly to topics related to film and fashion. In numerous articles on the state of women’s sports in Sweden in the late 1920s, the magazine went beyond the optimistic Amazonian rhetoric of previous years and addressed instead the many serious challenges facing women’s sports, particularly the problem of facilities. Not only had female athletes been “humiliated for a decade” by “hostile” male sports leaders, but despite women’s progress in sports, men continued to “shut the gates” when women asked for access to stadiums and sports fields.125 Judging by these and similar alarming reports, neither patriotic appeals nor the muchdiscussed importance of the “people’s health,” had thus succeeded in raising the necessary state support (or backing from resourceful male clubs) in relation to women’s sports.126 In a rare note on the class aspects of sports, Våra Nöjen moreover pointed out that some sports simply cost too much for the average girl; one hour at the tennis court cost an entire week’s salary for an office girl.127 The contrast between international tennis stars and the everyday experiences of the local sports-interested girl was thus painted in stark colors, and, as Våra Nöjen noted, even when girls were allowed into sport stadiums they were often harassed by unwanted audiences and “packs of laughing boys” who came to watch and taunt them.128 The lack of support to women’s sports at this time has been given several historical explanations. One has to do with connections made early on between women’s physical and political agency: Sportswomen and feminists “formed a threatening cadre of New Women,” as Susan K. Cahn writes, “whose public presence prompted shrill calls for a return to more familiar patriarchal arrangements.”129 Another, related, explanation has to do with increasing numbers: As long as few women were engaged in sports, the phenomenon could be regarded as an instance of eccentricity—after all, the occasional horseback-riding or tennis-playing woman from the aristocracy did not threaten the entire gender order of society.130 However, when increasing numbers of women became involved in various sports, demanding access even to the Olympic Games, the gender challenge became more widespread and ostentatious. With increasing numbers, the competition for resources also hardened. When training slots were to be assigned and the number of playing fields was limited, women’s teams tended to be excluded or given very little time. The arguments for this inequality varied, ranging from complex discussions of the essence of femininity to simple turf claims: “They [the men] were there first,” as stated by one male Swedish leader in 1929.131 Others referred

“What We Have Learned”  121 women’s poor results as a legitimate reason for clubs to focus their support on male teams (the link between poor training opportunities and results were sometimes but not always acknowledged).132 Culturally, the fear of women’s “masculinization” by sports existed as a strong undercurrent in the resistance to women’s material access to sports, but, as Helena Tolvhed and others have discussed, there was a flip side to this concern that perhaps mattered even more: If sports did not masculinize women, as the defenders of women’s sports often claimed, there was maybe a possibility that sports would not masculinize men either.133 Strategies to restrict female participation, especially at higher levels, thus reveal the ways female athletes posed a threat not only to the stability of their own femininity (and sexuality) but also to men’s masculinity—a concern to which I return later. However, the sentiment that women should refrain from certain types of sports and competitions was not controversial per se at this time since many people, both men and women, were convinced that sports served different purposes for men and women. But should females refrain from all kinds of competitions? After all, the modern woman was also expected to break new ground and become “the first woman” in ever-expanding new areas, whether it was a matter of the first female professor in a certain field or the first female racecar driver. The phenomenon of the path-breaking sportswoman was intrinsically connected to women’s access to competitions, where the display of female assertion and will to win seemed to unsettle the meaning of both femininity and masculinity.

The Matter of Competitions: Masculinities, Femininities and Beyond To many male opinion-makers, the benefits of sports was clear: Competitions produced winners and heroes, or at the very least, they taught men to fight and do their best. Their opposition to women doing the same thing followed a gender logic that dictated that the presence of women, representing the “weaker sex,” would essentially nullify the value of men’s achievements.134 Feminists agreed, to some extent, that women should refrain from competing, though their concerns were raised from a different perspective: Competing, as the argument went, would cause envy, overexertion and damage a girl’s “nerves.”135 Debates in the press continued to highlight these conversely related views on the value of competitive sports for men and women: that femininity needed to be saved from competitions, while masculinity was being saved by competitions. While popular and compelling, this logic was also contested. Saving Femininity? The Swedish feminist resistance towards women competing was motivated in the 1920s foremost by health arguments. As stated by the

122  Changing Stories women’s sport organization SKCFK, improved health for all women, not a hunt for prizes and cups, associated with male leadership and masculine ideals, should be the main goal of women’s sports.136 However, not everyone agreed entirely. For example, as Helena Tolvhed notes, Doctor Andrea Andreen, one of SKCFK’s founding members, argued that competitions made sports “fun” if organized “in a wise and balanced manner.”137 This aspect of fun was also emphasized by Damsporten (Women’s Illustrated Sports), which during its short lifespan in 1930 devoted many articles to games and competitions. In a characteristic advertisement for the magazine, a triumphant female runner breaking the finishing line tape was described by four words that seemed to tell a story not only of women’s sports but of the individual sportswoman: “Dedicated—Independent—Bold—Free.”138 These two perspectives, one emphasizing collective health and wellbeing and the other, fun and self-realization, operated (to simplify somewhat) on two different levels of analysis, one structural and one individualistic, which also led to different views on competitions. From Damsporten’s individualistic perspective, competing and winning posed no problem; on the contrary, when describing the sport handball in 1930, the magazine explained how “every team, every player does their utmost to keep their prestige, to achieve victory,” and how the resulting action aroused intense interest among players as well as the audience.139 This attitude clearly differed from the deep-felt skepticism towards competitions that had been voiced by many leading representatives of the SKCFK, even at the founding meeting, the “women’s sport parliament” in 1924, where “the drive to outshine” had been declared a menace to women’s sports.140 Even though this thinking in many cases originated in thoughts on the “different purposes of sports” for men and women (as argued by Ester Svalling in 1924), Helena Tolvhed has also pointed to a strategic dimension to the feminists’ cautioning against competing: Rather than claiming full access right away to “male” sports and competitions, women have historically often, as a way of legitimizing their claim to sports, emphasized values perceived as uncontroversial.141 During the 1920s, the tension between individualistic and collective perspectives on women’s sports came to the surface in many interviews with individual female athletes. For example, when interviewed in in 1930, track and field talent Maj Jacobsson—praised for her “nine-fold record-breaking” and extraordinary achievements—declared that she did not believe that girls should persist in sports for such a long time that they became “semi-professional” or developed “competition muscles.”142 Jacobsson hastened to add in this context that she did not plan to keep competing much longer herself, since, after all, “a girl is not a boy.”143 In 1926, former female swimming star Ragnvi Torslow similarly emphasized her “principle” that competitions should not be organized for women, only girls, and then preferably only as “play,” and with no

“What We Have Learned”  123 demands for training and practice.144 This differentiation between sports and play appeared to be crucial to many observers: Whereas the purpose of sports (idrott) was about achievement, as measured by races and competitions, play (lek) was about fun and health.145 A girl could compete since her youth guaranteed that the level of threat to the gender order remained low, whereas in the position of a grown woman, she needed to be tempered with a restriction to only play. As a result, children were expected to compete, and adult women, to “play.”146 This attitude towards competitions became problematic in discussions of the Olympic Games.147 The problem in this context was, of course, that the production of Olympian female winners was not very compatible with the ideal of feminine modesty and “play.” The magazine Charme recognized this conflict in 1924, asking, on the one hand, whether “our slim, blonde, Germanic woman might be the ideal athlete,” while questioning, on the other hand, the wisdom of creating “female record machines.”148 The wording reflects how sentiments of racial superiority and national pride appeared to support the idea of allowing Swedish women to participate in the Olympics. However, such arguments were not necessarily enough to neutralize anxieties with female “record machines.”149 A worst-case scenario was presented in 1929 by the magazine Våra Nöjen (Our Entertainment), reporting of Violette Morris, a French discus thrower who had not only proven her strength in throwing but had also defeated all men in a recent twenty-four-hour automobile race, and, moreover, had begun to dress in male clothing. Not even when her application to join the French Women’s Sports Association had been denied could she be convinced to dress differently; instead she was now reported to have sued the association for 100,000 francs.150 This horror story of a female athlete out of control connected several fears in one image—a woman who starts out in a “male” sport (discus throwing) and then moves on to other, even more extreme challenges (men’s automobile races), where she manages to humiliate the entire male contingent, and, as a final touch, she shreds her femininity by dressing in male attire. Such examples of the slippery slope of female athleticism illustrate why discussions of the need for balance and moderation in women’s sports continued to be lively throughout the interwar period and beyond. In the Swedish debate in the 1920s, playfulness and youth remained two of the most commonly adduced strategies to “save” femininity from accusations of female masculinity. Incidentally, these strategies tended to be interconnected to concerns with the state of male masculinity. Saving Masculinity? When an unknown young woman by the name of Margit Nordin successfully completed the 90 kilometer Vasa Race (Vasaloppet, the most famous Swedish long-distance skiing race) in 1923, the first reports were

124  Changing Stories enthusiastic. Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s major newspapers and supporter of the Vasa Race, reported that Nordin had been received by “a storm of applause” upon her finish and, moreover, that she had “not seemed very tired.”151 However, the next day, the same paper noted how “Nordin’s participation had evoked a strong common opinion against women in the Vasa Race.”152 Readers of Dagens Nyheter would soon learn that Nordin’s achievement should be considered an exception; as decided by the Vasa organizers, women would henceforth be banned from the Vasa Race (a prohibition that was not lifted until 1981).153 Yet, a closer look at the timeline of events in 1923 reveals that Nordin’s fate had not been sealed primarily by public “opinion.” In fact, upon Nordin’s application for the race several months earlier, the organizers made a note to change the by-laws, specifying that the Vasa Race was open to men only.154 A month after Nordin’s successful accomplishment, Dagens Nyheter reported that the board of the Vasa Race had “quietly” formalized this decision.155 Considering the history of skiing in Sweden, this ban was not an obvious outcome of Nordin’s accomplishment in the Vasa Race. Skiing was at the time commonly listed as a healthy national sport that was also suitable for women.156 As frequently reported in print media, skiing was popular among women, even in Stockholm with its unreliable snow conditions. That women could ski long distances also seemed undisputed; by the mid-1920s, the Northern skiing talent Elin Pikkuniemi was described as virtually unbeatable in the skiing trails, defeating men in 20 and 30 kilometer races, and Erik Pallin moreover reported of at least 20 women who in 1917 had been awarded the male skiing badge.157 The reason these female achievements had not caused an outrage can to some extent be explained by the nature of the sport. For one thing, skiing was not a very visible sport; people literally disappeared into the woods, where potential breaches of feminine propriety (wearing trousers, sweating, dripping noses) remained unseen by the public.158 Moreover, skiing was seen as a sport with a long national heritage that promoted strength and health in both men and women.159 Against this backdrop it may seem odd that Margit Nordin’s feat in the Vasa Race resulted in a ban on female participation. However, the Vasa Race was promoted as a special event: Organized in honor of a national, royal hero, King Gustav Vasa, public attention had been raised to a new level. This was not just a healthy outdoor event but a test of manhood and a display of national potency, reflected in and by each other.160 If a woman could finish such a race (without seeming tired even), its aura of grueling trial was diminished. As concluded by Dagens Nyheter, Nordin—however admirable—would probably be the first and last woman ever to finish the Vasa Race.161 Prohibitions remained, however, a relatively rare countermeasure in the context of controlling male privilege and women’s access to sports. A less conspicuous but equally effective strategy was, as we have seen, to deny women access to training facilities and financial support. In other cases,

“What We Have Learned”  125 leading sports men simply attempted to convince women to voluntarily refrain from participation, referring both to the essence of their womanhood and to the manhood of men. However, whether sports and winning was considered “masculine” or not, girls and women still entered races and competitions in the 1920s in a wide range of sports, including skiing. Competitions for women or competitions open to women nevertheless remained a source of controversy in a solidifying national sports culture that recognized “honor” and “superiority” as the goal of sports as well as masculinity, but not femininity. In the end, the story of femininity’s path towards the “eternally sporty” thus developed into a complex subject matter, struggling to find its place between the masculine and the monstrous.

Concluding Remarks Framed as an inevitable part of modern progress, women’s advancement in sports in the 1920s became a popular topic in Swedish print media. Observers interested in women’s political and cultural emancipation now included women’s physical progress within this larger narrative. However, such stories of change evoked questions that revolved around what difference would remain between men and women in the end. Debates on “suitable” sports for women, what they enjoyed, and what their bodies could and should do were often fuelled by disagreements over the purpose of women’s sports. Arguments of emancipation, women’s health, individual achievement, national honor and feminine beauty all co-existed (though not necessarily peacefully) in the story of the modern sportswoman. Swedish commentators were ultimately torn in the 1920s between celebrating and critiquing the modern sportswoman. On the one hand, she enjoyed a celebratory star status, surrounded by a nimbus of fun, adventure and victory, but at the same time she was constantly scrutinized, from minute facial expressions to body shape, muscles and clothing—a scrutiny that sometimes resulted in accusations of mannishness and ugliness, even in the case of international female sports stars. In this context the factor of age was crucial. Whereas the young sports girl could be construed as a charming and healthy antidote to the artificial “skinny jazz girl,” the adult female athlete was more easily associated with mannish and emancipated women. However, as the image of the modern woman was increasingly defined by her sporty youthfulness in Swedish media, this distinction by age became difficult to uphold. Even among female athletes themselves opinions diverged regarding when it was appropriate to stop competing. In time, the various calls for limits on and within women’s sports became filled with contradictions—strength was good, but too muscular was bad, prizes inspired excellence, but too much competing was dangerous, and so on. The conflicted advice directed at the modern sports girl

126  Changing Stories nevertheless followed a logic based on simple but prevailing opposites: strong/weak, active/passive, competitive/playful. However, advice concerning the female athlete’s need to shift her appearance in time for her (more) feminine duties ultimately reflects concerns with the (in-)stability of this dichotomical system. The question of how far the prescribed “shifting” back and forth could go and how it should be carried out remained. Several forces worked to constrain the sportswoman: conservative observers reminded her of her primary duties as wife and mother, commercial interests reminded her of the importance of skin care, beauty and charm, and feminist leaders, struggling to gain official recognition, continued to discuss the importance of limits and “moderation” in all sports. While the threat of female masculinity continued to fuel this narrative dynamic, the 1920s was also a decade when an appropriate measure of sports was presented simply as an integral and natural part of modern femininity. Women’s sports in the mid-1920s were also surrounded by an immense optimism that focused on the success story of “our sporting ladies” in countless articles, interviews and reports.162 The youthful style of these female athletes was often emphasized, but so was their strength, stamina and resolve. From the perspective of sports, the story of femininity was already changing, even though perhaps not as much as some desired and others feared.

Notes 1 “Vad de sportande damerna lärt oss,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1925, 24–25. 2 Ibid. “en handfull kvinnor, vilkas namn överglänst till och med societetens och teatervärldens klarast lysande stjärnor.” 3 Ibid. “Samtidigt har den kvinnliga idrottsrörelsen framlevt en mer undangömd tillvaro. Man har ryckt på axlarna och menat att den inte skulle ha framtiden för sig. [. . .] De manliga idrottsutövarna ha inte ens funnit sig i att kvinnor fuskat i deras bransch.” 4 Ibid. “Man har menat, att idrotten sådan den numera bedrives är alltför hård och ansträngande för en kvinnas fysik, att kvinnlig idrott antar osköna former.” 5 Ibid. “Vår tids unga sportande damer ha visat att den kvinnliga prestationsförmågan väsentligt underskattats och att en kvinna kan uppnå resultat som inte stå männens långt efter.” 6 Rather than looking at sports magazines or sports sections of the daily press, which generally focused on male athletes and men’s sports, I have chosen to study women’s magazines and entertainment magazines, such as Charme, Idun, Bonniers Veckotidning and Våra Nöjen (and in some cases interviews and articles in morning papers such as Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet). These publications featured lively and often positively inclined discussions on women’s sports. In contrast, as previous scholarship has noted, sports magazines like Svensk idrott and Idrottsbladet reported sparingly (and mostly conservatively) on women’s sports at this time. See Eva Olofsson, Har kvinnorna en sportslig chans? Den svenska idrottsrörelsen och kvinnorna under 1900-talet (Umeå: Umeå universitetspress, 1989), 66; Rolf Haslum, Idrott, borgerlig folkfostran och frihet: Torsten Tegnér som opinionsbildare

“What We Have Learned”  127 1930–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2006). On the negative reporting on women’s sports in Idrottsbladet in the 1920s, see also Claes Annerstedt, Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige (Malmö: LiberFörlag, 1984), 198. 7 Judith Butler, “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism,” Stanford Humanities Review 6, no. 2 (1998). 8 Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls (New York: Random House International, 2000); Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 2nd ed. (Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 9 Vikki Krane, “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, but Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport,” Quest 53, no. 1 (2001): 122. 10 As Katie Sutton shows in her study of German print media in the Weimar period, celebrations of the modern sportswoman tended to be mixed with fears of her “masculinization,” which in turn inspired discussions and advice regarding the limits of women’s sports. Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 66–89. 11 Krane, “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, but Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport,” 122. 12 In particular, I expand here on Helena Tolvhed’s enlightening study on Sweden’s first independent national women’s sports organization Svenska Kvinnors Centralförbund för Fysisk Kultur [Swedish Women’s Confederation for Physical Cultivation] (SKCFK), founded in 1924. Helena Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2015). SKCFK was devoted broadly to “physical culture” rather than sports, as I will get back to. 13 “Det evigt sportmässiga,” Veckojournalen, August 12, 1928, 33. 14 On the breakthrough of sports in Sweden in the late nineteenth century, influenced largely by British models, see Mats Hellspong, “Den moderna idrotten,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Stockholm: Signum, 2009). 15 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A  Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1949; repr., 2009), foreword. 16 Ibid., 51. 17 Ibid., 50. 18 The typical Swedish “sports hero” in the press has traditionally been embodied by male athletes; John Hellström, Den svenska sporthjälten: kontinuitet och förändring i medieberättelsen om den svenska sporthjälten från 1920talet till idag (Malmö: Idrottsforum, 2014); Helena Tolvhed, Nationen på spel: kropp, kön och svenskhet i populärpressens representationer av olympiska spel 1948–1972 (Umeå: h:ström—Text & kultur, 2008). On media representations of sport and gender, see also Susan Birrell and Mary G. McDonald, Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); Linda K. Fuller, Sport, Rhetoric, and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 19 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 13, 23. In a Swedish context, two pioneering studies on women’s sports are Olofsson, Har kvinnorna en sportslig chans? Den svenska idrottsrörelsen och kvinnorna under 1900-talet; Annerstedt, Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige. 20 Of course, one approach need not exclude the other, as Tolvhed points out; we may both bring attention to norms and to those historical subjects who lived, negotiated and influenced these norms. Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 24.

128  Changing Stories 21 For an overview of the history of women’s sports, see Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport; Jean Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850– 1960 (London; New York: Routledge, 2012). On sports in relation to body ideals and physicality, see Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Butler, “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism”; Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. On sports in relation to sexuality and homophobia, see Jayne Caudwell, ed., Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 2006); Katherine M. Jamieson and Leila E. Villaverde, “In/ Visible Bodies: Lesbian Sexualities and Sporting Spaces: Introduction,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 13, no. 3 (2009); Helen Lenskyj, Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2003); Pia Lundquist Wanneberg, “The Sexualization of Sport: A Gender Analysis of Swedish Elite Sport from 1967 to the Present Day,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18, no. 3 (2011); Krane, “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, but Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport.” 22 Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 4. 23 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Though Huizinga was interested in the wider concept of “play” rather than sports, he did not necessarily position “play” as the opposite of competitive sports, which was often done in the interwar period. 24 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 8. 25 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 229–31. See also Hellström, Den svenska sporthjälten: kontinuitet och förändring i medieberättelsen om den svenska sporthjälten från 1920-talet till idag. 26 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 165. On norms and ideals that continue to construe femininity as passive and physically frail, see also; Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 58, 268. 27 Tennis player Billie Jean King’s much-quoted statement that “There is nothing more revolutionary than raising women to be physically strong” illustrates the depth of this cultural anxiety (from the documentary “The Battle of the Sexes,” 2013, quoted in Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 227). 28 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 46, 229; Caudwell, Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory; Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports (London; New York: Routledge, 1994). 29 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 164–84; Lenskyj, Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities. 30 On “queer” female masculinities, see also Chapter 5. 31 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 51. 32 On the development of the women’s movement in Sweden in the 1920s, see Christina Florin and Lars Kvarnström, Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap: genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1950 (Stockholm: Atlas, 2001); Kjell Östberg, Efter rösträtten: kvinnors utrymme efter det demokratiska genombrottet (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1997); Lena Eskilsson, Drömmen om kamratsamhället: Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på Fogelstad 1925–35 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991).

“What We Have Learned”  129 33 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 37–39. See also Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 11–12. 34 Karin Johannisson, “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget,” in Lychnos. Årsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoria (Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991). The theme of “discovering your country” was especially popular in camping and automobile advertisements in the 1920s (see, for instance, Ford’s advertisement in Veckojournalen, September 16, 1928). The Swedish Tourist Association (STF), founded 1885, was also actively encouraging healthy outdoors activities at this time; Lena Eskilsson, “Friluftsliv,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: Det moderna genombrottet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Atlantis, 2008). 35 To take one example, Lydia Wahlström, headmaster of a girls’ school and later professor and active in the women’s sports movement, was already engaged in 1912 in discussions of establishing a female sports badge; “Det kvinnliga idrottsmärket,” Idun, November 24, 1912. 36 Jens Ljunggren, “Mellan natur och kultur,” in Rädd att falla: Studier i manlighet, ed. Claes Ekenstam (Stockholm: Gidlund, 1998), 124–44; Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 11–12. 37 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 69–70. See also Christina Florin and Ulla Johansson, ‘Där de härliga lagrarna gro’: kultur, klass och kön i det svenska läroverket 1850–1914 (Stockholm: Tiden, 1993). 38 The women’s sport parliament was reported in great detail both by the morning paper Stockholms-Tidningen, and of course by Idun. “Ett kvinnornas central förbund för fysisk kultur,” Stockholms-Tidningen, January 8, 1924; “Kvinnornas idrottsriksdag,” Idun, January 13, 1924 (Idun’s “sports issue”). 39 On the rise and fall of this independent Swedish women’s sports organization, see Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 50–127. 40 Ibid., 17, 89–127. 41 “Vad de sportande damerna lärt oss,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1925, 24–25. Lists of unsuitable sports for women were a common feature in sports articles in entertainment magazines at this time. Similar discussions occurred across a range of Western nations; see Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport; Fiona Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 5 (2012); Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. Besides tennis and swimming, one of the most accepted sports for women at this time was still gymnastics, which had been established already in the early nineteenth century in Sweden. 42 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 73, 84. On the British, German and American contexts, see Jennifer Hargreaves, “The Victorian Cult of the Family and the Early Years of Female Sport,” in The Sports Process: A Comparative and Developmental Approach, eds. Eric G. Dunning, Joseph A. Maguire, and Robert E. Pearton (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1993); Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany; Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in TwentiethCentury Women’s Sport. 43 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 84. 44 Ibid., 80–82; 94–127.

130  Changing Stories 45 Ester Svalling, “Kvinnlig idrott, mål och medel,” Riksidrottsförbundets propagandaskrifter 4, 1924, 5. The speech was held at the Nordic Congress for Physical Education in Gothenburg in 1926 (Nordisk kongress för fysisk fostran): “[Inget avseende bör fästas] . . . beträffande vilka idrottsövningar äro att anse som passande för kvinnor, d.v.s. att de äro kvinnliga, graciösa och själfulla. ‘Kvinnlighet’ tyckes nämligen vara en ytterligt obestämd egenskap att döma av alla uttalanden därom som gjorts här i landet under de sista 80 åren eller från Fredrika Bremers dagar, kvinnorörelsens början. Snart sagt varje område som öppnats för oss kvinnor har proklamerats som okvinnligt.” 46 Svalling, “Kvinnlig idrott, mål och medel,” 1924. “Under 1880–1890-talet strävade visserligen kvinnorörelsen att utplåna olikheterna mellan könen, men numera sättes överallt fordran på att kvinnans emancipationssträvan fördjupas och anpassas efter hennes natur.” 47 Ibid. “Man bör dock ej glömma att gossarnas och flickornas idrott på visst sätt tjäna två skilda ändamål. För flickorna bör idrotten vara ett naturligt uttryck för en sund livsverksamhet till hälsans bevarande, varjämte för gossarna tillkommer att den tjänar att giva utlopp åt nedärvda kampdrifter.” 48 “Sportkvinnan,” Charme, October  15, 1924, 12. “Och varför skulle hon tveka. Har inte tiden och utvecklingen—och mannen!—givit henne jämställighet med det starka könet?” 49 The women’s magazines Idun and Charme discussed the progress of women’s sports under recurring headlines such as “Our Sporting Ladies” or “The Sportswoman,” but the topic was discussed in a range of other entertainment magazines as well, such as Bonniers Veckotidning, Våra nöjen and Veckojournalen. 50 “Sportkvinnan,” Charme, October 15, 1924, 12. “Kvinnan erövrar ständigt ny terräng. Det gäller inte minst inom sporten, där allt fler manliga idrotter upptagas av de moderna amazonerna. Det räcker inte längre med tennis, fäktning eller Lings system—kvinnan har gripits av ‘den stora idrottens’ sensation och sportar friskt inom alla idrottsgrenar. Kasten har hon väl ännu respekt för och boxningen för riskabel för hennes fina skinn, men annars går hon med frejdigt mod ut i leken.” 51 As Fiona Skillen discusses in her study on women’s sports in a British interwar context, “Modernity, for the first time, placed an emphasis on the shape of women’s bodies. The move from the voluminous fashions of the Victorian period to the simple, linear fashions of the 1920s ensured that the body was on public display in a way in which it had never been before. This shift was also accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the measurements of the body; its size, weight and toning became the focus of investigation and discussion.” Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain,” 755. On the sporting female and male body as a symbol of modernity, see also Erik Norman Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 52 Erik Pallin, “Den kvinnliga idrotten i Sverige,” Idun, November 9, 1919, 648. 53 “Vad de sportande damerna lärt oss,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1925, 39. “sporten och den förbättrade dieten” 54 Ibid. “Höga ‘maskulina’ axlar och skuldror anses nu icke längre vara vanprydande.” 55 “Indiskreta Parisbrev,” Charme, May 15, 1923, 3. The sight of female soccer players was at this time in reality both unusual and controversial (as noted, for instance, by Erik Pallin in 1919 in “Den kvinnliga idrotten i Sverige,” Idun, November 9, 1919, 648). Women’s access to this sport would remain restricted beyond the interwar period: In 1946, a leading Swedish sports official stated that soccer should be “automatically” removed from any list

“What We Have Learned”  131 of women’s sports; Annerstedt, Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige, 202. In England, the national football organization (FA) had banned female soccer teams from playing on any League and Association-affiliated fields from 1921, which effectively quashed the development of women’s soccer; Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 127–28. 56 “Kvinnoidealet av idag,” Våra Nöjen, August 21, 1926, 12. “I den mån koketteriet finns kvar har det genomgått en välgörande friluftskur, rensats av luft och sol och vatten. Och en nödvändig följd därav är att skönhetsuppfattningen har förändrats. Den har blivit friare, klarare och sundare. . . . Den bleka kranka jazz-flickan är intet ideal.” As argued by another writer a few weeks later, faults could be found both with the sports girl and the jazz girl, but most men would like the healthy sports girl better than the pale jazz girl “rubbing against a boyfriend in a smoky café to the sound of saxophone music.” “Plats för damerna,” Våra Nöjen, September  4, 1926. As Jack Halberstam notes, “the naturalness of female toughness” has tended to be more accepted in cases where modern femininity has been associated with artificiality, “making a case for natural and healthy bodies as opposed to wasted and deformed, but properly feminine, bodies.” Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 58. 57 Erik Pallin, “Den kvinnliga idrotten i Sverige,” Idun, November  9, 1919, 648. On the political interest in Sweden in “the people’s health” in the interwar period, see Johannisson, “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget.” 58 The question of a women’s sports badge was a recurring topic in Idun in the years 1911–1915. See Erik Pallin, “Våra damer och sporten: Ett idrottsmärke för Sveriges kvinnor?” Idun, August 20, 1911, 540. In 1912, Lydia Wahlström (later engaged in the women’ sports organization SKCFK) gave her full support for a women’s sports badge, and added that shooting and horse-driving would be nice to include in the requirements: “Det kvinnliga idrottsmärket,” Idun, November 24, 1912, 776. For a summary of the debates, see Annerstedt, Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige, 176–78. 59 “Våra sportande damer,” Charme, January 1, 1924, 18. Reports on female sprinter records were also popular; see, for instance, “Världens yppersta sprinterflicka,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 19, 1928, 30. On women in motorsports, see Chapter 4. 60 “Sportkvinnan,” Charme, April 15, 1924, 26. “Kvinnan arbetar sig som synes sakta men säkert upp mot mannens standard även på det idrottsliga området. Kanske blir det en ny könens strid på kolstybben, när kvinnoidrotten fått några år på nacken? Redan nu övertrumfa de främsta kvinnliga stjärnorna flertalet manliga medelmåttor.” 61 “Alla tiders största kvinnliga sportbragd,” Charme, November 15, 1926, 20–21. 62 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 70. 63 Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain,” 761. 64 See, for instance, “Sportkvinnan djärvare,” Svensk Damtidning, April  20, 1935, 17. 65 In characteristic phrasing in 1926 Charme defined the ideal sportswoman in the negative—as not masculine: “The ideal Swedish sportswoman or sports girl should not be a too masculinized type” (Idealet för den svenska idrottskvinnan eller sportflickan bör inte vara en alltför maskuliniserad typ). “Skönhet och hälsa,” Badnummer (Swim Issue), no. 13, 1926, 30. 66 “Sport, middagar och vila,” Bonniers Veckotidning, March 3, 1929. “Många av oss minns den tid då en sportkvinna inte ansågs vara annat än ograciös, okvinnlig och oskön. Hon hade för alltid avsvurit alla de kvinnliga behagen. Där hon gick fram svepte en kall och hård vind; hennes gång var tung och

132  Changing Stories klumpig, hennes röst hård och skarp och hennes ansikte grovt och fult. Hur olika ter sig icke sportkvinnan för oss! Frisk och rosig se vi henne framför oss, hennes röst är klar och hennes gång lätt och spänstig. [. . .] den allmänna uppfattningen om henne [ha] förändrats och hon med den.” 67 The magazine Våra Nöjen argued that it was all a matter of changing perceptions. “Plats för damerna,” Våra Nöjen, September 4, 1926. 68 Birgitte Søland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain”; Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 69 On interwar advertising and the modern woman in a Swedish health context, see Roger Qvarsell and Ulrika Torell, Reklam och hälsa: levnadsideal, skönhet och hälsa i den svenska reklamens historia (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005). To what extent common girls could identify with women in media and in advertising, whether idealized as an adventurous aviatrix, an international star athlete, or a movie star photographed with boxing gloves is another story. Some sports, like tennis and golf, still belonged to a privileged upper class, whereas others, such as boxing, remained unthinkable outside the covers of magazines. Yet, as Skillen argues, “Advertising and advice literature demonstrated not only what was fashionable but importantly they showed how to be modern. [. . .] they [these adverts] would also have appealed to those who could not participate.” Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain,” 759. 70 “Vad de sportande damerna lärt oss,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1925, 39. “motståndet torde vara omöjligt att nedbryta.” 71 Ibid. “Och skälen som anföras äro huvudsakligen av estetisk art, berättigade eller ej må nu vara osagt.” The same observation was made by Våra nöjen in 1926, “Damolympiaden i Göteborg,” Våra Nöjen, September 3, 1926, Bildbilaga (Illustrated Supplement). 72 “Sport och kvinnlighet,” Idun, October 2, 1927, Supplement, 221. 73 Ibid. “Dessa vilka alltså nått toppunkten av det som kan presteras inom kvinnlig idrott, de böra kunna bevisa om idrotten är lämplig för kvinnor. [. . .] Visar exempelvis Suzanne Lenglen ett manligt och kavat uppträdande på tennisplanen eller är hennes varje rörelse kvinnlig?” 74 Ibid. “Vilken kontrast mellan de bägge! [Mrs  Lambert-Chambers]  .  .  . en kropp utan behag, utan något som blicken glädjefullt kan fästa sig vid och igenkänna en kvinna [. . .] en fruktansvärd stridsmaskin utan en tumsbredd fett, endast nerver och muskler, inte distraherad av någonting och framför allt inte av bekymret att behaga, med hela sin viljekraft strävande mot ett enda mål; segern.” 75 Ibid. “en flicka, som nyss fyllt de tjugo, med feminin kropp i sin första blom, full av smidighet och grace, en lätt gång svävande över marken.” 76 Ibid. “charmen och gracen” 77 “Förfular tennisen kvinnan?” Våra Nöjen, July 19, 1929, 26. “tennisansikte” 78 Ibid. 79 Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 11. 80 Yvonne Hirdman, Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010). 81 A distinction that matters not only on a structural, rhetorical level, but also on an individual, physical level: While women were admonished to never stop thinking of their appearance, men were encouraged to become immersed in the moment, mentally and physically. As Judith Butler points out, “when that spectatorial point of view is relinquished in favor of engaged bodily action,

“What We Have Learned”  133 we are less likely to know precisely where our bodily boundaries begin and end—in the act of touching, in working with an instrument, in concerted athletic play, we are not always aware of the distinction between our bodies and the objects or Others with which they are engaged. [. . .] In athletics, taking the perspective of the body—that is, having a strong bodily ego—means precisely being able to center and direct oneself.” Butler, “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” 82 Erik Bergvall, “Idrottens hjältar och hjältedyrkan,” Bonniers Veckotidning, October 3, 1926, 13. “önskan att kunna något, att vilja något, att våga något. Och all denna trängtan att vilja och våga och kunna kan en gång överflyttas på viktigare uppgifter i livet.” 83 Quoted in Olofsson, Har kvinnorna en sportslig chans? Den svenska idrottsrörelsen och kvinnorna under 1900-talet, 66. 84 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 74, 79. That games held a certain moral, or fostering, value also to women was sometimes pointed out by female educators, trying to balance the discussions of “aesthetics.” See for instance, “Kvinnoidrotten på tröskeln,” Svenska Dagbladet, May 30, 1926. However, the emphasis was in these contexts often put on the even higher value of teamwork and learning a sense of fair play rather than winning. On this point see also Elizabeth Chesser, The Woman Who Knows Herself (London: W. Heinemann Ltd., 1926), 79. 85 In other words, the resulting “aesthetic considerations” revolved in the 1920s around much more than the question of muscles. Sports that seemed to require an aggressive fighting spirit also became suspicious in connection to female players. Soccer was thus characteristically listed together with boxing and weight-lifting by one Swedish magazine in 1926 as one of the three most unthinkable sports for women (“All Round,” Våra Nöjen, January 16, 1926, 29). See also Cahn, Coming on Strong, 218. 86 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 75. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 77. 89 “Sportkvinnan och toalettelegansen,” Damsporten i ord och bild, February 1930. “ändamålsenliga kläder,” “elegant toalett” 90 See also Chapter  2 on such containment strategies. On the important role of print media in the formation of a youth-orientated modern culture at this time, see Lisbeth Larsson, En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning och svensk veckopress (Stockholm: Symposion, 1989); Johan Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001). 91 Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain,” 760. “Women were ‘allowed’ to play sports but only those which were regarded as conducive to maintaining womanliness and femininity. Fear that playing sports, especially in the outdoors, could ‘damage’ a woman’s looks or worse make her appear masculine were to the fore for much of the period. Advertisers played on this belief to sell many of their products and services.” 92 Krane, “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, but Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport.” 93 Advertisement in Bonniers Veckotidning, July  1, 1928. “Våra sportande damer måste ägna en särskilt omsorgsfull vård åt ansikte, hals och armar för att trots inverkan av väder och vind kunna bevara den mattvita hy och varma teint, som äro ett oeftergivligt villkor för charme och skönhet.” The message of such ads was often elaborated in lengthier editorial materials. For such an example, see “Sport, middagar och vila: skönhetsvård,” Bonniers Veckotidning, March 3, 1929, 49.

134  Changing Stories 94 Consider, for instance, the skeptical reactions to the first generations of female bicyclists in the nineteenth century. Sarah Hallenbeck, Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016). 95 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 165. 96 Ibid., 171. On this point, see also Chapter 5. 97 “Den missuppfattade sportflickan,” Damsporten i ord och bild, January 1930, 14. “monstrum av manhaftighet”; “trolska nymfer” 98 Ibid. “För en hel del människor står en idrottsflicka som ett monstrum, en underlig individ, en typisk kombination av kvinna och utkristalliserad manhaftighet.” 99 Ibid. “Hon frånkännes utan närmare analys samtliga sina rent feminina egenarter och skapas om till en rent könlös figur, vilken man tror sig kunna kalfatra utan minsta skonsamhet och göra till ett okänsligt objekt för samtliga subjektiva insinuationer och otidiga angrepp.” 100 Ibid. “oreflekterande, tjusigt svajig jazzböna” 101 Ibid., 14. “lotsa sig förbi Karybdis och akta sig för Skylla. [. . .] Idrotten har stålsatt henne. Den har skapat en mänsklig individ.” Damsporten’s discussion of the dangers facing her (Scylla and Charybdis) in fact illustrates Vikki Krane’s recent discussion of the “femininity balancing act”: “Consequences of nonconformity to hegemonic femininity in sport often include sexist and heterosexist discrimination. This leads many sportswomen to emphasize feminine characteristics to avoid prejudice and discrimination. However, females perceived as too feminine are then sexualized and trivialized, leaving women to carefully balance athleticism with hegemonic femininity.” Krane, “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, but Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport,” 115. 102 “Den missuppfattade sportflickan,” Damsporten i ord och bild, Janu ary  1930, 15. “Hon är först som sist kvinna [.  .  .] Och att kasta epitetet manhaftig i ansiktet på henne, det är den grövsta förolämpning man kan ställa mot en flicka” 103 Kristina Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), 95–96. 104 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 165–69. 105 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 77. 106 Ibid.; Laura L. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 195; Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 168. 107 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 77–80. 108 “Den missuppfattade sportflickan,” Damsporten i ord och bild, Janu ary 1930, 15. 109 “Problemet om mannen,” Charme, February 1, 1923, 15. “Det vi kvinnor känna för en alltför feminint betonad man är väl ungefär detsamma som männen känna för en manlig kvinna, nämligen ett undrande löje med lust att förlöjliga.” 110 Ibid. “Den koketta lusten att pryda och försköna sig borde vara kvinnorna förbehållet; färg och puder passa illa i ett ansikte som skulle vara präglat av kraft och beslutsamhet. [. . .] En mans vackra ansikte är av föga betydelse jämfört med den beundran han kan inge hos kvinnorna genom sin smärta, väl tränade och gymnastiserade kropps stolta och självmedvetna hållning.”

“What We Have Learned”  135 11 “Förfular tennisen kvinnan?” Våra Nöjen, July 19, 1929, 26. 1 112 George Jr. Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance,” Salmagundi, no. 58/59 (1982); Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 16–20. 113 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 164–84. On a rising consumer culture in Sweden focused on heterosexual femininity, see Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960; Therése Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014). 114 On this short story, see Lisbeth Stenberg, “ ‘en lifsmakt för qvinnan’: Hur en begynnande diskurs om relationer mellan kvinnor tystnar under 1880-talets skandinaviska sedlighetsdebatt,” lambda nordica 4, no. 2 (1998). 115 Ibid., 8–11. As Stenberg notes, this short story was in fact a draft for a novel, but in the hardening misogynistic debate climate of the late 1880s, Leffler chose not to finish the project. 116 “Skulle ni vilja gifta Eder med en idrottsstjärna?” Damsporten i ord och bild, August 1930, 3. 117 By the mid-1920s, articles on women’s sportswear constituted an increasingly popular segment in magazines like Charme, Bonniers Veckotidning and Idun. Swedish writers emphasized how women’s winter wear needed not be unfeminine, boring, heavy and unwieldy. See for instance, Barbro Alving (pseud. Bang), “Sportigt till sport,” Idun, January 6, 1929, 11. As argued by Fiona Skillen in a British context, advertisements for women’s sportswear constituted in fact an important aspect of the image of the active, modern woman. Skillen, “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain.” 118 For examples in the genre of satire targeted at the modern sportswoman, see “Den unga damen och idrotten,” Våra Nöjen, August  14, 1926, 25; “Ingen längre svag,” Våra Nöjen, June 21, 1929, 36–37. When Svenska Dagbladet announced a drawing competition (for artists) on the theme of the modern sportswoman, several of the contributions relied on the stereotype of the coquette woman; “Sportkvinnan,” Svenska Dagbladet, December 19, 1926, 46–47. 119 Lydia Wahlström, Sin fars dotter (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1920), 36–43. On this novel, see Liv Saga Bergdahl, Kärleken utan namn: identitet och (o)synlighet i svenska lesbiska romaner (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2010), 60–66. 120 Greger Eman, Nya himlar över en ny jord: om Klara Johanson, Lydia Wahlström och den feministiska vänskapskärleken (Lund; Stockholm: Ellerström, 1993). 121 On the themes of driving and desire in Charlie, see Jenny Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017). 122 “Vem löser lokalfrågan?” Våra nöjen, November 1, 1929, 26. 123 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 94. 124 “Var ska flickorna sporta?” Idun, February 10, 1929. On SKCFK’s efforts to bring attention to the matter of women’s sporting facilities, see Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 73–76. 125 “Svensk damsimning bör räddas,” Våra Nöjen, October 11, 1929, 26; “Vem löser lokalfrågan?” Våra Nöjen, November  1, 1929, 26. Yet, Våra Nöjen also expressed a certain optimism, arguing that women’s sports would soon be “saved” thanks not least to the “propaganda” of the magazine: “Damsporten är räddad,” Våra Nöjen, October 4, 1929, 26. 126 Exceptions were noted: The male sports club Göta was thus commended for having included women’s sports on its program, and for having admitted a

136  Changing Stories female bandy club under it wings: “Göta banar vägen för kvinnlig idrott,” Våra Nöjen, November 8, 1929, 26. 127 On the class-aspect of sports, see “Vem löser lokalfrågan?” Våra Nöjen, November 1, 1929, 26. 128 “Damsport,” Våra Nöjen, May  31, 1929, 27. “utskrattas av en massa pojkar [.  .  .] Den [publiken] finner ett särskilt nöje att håna de tränande flickorna.” See also “Egen idrottsplats åt damerna!” Våra nöjen, May 24, 1929, 27; “Inför premiären: Låt 1929 bli ett stort år för damsporten,” Våra Nöjen, April 19, 1929, 27. 129 Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 20. 130 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 74. Compare similar developments in automobility, and reactions to rising numbers of female automobilists in the early twentieth century. Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 128. See also Chapter 4. 131 “Damsporten 1929,” Våra Nöjen, January 4, 1929, 27. “Detta för att de [männen] varit först på platsen.” 132 “Svensk damsimning inför sin upplösning?” Våra nöjen, April  26, 1929, 27. For instance, as reported in this article, swimming clubs argued that it would cost too much to provide separate women’s spaces in the bathhouses, and since women’s results were anyway poor, female swim teams were often discontinued. Female swimmers were thus reported to train mostly in the summer time (when they could swim outdoors), which limited their development. 133 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 98; Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in TwentiethCentury Women’s Sport, 54. 134 To clarify, the debate was not necessarily about women competing against men, but about women competing against each other at the same event as men. See also the arguments of Erik Bergvall, quoted earlier. 135 “Kvinnoidrotten på tröskeln,” Svenska Dagbladet, May 30, 1926, Sunday Supplement. 136 “Ett kvinnornas central förbund för fysisk kultur,” Stockholms-Tidningen, January 8, 1924; “Kvinnornas idrottsriksdag,” Idun, January 13, 1924. 137 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990, 64–66. In contrast, Doctor Ada Nilsson was skeptical about the point of competing (trying to “jump half a millimeter higher than the next”), as Tolvhed notes. Also Ester Svalling, mentioned above, believed in restricting competitions for girls; Annerstedt, Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige, 202. However, as Tolvhed points out, these women nevertheless agreed on the greater emancipatory value of sports, they just disagreed whether competitions enabled this value or not; Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 66. 138 Damsporten i ord och bild, January  1930. “Målmedveten—obunden— djärv—fri.” In the end, this kind of bold advertising did not raise enough support for the magazine to survive financially; after nine issues the magazine was discontinued. Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 103. 139 Damsporten i ord och bild, March 1930. “Varje lag, varje spelare, söker till det yttersta göra allt för att prestigen skall hållas, segern skall vinnas.” 140 “Ett kvinnornas central förbund för fysisk kultur,” Stockholms-Tidningen, January 8, 1924, 10. “Lusten att överglänsa bör elimineras.” 141 Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 107.

“What We Have Learned”  137 142 Barbro Alving (pseud. Bang), “En ny stjärna på idrottshimlen,” Idun, September 7, 1930, 937. “Men flickorna [. . .] böra aldrig hålla på för länge, inte så länge att de bli halvt professionella och få en tävlingsmuskulatur.” As Tolvhed notes, Maj Jacobsson seems on another occasion (attempting to raise support from Sweden’s male sports leadership), to have adopted these arguments mostly in a strategic manner, as a way of disarming the challenge of women’s sports. See Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 106–107. 143 Alving, “En ny stjärna på idrottshimlen,” Idun, September  7, 1930, 937. “En flicka är inte en pojke” 144 “Kvinnoidrotten på tröskeln,” Svenska Dagbladet, May 30, 1926, Sunday Supplement. “Idrott bör vara lek, anser Ragnvi Torslow.” 145 Ibid. As discussed by Susan K. Cahn, the tradition of distinguishing between “manly sport” and “female exercise” developed in the US as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, 9. 146 On the importance of youth in print media’s representations of female athletes, see also Helena Tolvhed’s investigation of distinctions that have been made in twentieth century sports media between (acceptable) sports girls and (less acceptable) adult sportswomen; Tolvhed, Nationen på spel: kropp, kön och svenskhet i populärpressens representationer av olympiska spel 1948–1972. 147 At this time, the international sports world was still reeling after the sight of “collapsing” female runners after an 800 meter race in the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, which had led some to re-invoke ideas of feminine frailty and question women’s place in the Olympics; På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 103–05. 148 “Våra damer och allmänna idrotten,” Charme, October15, 1924, 6. “Skulle inte snarare vår slanka, blonda, germanska kvinna vara den idealiska idrottsgestalten? Men är det nu överhuvud taget målet att skapa kvinnliga rekordmaskiner?” 149 What we have here is an example of a clash between ideals related to, on the one hand, a type of feminine morphology and, on the other hand, the goal of (national) superiority. As Judith Butler points out: “in the labored crafting of the athletic body, certain ideal feminine morphologies come into crisis. They come into conflict with other competing, culturally elaborated ideals.” Butler, “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” 150 “Kvinnlig idrottsstjärna i manskläder,” Våra Nöjen, March 15, 1929, 27. 151 “O. Lindberg vann Vasaloppet,” Dagens Nyheter, March 5, 1923. “hyllade henne ovationsartat” (p. 1), “Hon ser icke värst trött ut.” (p. 10). 152 “Efter andra Vasaloppet,” Dagens Nyheter, March  6, 1923, 10. “Fröken Margit Nordins deltagande har framkallat en allmän och bestämd opinion mot kvinnligt inslag i tävlingen för framtiden.” 153 Annerstedt, Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige, 134. Even though the Vasa Race today is open to women, women’s lesser capacity and/or confidence is reinscribed by a special “girl version” of the race with a distance of 30 km (instead of 90), labelled The Girl Vasa (“Tjejvasan”). On the trend in recent years of creating separate women’s races, see Karin S. Lindelöf, “Lady Långdistans, Ladylufsen and Kvinnor Kan: Ethnological Perspectives on the Rise of Women-Only Sports Races in Sweden,” Ethnologia Scandinavica 45, (2015). 154 Lars Nylin and Torbjörn Nordvall, Vasaloppet: I fäders spår (Stockholm: Schibsted, 2009), 128. 155 “Senaste om Vasaloppet: Damer få ej tävla mer,” Dagens Nyheter, April 4, 1923, 8. “i all tysthet”

138  Changing Stories 156 In 1919, sports commentator Erik Pallin even published a book on women’s skiing, meant to encourage even more women to engage in this healthy outdoor sport; Skidlöpning för kvinnor och ungdom (Stockholm, 1919). 157 Erik Pallin, “Den kvinnliga idrotten i Sverige,” Idun, November 9, 1919, 648. “Våra sportande damer,” Charme, January 1, 1924, 18. 158 A point made by Lena Andersson, “Med rinnande mascara i spåret,” Dagens Nyheter, March 7, 2015. 159 Writing in Idun, Erik Pallin noted that modern skiing competitions for women had been organized in Sweden since the 1890s, and female skiers were described by Olaus Magnus as early as the sixteenth century. Erik Pallin, “Den kvinnliga idrotten i Sverige,” Idun, November 9, 1919, 648. 160 The very motto of the race, “I fädrens spår för framtids segrar,” was thus designed to appeal to a sense of national heritage and patriotism among its male skiers. As shown by Tolvhed in the context of Olympic Games in the period 1948–72, print media generally configured male, and not female, athletes as the defenders of this national heritage and honor; Tolvhed, Nationen på spel: kropp, kön och svenskhet i populärpressens representationer av olympiska spel 1948–1972. 161 “Efter andra Vasaloppet,” Dagens Nyheter, March 6, 1923, 10. “Förmodligen kommer fröken Margit Nordin att förbli icke blott den första kvinna som fullföljt Vasaloppet, utan också den enda, åtminstone några år framåt.” 162 The fact that this level of optimism and interest in women’s sports would not appear again until the late twentieth century suggests, as Helena Tolvhed has also pointed out, that the history of women’s sports, and emancipation, is in no way a linear story. Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 14.

Bibliography Andersson, Therése. Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014. Annerstedt, Claes. Kvinnoidrottens utveckling i Sverige. Malmö: LiberFörlag, 1984. Behling, Laura L. The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935. Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Bergdahl, Liv Saga. Kärleken utan namn: identitet och (o)synlighet i svenska lesbiska romaner. Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2010. Birrell, Susan, and Mary G. McDonald. Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” Stanford Humanities Review 6, no. 2 (1998). Cahn, Susan K. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport. 2nd ed. Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 1994. Caudwell, Jayne, ed. Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Chauncey, George Jr. “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance.” Salmagundi, no. 58/59 (1982): 114–46. Chesser, Elizabeth. The Woman Who Knows Herself. London: W. Heinemann Ltd., 1926.

“What We Have Learned”  139 Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Dowling, Colette. The Frailty Myth: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls. New York: Random House International, 2000. Eman, Greger. Nya himlar över en ny jord: om Klara Johanson, Lydia Wahlström och den feministiska vänskapskärleken. Lund; Stockholm: Ellerström, 1993. Eskilsson, Lena. Drömmen om kamratsamhället: Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på Fogelstad 1925–35. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991. ———. “Friluftsliv.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: Det moderna genombrottet, edited by Jakob Christensson, 362–91. Lund: Atlantis, 2008. Fjelkestam, Kristina. Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002. Florin, Christina, and Lars Kvarnström. Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap: genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1950. Stockholm: Atlas, 2001. Florin, Christina, and Ulla Johansson. ‘Där de härliga lagrarna gro’: kultur, klass och kön i det svenska läroverket 1850–1914. Stockholm: Tiden, 1993. Fuller, Linda K. Sport, Rhetoric, and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Hallenbeck, Sarah. Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Hargreaves, Jennifer. Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. “The Victorian Cult of the Family and the Early Years of Female Sport.” In The Sports Process: A Comparative and Developmental Approach, edited by Eric G. Dunning, Joseph A. Maguire and Robert E. Pearton. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1993. Haslum, Rolf. Idrott, borgerlig folkfostran och frihet: Torsten Tegnér som opinionsbildare 1930–1960. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2006. Hellspong, Mats. “Den moderna idrotten.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Stockholm: Signum, 2009. Hellström, John. Den svenska sporthjälten: kontinuitet och förändring i medieberättelsen om den svenska sporthjälten från 1920-talet till idag. Malmö: Idrottsforum, 2014. Hirdman, Yvonne. Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010. 1989. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 1949. 2009. Ingemarsdotter, Jenny. “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017): 38–70. Jamieson, Katherine M., and Leila E. Villaverde. “In/Visible Bodies: Lesbian Sexualities and Sporting Spaces: Introduction.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 13, no. 3 (July 13, 2009): 231–37. Jensen, Erik Norman. Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Johannisson, Karin. “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget.” In Lychnos: Årsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoria, 139–95. Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991.

140  Changing Stories Krane, Vikki. “We Can Be Athletic and Feminine, But Do We Want to? Challenging Hegemonic Femininity in Women’s Sport.” Quest 53, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 115–33. Larsson, Lisbeth. En annan historia: om kvinnors läsning och svensk veckopress. Stockholm: Symposion, 1989. Lenskyj, Helen. Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2003. Lindelöf, Karin S. “Lady Långdistans, Ladylufsen and Kvinnor Kan: Ethnological Perspectives on the Rise of Women-only Sports Races in Sweden.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 45, (2015): 140–57. Ljunggren, Jens. “Mellan natur och kultur.” In Rädd att falla: Studier i manlighet, edited by Claes Ekenstam, 124–44. Stockholm: Gidlund, 1998. Nylin, Lars, and Torbjörn Nordvall. Vasaloppet: I fäders spår. Stockholm: Schibsted, 2009. Olofsson, Eva. Har kvinnorna en sportslig chans? Den svenska idrottsrörelsen och kvinnorna under 1900-talet. Umeå: Umeå universitetspress, 1989. Östberg, Kjell. Efter rösträtten: kvinnors utrymme efter det demokratiska genombrottet. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1997. Qvarsell, Roger, and Ulrika Torell. Reklam och hälsa: levnadsideal, skönhet och hälsa i den svenska reklamens historia. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005. Skillen, Fiona. “ ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 5 (2012): 750–65. Söderberg, Johan. Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Søland, Birgitte. Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Stenberg, Lisbeth. “ ‘en lifsmakt för qvinnan’: Hur en begynnande diskurs om relationer mellan kvinnor tystnar under 1880-talets skandinaviska sedlighetsdebatt.” lambda nordica 4, no. 2 (1998). Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Tolvhed, Helena. Nationen på spel: kropp, kön och svenskhet i populärpressens representationer av olympiska spel 1948–1972. Umeå: h:ström—Text & kultur, 2008. ———. På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990. Göteborg: Makadam, 2015. Wahlström, Lydia. Sin fars dotter. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1920. Wanneberg, Pia Lundquist. “The Sexualization of Sport: A  Gender Analysis of Swedish Elite Sport from 1967 to the Present Day.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 265–78. Williams, Jean. A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960. London; New York: Routledge, 2012. Wosk, Julie. Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

4 The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar Stories of Masculinized Women Behind the Wheel

How does it feel to be behind the wheel? Oh, it’s wonderful . . . wonderful . . . as long as you drive fast! —Svensk Motortidning, February 22, 19251

Confident, cosmopolitan and on the move—the modern woman behind the wheel signified the very essence of modernity in the 1920s to many.2 Seemingly undeterred by the male dominance in national motor clubs, female drivers in Sweden emphasized how women embraced every aspect of driving that men did—the thrill of speed, the adventures of longdistance tours, the tinkering with the mechanics of the car or the cruising on winding country roads.3 One young “chauffeuse” even admitted that she wished she could have her own racecar, even though it would probably “not be very useful.”4 Such statements highlighted not only women’s ability to drive and to travel but also their desire to do such things, a desire that until now had been associated with men and masculinity.5 As the historian Virginia Scharff writes in her pioneering study on female drivers in the first decades of the twentieth century, the automobile industry had from its earliest years configured itself as an exclusively masculine enterprise, built on the “sweat and ingenuity” of men.6 Whether the racecar-dreaming chauffeuse represented a change in this story of Western male mobility was in the early 1920s still uncertain. This chapter examines how stories of women taking the wheel worked to challenge and sometimes unsettle the boundaries between masculinity and femininity in Sweden in the 1920s. Drawing on a range of popular periodicals, from fashion magazines to motor journals, I explore how the many stories of modern female automobilists worked, on the one hand, to disturb traditional ideas of the stationary and homebound woman, but at the same time how stereotyping and satire worked to re-inscribe old gender hierarchies. At stake was not only the meaning of modernity’s motorized masculinity but also the fate of femininity in a restless and aggressive world of traffic and public exposure. Within motorsports particularly, it was unclear to many whether the increasing female presence

142  Changing Stories in competitions and races would lead to a masculinization of the women or a feminization of the sport.7 On a deeper level, the resulting conflicted attitude towards the female motorist, whether she wished for a racecar or a reliable commuter vehicle, rested on difficulties to conjoin the agency invested in the driver’s seat with a cultural understanding of femininity as cautious and passive. Ultimately, many wondered what to make of women—and the construction of femininity—on the road.8 By studying the Swedish case of interwar gender negotiations in motoring, this chapter expands on previous research with a focus on a Scandinavian country that was torn in the 1920s between critiquing and embracing foreign, especially American, automobilization trends.9 In addition to print media’s ambiguous stories of women drivers, I also address the largely forgotten experiences of Sweden’s pioneering female motorists themselves. The voices of these women, as they come across in interviews, in debates and in sports articles, will provide a starting point to reflect more broadly upon the intersection of gender and technology. As the historian Georgine Clarsen points out, early women motorists’ “attempts to create the category of the technologically adroit woman spilled over into a much bigger project, that of redrafting the very ideas of masculinity and femininity.”10 Exploring these “redrafting” efforts will underscore how automobility has always represented something more than a means of transportation. In Laura Doan’s words, automobility highlights “not only individual agency in the ability to move or the passivity of ‘being moved,’ but the will to move.”11 More specifically, I approach this “will to move” in two contexts of female automobility. The first case centers on the city scene of Stockholm and the modern woman, determined to become, if not an automobile owner herself, at least licensed and mobile. The second case focuses on motorsports and those women who brought their love of driving even further: to the racing circuits and the world of motormen.

The Happy Chauffeuse and the “Automobilization” of Sweden Histories of motoring have rightly placed the rise of mass-automobility in Sweden in the 1950s, as this was the decade when Swedes on a larger scale could afford to buy their own cars.12 Yet, I argue here that the automobile became a powerful force of change in Sweden further back, in the 1920s, culturally as well as materially. For example, looking back, one motor magazine discussed in 1926 how Stockholm’s cityscape had undergone a “violent process of change” in only a few years’ time: Having almost completely “eradicated” the horse carriages from the streets, the automobile now dominated the city, with some 18,000 motorized vehicles passing Stockholm’s main thoroughfare (Slussen) every day.13 Two years later, writing about an escalating “traffic chaos” in Stockholm,

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  143 another reporter noted how even the pace of change seemed to be changing: “The development is now progressing at such a speed that we are having trouble keeping up, despite our location at the focal point.”14 Others commented on the explosion of driving schools in Stockholm, which welcomed male as well as female students: Noting in 1928 that the number of women found in driving schools was, in fact, “astonishingly high,” the daily paper Stockholms-Tidningen speculated that the ability to drive was now perhaps a part of having “It” (a remark inspired by the theme of the popular film It in 1927, portraying a fashionable and sexually alluring modern girl).15 In other words, the automobile was perceived at the time as a forceful catalyst of change that was rapidly altering Sweden and especially Stockholm. Whether this motorized change was discussed in terms of congestion, pollution, accidents, or, more positively, in terms of exciting motorsports events or increasing gender equality, many agreed that the “automobilization of society” was indeed changing society.16 To many observers, the female driver epitomized this story of change, potentially transforming yet again something masculine into something modern.17 However, to the individual female driver (expected to be confused rather than confident around technology) the act of taking the wheel was not as straightforward as it was for men, precisely because she was perceived to challenge, not confirm, her gender. In the words of Georgine Clarsen: “Motoring women were obliged to struggle, in ways that men were not, with fundamental issues of differences between what bodies were able to do, were imagined to do, were allowed to do, and were encouraged to do, in a domain in which female bodies were largely dismissed as out of place.”18 This struggle played out somewhat differently in different national contexts, as Clarsen also shows: British women, given the national crises of World War I, commonly expressed their ambitions in terms of female patriotism, whereas in the US, where production conditions had been less afflicted by the war, women were more likely to represent their hopes for mobility “through the commercial imperatives of commodity consumption.”19 In Sweden, the automobile early on came to symbolize technological progress as well as an exciting, albeit exclusive, facet of modernity. After the war, which Sweden had experienced from the sidelines, automobile advertisements appeared in a range of new entertainment magazines but continued in many cases to depict the automobile as a mark of privilege, represented by elegant people traveling in style. However, advertisements that focused on luxury and “aristocratic” style were soon challenged by ads that emphasized affordability and reliability.20 Meanwhile, the rise of mass-automobility in the US was analyzed closely in the Swedish press, and many predicted that the automobile would also become more widespread in Sweden, in an increasingly democratized society.21 As pointed out by a weekly magazine in 1928, most Swedes could perhaps still not

144  Changing Stories afford to buy their own car, but plenty of people had nevertheless traveled in one or even driven one.22 Moreover, it should be noted that motoring was not limited to automobiles in the 1920s: Less affluent Swedes frequently drove motorcycles at this time.23 In addition to everyday uses of motor vehicles, racing events and motorsports introduced a particularly controversial arena for the debate regarding the place of women in motoring. By the mid-1920s, images of tough-looking female racecar drivers and long-distance drivers had joined those of fashionable flappers behind the wheel in the Swedish press. However, while some commentators interpreted the increasing numbers of such sporting women at the wheel (or riding motorcycles) as a sign of increasing equality, others remained concerned that from the beginning female motorists had in fact been en route not to modernity but to masculinity.24 Yet, insisting on their right to drive, many Swedish women for their part (to be further exemplified throughout this chapter) presented their new motorized habits neither as acts of patriotism, nor as acts of consumption, but, rather, as a natural part of modernity—the modern woman was simply a mobile one. Concerns with the prospect of automobilized women were limited at first. As suggested by a Swedish observer from Paris in the year 1900, the automobile appeared mostly to be a source of amusement for the nobility rather than a matter of mobility: “Noble ladies, dressed for the ball or the opera, swish through the crowds on a contraption that look like a hissing coffee pan, terrifying all living creatures.”25 However, two decades later, when the Swedish press reported from the latest automobile exhibitions in Paris, new auto models were presented not as curiosities but as commercial products, ready for the Swedish market.26 By the early 1920s Swedish women’s magazines noted an increasing number of women on the road and predicted that driving would soon be a natural part of being a modern woman.27 However, such predictions also held problematic possibilities: In the automobile homeland of the United States, where early on the auto industry explored ways to mass-produce motorcars, the idea of thousands (or millions) of women on the road had raised concerns about the stability of a gender order that assumed women’s place to be at home, or at least close to home.28 Expecting women to use the automobile mostly for shorter errands, American auto industrialists had initially promoted the electric car, with its very limited driving range, as a suitable car for ladies. However, as Virginia Scharff has shown, female automobilists were never content with the limitations of the electric model: Choosing instead to drive gasoline cars, American women forced the automobile industry to rethink their gendered strategies well before World War I.29 In Sweden, one of the first female drivers, Alexandra Gjestvang, was photographed driving an electric car in 1904, but a decade later she and her younger female friends on the road were driving gasoline cars.30 The

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  145 first generation of Swedish female drivers was well aware that they had broken new ground by taking the wheel. When interviewed in the mid1920s several women recalled how they had been subjected to disbelief, taunting and name-calling when they learned to drive. One woman described how she had been surrounded in the street by shouting boys in the days when a car had to be started by a crank; another remembered how male taxi drivers in Stockholm had shouted at her, dismayed that women were now driving.31 However, many also emphasized that driving women had now become a common sight: As one young woman claimed in 1925, female drivers “don’t attract any attention these days,” even though it had been “quite another story” when she had first learnt to drive five years previously, at which time people had stared at her in the countryside, “finding the equipage an odd sight.”32 This notion of the increasingly un-sensational modern woman behind the wheel can be seen as part of a larger progress narrative of modernity and women’s emancipation. As Julie Wosk writes, by the 1920s photographs of women and automobiles had become “a central cultural emblem of women’s modernity, independence, and mobility.”33 In this spirit of emancipated glamor and modern progress, Swedish magazines did not hesitate to put fashionable female drivers on their front covers or celebrate their increasing numbers.34 For instance, in 1923 the women’s magazine Idun declared not only that one could no longer find a “modern lady who did not think that automobile travelling was the most enjoyable thing,” but also that, increasingly, women learned to drive “either their own or their husband’s car.”35 These kinds of progress reports, including photo spreads of modern “chauffeuses,” became a recurring feature in a range of Swedish popular magazines in the 1920s. In this manner mobility became connected not only with modernity and Swedish progress but with a broader historical narrative of women’s emancipation: As declared by the fashion magazine Charme in 1926, the “vegetating” days of the servile housewife, for whom it was “a rare and an adventurous occasion if she could accompany her husband to a restaurant,” were now finally a thing of the past—the modern woman could get out whenever she pleased.36 Thus, by the mid-1920s, Sweden’s ranking as a modern and automobilized nation was measured not only by the size of its car fleet but also by the presence of female drivers on the streets. In 1928, when discussing the “triumph of automobility,” the weekly magazine Veckojournalen reported that Sweden now had the fifth-highest number of registered automobiles in Europe, and, moreover, that Sweden was full of “happy chauffeuses” who no longer caused a sensation on the streets.37 Female drivers themselves typically corroborated this progress narrative of automotive equality, emphasizing how unspectacular the woman behind the wheel had become. Yet, individual experiences indicated a more complex reality: For instance, in 1926 when the actress Margit Rosengren

146  Changing Stories described how she had learnt to drive, she emphasized first how fun and easy it had been. However, she also related how she had recently found herself driving behind a gentleman walking slowly in the middle of the street: Refusing to step aside, the man had finally moved “two inches,” barely letting her pass, while muttering to himself that “women should not drive.”38 Such attitudes were also voiced more regularly in the press in the form of jokes and satire about accident-prone female drivers who focused more on their mirrors and make-up than any obstacles ahead.39 As discussed by Julie Wosk and others, the international phenomenon of satire targeting female drivers was possibly related to the steadily increasing numbers of women on the road. Not only did these female drivers disprove the idea that women were helpless around motor vehicles, but they also threatened a gender order where women were dependent on men for their mobility.40 By portraying driving women as confused and nervous, satire efficiently channeled this threat into something more familiar. Objections to these caricatures were occasionally voiced by women themselves or by teachers at driving schools, who tried to downplay the difference between male and female drivers. In 1928, one instructor argued in the daily paper Stockholms-Tidningen that the driving school was, in fact, uniquely indifferent to people’s gender and social backgrounds: “If there is such a school that can be free of social distinctions, of class and gender considerations, it is driving school. When they come to driving school, they are all equally stupid and inexperienced.”41 Unsurprisingly, such remarks went largely unnoticed in entertainment magazines, where women in particular continued to be stereotyped as relentlessly reckless drivers. Meanwhile the status of the car itself as a sexed object, “masculine in its power yet feminine in being a body that is ridden and mastered,” as literary scholar Deborah Clarke writes, remained unclear.42 In 1926 one Swedish commentator pointed out that the car, unlike watches, umbrellas and razors, only had “one sex.”43 However, auto advertisers tried to remedy this increasing blurring of gender in regard to cars by specifying which qualities of a particular brand would appeal to men and to women. As explained in an advertisement for a new model of the Auburn in a Swedish magazine in 1927, “he wants a well-built, powerful and practical car,” while she wants “a really stylish” one.44 Such advertising language also worked to re-inscribe gender in automobility by emphasizing how female drivers were interested in beauty, style and comfort, while men wanted power and speed. Still, as Georgine Clarsen has pointed out, auto advertisements were not limited to this kind of stereotyping; they also appealed to the modern woman’s desire for fun and adventure, as shown in advertisements that highlighted the daring and speed-loving woman behind the wheel.45 Advertising thus became not just a source for gender stereotyping, but it was also a site of new ideas concerning what the modern woman wanted and how far she desired to go (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1  Female model from Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) wearing a pilotinspired automobile outfit (“Bilekipering”), 1928 Source: Photo: Erik Holmén, Nordiska museet.

148  Changing Stories In close dialogue with the rhetoric of advertisements, the look and style of female automobilists became a popular topic in mainstream media across the world, oftentimes, as Clarsen notes, with “more than a hint of sexuality.”46 As one Swedish male observer characteristically wrote in 1928, “a woman in charge of big, heavy things, whether it’s a man or a car, is quite appealing.”47 Female fashion experts nevertheless remained concerned that the look of the motoring woman was not feminine enough: Advising women on “correct motor elegance,” in 1928, one weekly magazine emphasized how women’s leatherwear needed not be oily, dirty and limited to brown colors.48 These efforts to feminize female motorists were formulated in a cultural context where men and women were still perceived as doing different things when entering a motorcar: While male drivers were not seen as disturbing their gender appearance when taking control of a powerful vehicle, women doing the same thing exposed themselves to scrutiny and judgment. This is, of course, why looks mattered to driving women, not merely as a “frivolous” concern, as Clarsen points out, but in terms of identity and respectability: “At issue was how to acquire an admirably modern, capable and adventurous look without inviting social ridicule.”49 In Swedish print media, this issue was specifically addressed by the fashion magazine Charme in articles that expressed concern that the Swedish woman driver did not pay enough attention to matters of style. Driving Like Men: Charme’s Gender Critique of Swedish Women Behind the Wheel In 1924 when comparing the driving habits of “American girls” and “Swedish women,” Charme noted that the former could be seen “laughing boisterously” in the comfort of a closed car, whereas the Swedish woman was still driving her open car, “tucked up in her furs.”50 Charme had moreover detected a worrisome “sport instinct” in the Swedish woman behind the wheel: “She approaches motoring as a tough, demanding sport. She gladly participates in races and shows a striking interest in tinkering with the engine, unlike her continental and American sisters. For sure, she takes these matters more seriously than they do.”51 Thus, while Charme embraced driving as part of modern womanhood, the magazine also critiqued the Swedish female driver for her failure to adopt a more feminine approach. Not only was she driving her father’s or husband’s (too) big car, but she was copying “male fashions of leather wear [. . .] as if a short drive in the morning was a world championship in speed racing.” In short, as suggested by Charme, the Swedish woman seemed to like her car “for the sake of the engine.”52 Preferring the less serious and more youthful attitude of “American girls,” Charme suggested that Swedish women should consider not only how they dressed but also what kinds of cars they chose to drive.53 As noted by Charme’s reporter, in the US one could find cars that were

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  149 suitable for different kinds of women: “A  little blond is recommended to get a light blue Pierce Arrow, while a dark beauty is considered at her best advantage in a Marmon, painted in the popular color known as sultan red.”54 In Charme’s own survey of suitable car brands for women, some were dismissed as “too big and too masculine,” whereas the ideal ladies car was described as small-sized, easy to drive and nicely colored. Even though the supply of “ladies cars” was smaller in Sweden, Charme was optimistic for the future: “Sweden moves with a tremendous speed towards a complete Americanization, thank God.”55 To the individual female driver, the expectation to keep up an appropriate feminine style at all times, regardless of speed and weather, created new demands on self-monitoring. In a report from Paris in 1926, Charme explained that the Parisian woman “enjoyed driving at a 100 km, but she still wanted to step out in a presentable state with her face unaffected by weather and wind, and with her outfit preserved from dust and dirt.”56 Her solution was to drive “a light, comfortable and covered promenade car.”57 The entertainment magazine Bonniers Veckotidning similarly declared in the same year that “cars and coquetry” were perfectly compatible. To prove this point, the article explained in some detail how “no activity in the world”—least of all driving—could stop a woman from being feminine and “good enough to be fallen in love with.”58 Beneath her fur coat she is all crêpe georgette, or pearls or velvet, even sequin if necessary. From the moment she has locked her car, she is ready to be just as helpless as young beautiful women always pretend to be, when they have male protection at their disposal.59 Invoking the stereotype of the coquette and manipulative woman, articles like these tried to create a coherent picture of modern femininity and female motoring. Neither nervous nor masculine, the perfect female driver was essentially construed as a star—cool, confident and glamorous. Moreover, by describing in some detail how to achieve this style, popular media at the same time suggested that femininity was a kind of performance that could be learnt and perfected.60 Ultimately, women’s magazines did on the whole encourage women to be confident and learn to drive, but since they remained unconvinced of the compatibility of femininity with automobility, they also continued, as argued by Julie Wosk in an American context, “to promote a cultural agenda that insisted that women adapt their images—and attitudes—to win the approval, and the approving gaze, of men.”61 The resulting belittling of women’s automobile skills did not work to strengthen women’s confidence to take the wheel in the persistently male-dominated arena of motoring.62 In the end, women who identified neither with the glamorous star nor with the female racecar driver were left to find their own paths in the world of motorized traveling.

150  Changing Stories Driving Anyway: New Women on the Road A closer look at the source materials reveals that Swedish women did find their own paths into automobility during the 1920s. For instance, women drove cars for work, though these less glamorous examples— the doctor, the teacher, the dairy consultant, the driving instructor— were usually mentioned only in passing in the press.63 Such examples of women’s early use of the automobile constitute a little-explored part of women’s emancipation in the interwar era, particularly in the context of new work opportunities. The potential that the car held for women was nevertheless noticed by female commentators at the time. Writing in 1921 on the nation’s new “women at the wheel,” the women’s magazine Idun noted that modern women in the city were far from the only kind of female drivers: Women in the countryside had come to benefit greatly from the automobile too, particularly female doctors who maneuvered their cars “as confidently as any male colleague on the road.”64 Similar observations were published in other popular magazines, oftentimes in the context of photo spreads that featured brief presentations of “Ladies at the Wheel.”65 In terms of more distinctly motivated “emancipist” uses of automobiles, Swedish women did not use motorized traveling in the same organized manner as the women’s rights movement in the US had done, staging spectacular cross-country campaigns as early as 1910.66 Yet, by the 1920s, several well-known figures in the Swedish emancipation movement nevertheless frequently used automobiles for traveling: For instance, one of the leaders of the famous feminist Fogelstad group, Honorine Hermelin, took her friends on long tours in her car “Bille” to visit allies in Sweden and in Finland, while Ellen Hagen, formerly a leading figure in the suffrage movement, continued her work on social reform in the 1920s by setting out in her car on lecture tours across the country.67 One of the most socially far-reaching uses of the automobile in Sweden at this time was carried out by the sex educator Elise Ottesen-Jensen, who traveled all across the country to educate men and women about sexual health and birth control.68 For her fiftieth birthday in 1936 she was given a sum of money that had been raised as a gift from the Swedish people, which enabled her to buy a new, bigger car. However, only a few months after her birthday, Jensen crashed her new car and was hospitalized. The accident was revealed much later to be a suicide attempt.69 The fate of Jensen, who fortunately recovered, is a reminder not only of the opportunities of motorized power but also of the existential duality of the automobile—a vehicle of freedom, on the one hand, and a deadly force of self-destruction, on the other.70 While the “emancipist” use of automobiles in Sweden in the 1920s should not be exaggerated—trains and letters remained a simpler and cheaper means of communication within the women’s rights movement

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  151 at the time71—the effects and opportunities of automobility were not limited to such explicit political activism. The examples of women’s uses of motorized traveling had become quite diverse by the 1920s, featuring not only well-educated, upper-class women but a range of female automobilists, young and old, married and unmarried and of different backgrounds, driving for different reasons—for work, for fun and for sport. The automotive practices of this diverse group of women have rarely been characterized as “feminist” by the women themselves, and later scholarship focused on women’s rights from the perspectives of social reform, legal rights, education and employment. Yet Georgine Clarsen argues persuasively in this context that early female motorists did contribute to a wider political quest that extended the overt feminist campaign: their determination to redraft the everyday terms of femininity—such as women’s purported physical weakness and lack of coordination, their timidity and nervousness, their lack of mechanical aptitude or sense of direction—constitutes a different kind of politics and one that is rightfully situated within the history of feminist activism.72 From this perspective of challenging the limitations of femininity, one of the most conspicuous women in Sweden in the early twentieth century was the journalist Ester Blenda Nordström, born 1891, who set out on a motorcycle tour in 1914 in southern Sweden to collect observations of life in the countryside.73 Through her many subsequent, adventurous travels she went against a number of conventions and expectations regarding a woman’s place, not only in the area of journalism but also in the fields of motoring and explorative traveling.74 Such pioneering projects expanded the conceptual space of women’s mobility, both in terms of why and how they traveled as well as how far they were prepared to go. Driving Away—The Birth of the Road Trip One of the most mythologized car uses in Western culture is the road trip and its motorized promise of freedom and unmonitored adventures.75 However, because the execution of such travels has relied on the premise of independence, putting home and family literally in the rearview mirror, this kind of automobilized escape has tended to be cast as a masculine rather than universal endeavor.76 Women’s road trips have historically been charged with an even more radical message of rebellion, as these adventures have challenged longstanding associations of femininity with domesticity. By the 1920s, a growing number of enthusiastic female longdistance drivers across the world suggested that such journeys could also be seen as part of the emancipated “modern woman” narrative.77 In a Swedish early interwar context, several particular circumstances encouraged women to set out on their own adventurous drives. To begin

152  Changing Stories with, the idea of exploring one’s country, embraced particularly by the Swedish Tourist Association (Svenska Turistföreningen, STF), was founded in a Swedish tradition of patriotic nature romanticism.78 Though criticized in the countryside, in the 1920s the “stinking” automobile was increasingly being portrayed as in harmony with the nature-loving Swedish people: Cars embedded in beautiful nature sceneries could be found not only in the annals of STF, but also in auto advertisements.79 These national perspectives on the benefits of motorized traveling—enabling healthy, patriotic trips in the Swedish countryside—did not, in principle, exclude women. Advertisements contributed to an increasing visualization of female explorers on the road, enjoying their open-top car as well as the fresh countryside air. In combination with reports on women’s real-life initiatives to embark on long-distance motor expeditions, a new type of female mobility thus appeared to be in the making: modern and adventurous rather than cautious or suspicious.80 In 1926, the Swedish Tourist Association published an all-female travelogue, “Four Girls in a Car,” which related how a group of young women had successfully conducted a seven-week car trip to the north of Sweden and Norway. As related by one of these women, the adventure had started with them buying a little Fiat that had allowed them to explore the country as “true barons.”81 Even though skeptical remarks (“A  mad idea, and only women!”) had been made on their departure, the patriotic imperative to discover the country had by now created new opportunities for young women to travel on their own in unprecedented ways.82 Beyond such officially supported journeys, Swedish magazines also reported on women who seemed to have created a habit of taking long road trips for fun: As explained by a young woman in a motor journal in 1925, she and her sister simply liked to “load up their car” with lots of female friends whenever they could and head out for long drives. When asked about their record, she answered that they had travelled all over Norway the last summer, “driving a couple of thousand kilometers.”83 While such initiatives were generally limited to privileged women who had access to automobiles, the fact that they could conduct such trips with apparently little official critique indicate that a certain degree of automobilized freedom was at this time seen as modern rather than masculine. Paradoxically, the automobile was presented in Swedish media in the 1920s both as a problem (a symbol of the congested and stressful city) and a solution (a means of getting away from the city). From this urban perspective, the modern woman’s place tended to be associated, ideally, neither with traffic jams nor with the stale homestead but somewhere in between, on a motorized path to freedom and fresh air. As gender historians point out, the freedom of the road has, of course, never really been “free” beyond the language of advertising: Citing Janet Wolfe’s influential essay on mobility and gender, Deborah Clarke reminds us

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  153 that “the suggestion of free and equal mobility is itself a deception, since we don’t all have the same access to the road.”84 Not only does operating a vehicle cost money, as Clarke continues, but the who and the how of traveling also matters: “What one moves is a body—in particular a female body. The means through which women accomplish such a feat can spell the difference between reaching the journey’s end or being raped and/or murdered along the route.” Thus, considering, how “[t]he right or wrong car can make or break a road trip,” the aspect of reliability has mattered to female drivers in more than one way when on the road.85 Traveling in a group—“four girls in a car”—constituted one way of negotiating the road; another involved careful planning and finding appropriate hotels. However, as related in 1929 by a group of experienced female drivers, few hotels in Sweden met the needs of the weary automobilist in need of a garage, a bathroom and, preferably, a hot meal; the chances of getting either of these services were often slim, especially if one arrived late at night.86 Still, as one woman concluded, the hotel staff was usually friendly and generally did not “disrespect” the female automobilist traveling on her own.87 Disrespect, whether in terms of name-calling or worse, constituted a real problem for many women exploring their mobility in the interwar years. To female pedestrians in Stockholm—who were not “left alone” by insolent “gentlemen” stalking them in the streets (as reported by the magazine Charme in 1926)—the opportunity to travel by car was likely seen from the perspective of relief rather than risk.88 The automobile thus potentially represented many things at once—a means of getting away from home, a home away from home, an adventure and an unreliable piece of machinery that required a garage when one could not find one. The rising numbers of women on the road did not necessarily unsettle cultural expectations for women to be domestic and homebound. By the mid-1920s, Swedish media reported on a new American trend that presented the modern woman not as an adventurous road-tripper but as a devoted, though mobile, homemaker. This was the trend of motorized camping. As noted by one Swedish entertainment magazine in 1926, the American auto industry had worked hard to accommodate the needs of camping families, and now camping life had become amazingly well organized all across the US.89 However, for women, the amount of work required to execute such trips was considerable, as Virginia Scharff has discussed, in terms of planning, organizing, cooking and cleaning—tasks that men rarely needed to consider.90 By the mid-1920s, these different expectations for male and female campers could also be discerned in Swedish advertisements for camping gear: Addressing Sweden’s “motormen” in 1928, the department store NK characteristically depicted a woman on her knees cooking in the wild beside her adventurous but idle man.91 Thus, even though few Swedish families could afford going

154  Changing Stories on motorized camping trips at this time, the idea of such holidays was nevertheless becoming widespread in mainstream media.92 When Volvo, founded in 1927, explored ways to promote a spacious but affordable Swedish automobile, the camping trend thus provided an opportunity to associate their cars not only with comfortable traveling in general but also with healthy family holidays.93 As explained by Volvo’s magazine in a piece on modern camping in 1930, a Volvo station wagon was essentially a “ ‘convertible’ bed chamber,” perfect for modern campers.94 This family-orientated vision of motorized camping worked to restore some of the potentially unsettling effects that the modern woman, traveling solo or with her female friends, had introduced into the motif of the journey.95 However, the desires and practices of modernity’s “happy chauffeuses” continued to disturb more conservative observers of automobility, particularly in the field of motorsports, where speed-loving women in goggles fought men for prizes in automobile as well as motorcycle competitions in all seasons and weathers.

“Motor Amazons” and the Matter of Women in Competitions In the 1920s, the automobile symbolized not only modern progress and new technological wonders but also a new kind of sporting challenge that involved excitement as well as deadly risks on an unprecedented scale.96 Thrown in the mix were also female racecar drivers that raised the question of a woman’s place in a world that was led and dominated by men. However, due to the privileged nature of motoring (expensive automobiles were not for everyone), these concerns were limited in the beginning.97 Yet, for the less privileged, motorcycling was also an option, and, to the surprise of Swedish motorsport commentators in the 1920s, women could be seen exploring the powers of this vehicle, too.98 Meanwhile Swedish motor clubs organized new competitions that would boost public interest in motorized sports.99 To those who listened, the “roaring twenties” was roaring quite literally—at the racetrack, at the motorcycle velodrome and even in the woods, where automobiles and motorcycles competed on back roads in various kinds of long-distance endurance trials. These events also attracted women—not only as by-standers but also as drivers. The presence of women in motorsports raised a number of specific questions in Sweden at this time: Did women actually enjoy speed and risk? Should they be banned from the most challenging competitions? Should they have their own competitions? Because it was unclear exactly what motorsports measured—man or machine—the question of women behind the wheel also became connected to the ambiguous meaning of the body in motor racing. As Deborah Clarke writes in this context: “The automobile played a crucial role in shaping the modernist tensions

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  155 between the machine and the body; it both displaced and displayed the body, replacing some bodily functions yet demanding bodily skill.”100 Thus, even though the machine age seemed to “de-emphasize the power of the body,” bodies still mattered, particularly, as it turned out, female bodies.101 Qualities and capabilities commonly listed as crucial in motorsports included not only strength and stamina but also “nerves” and navigational skills. These qualities were discussed by the male leadership of Swedish motor clubs as both essential and masculine.102 As Clarke concludes, women who challenged this “male automotive dominance” thus ultimately challenged masculinity itself.103 “Almost Airborne”—Women in Pursuit of Speed The attraction of speed has recently been explored in a wide range of cultural studies, whether from the perspective of modernist literature or the theme of the crash in popular culture.104 As these studies suggest, high speeds seem to hold a special allure, whether related to “individuation and conquest,” as Jeffrey Schnapp writes, or sensations of difference: Speed as a way of inducing “a different mode of being,” as Paul Virilio writes (emphasis in the original), allowing the driver “to think of nothing, to feel nothing, to attain indifference.”105 Somewhat curiously, as Laura Doan has pointed out, these and other speed-related themes of empowerment and escape have rarely been discussed from the perspective of gender.106 Perhaps because femininity has historically been associated with passivity rather than mobility, the leatherclad female motorist—less glamorous than the imaginary chauffeuses of advertising—has tended to come across as odd rather than modern; a different being to begin with.107 However, as indicated by numerous interviews and articles in the Swedish early interwar years, women in motorsports consistently chafed against their exclusion from the experience of speed and, more specifically, racing. In this effort they were to some extent supported by the new visuality of mainstream media: Images of “modern women” enjoying fast cars and high speeds were common in Swedish print media in the 1920s, particularly in advertising but also in the context of motorsports.108 With regard to the early history of motorsports, it should be noted that competitions were not necessarily determined by speed; various types of “reliability trials” were even more common, where drivers had to complete a designated course in compliance with a set average speed.109 Bad roads and unreliable vehicles ensured that such competitions remained spectacular enough. In Sweden, one of the most grueling automobile competitions, established in 1906 by the Royal Automobile Club (Kungliga Automobil Klubben, K.A.K.), involved driving in the middle of the winter from Gothenburg to Stockholm (an estimated thirty-hour drive).110 In the 1920s the drivers who completed this challenge were

156  Changing Stories celebrated as heroes and occasionally as heroines (to be further discussed later). Whether women were tough enough for motoring was only one of many concerns that were raised at the time; another equally central issue focused on women’s boldness and “nerves,” especially in the context of speed racing. However, as argued by the magazine Charme in 1926, the performances of female drivers on the racetrack should have disproven any remaining doubts of their capacity: For a long time, the common opinion has been that record chasing by automobile is the kind of accomplishment that require firm hands and professional nerves of steel. The surprise, yes, the astonishment, was therefore quite widespread when some of our pluckiest sports ladies this year dared to join the game of racing competitions, and moreover, that these women completed the races with such gusto that they fought their way to the frontrunners, beating many male drivers.111 More specifically, Charme reported on two female drivers whose recent successful participation in a speed race had been regarded as a curiosity (skeptical male drivers had cast “sideway glances” at the women at the starting line). Yet, despite the fact that women had completed the race with excellent results, the reporter also noted how the women tried to downplay and even belittle their own achievements, claiming that the whole thing was “not as remarkable as people thought.”112 Such belittling was, on the one hand, in line with feminine ideals based on humility and modesty, but on the other hand, a downplaying of driving “challenges” can also be seen as part of a female strategy to normalize women’s presence in motorsports. As Charme had pointed out a few years earlier, motoring had contributed to a leveling of the playing field, since “physical achievements” no longer constituted the sole factor of winning.113 However, whether Swedish motor clubs would embrace this motorized promise of equality was still a question that was open for debate. In the early 1920s, Swedish media noted that young women did not seem to hesitate to sign up either for automobile or motorcycle competitions, including speed races. They were still few in number—typically a handful of female participants in a race of several dozens of men—but their presence was noted, both by organizers and the press. As a defender of the modern woman’s right to choose her pleasures, Charme related female participation in motorsports as part of a progress narrative of the modern woman who did not shy away from any challenge or sport.114 Charme’s defense of motoring women may, of course, seem surprising considering the magazine’s critique of the (too) masculine look of Swedish women behind the wheel, as discussed previously. Yet, this rhetorical duality was not unusual in women’s magazines at the time, committed on the one hand to defending the modern woman, while at the same

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  157 time trying to moderate her masculine tendencies. In the spring of 1926, Charme defended women in motorsports also on a more principal level, arguing that the love of speed should be seen as a human rather than male predilection: Every human being has something of a speed demon within her. Of all sensations available to present-day people, nothing can compare to the sensation of dizzying speed: To sit in a comfortable, powerful automobile, to sense its acceleration [. . .] to experience the amazing sensation of speed—mad speed.115 In this context of modernity and speed, Charme even defended female motorcyclists, such as the dedicated motorist Signe Andersson who was reported to have successfully driven her Indian motorcycle at the new 5,000-meter velodrome in Stockholm in 1924, negotiating the curves with “fine technique” and “unshakeable calm.”116 Two years later, Charme proudly reported that the remarkable Mrs. Andersson had recently beaten “several male competitors” in a motorcycle speed race.117 To further promote the modern motorsports woman, Charme featured a series of portraits of “Our Motoring Ladies,” which revealed that many women seemed to be quite passionate about driving fast. For instance, one young woman by the name of Miss Brusell explained that she had never before driven faster than ordinary “countryside road speeds,” but when she had reached the “breakneck speed of 131 kilometers per hour” in a race, she had found it “quite natural—and fun.”118 The fun of driving was again emphasized in an interview with experienced driver Inga Rüder, “a capable chauffeuse from Malmö,” who declared driving to be “the most wonderful thing,” especially when reaching high speeds, which made “all the little nuisances and problems of everyday life disappear.”119 Such portraits arguably contributed to a broadened understanding not only of what women could do but also what they enjoyed doing. However, the thrill of speed had already been established at this time as a cultural theme that explored motoring primarily in terms of the male racecar driver and his bold spirit, inspiring him to conquer the racetracks of the world.120 To what extent the modern woman embraced this spirit of conquest was uncertain, despite the testimonials of Charme’s “Motoring Ladies.” The following question remained: Should women engage in a sport defined by risk and speed at all? Concerns were voiced particularly in the context of motorcycling. In 1928, one male observer complained that it was difficult to identify female motorcycle drivers in their heavy leatherwear as women.121 His feeling that the motorcycle should be considered a “strictly masculine vehicle” was at the time shared by many:122 Due to the elements of hardship, dirt and danger, motorcycling was often described as an exceedingly demanding and thus “masculine” sport. When five women entered

158  Changing Stories a long-distance motorcycle competition in 1921 (see Figure 4.2), critical voices raised questions about whether women were really “made for such hard physical exertions.”123 However, in response to this skepticism, one of the female competitors, Alice Sabelfelt, argued that she and the other women had proven not only that they were physically capable but also that they shared the same passion for the sport as men: “Why shouldn’t we be inspired by the same sports feelings as male motorcyclists? To say that we can’t cope—isn’t this a way to underestimate us and exaggerate the effort?”124 The motor magazine Svensk Motortidning (The Swedish Motor Magazine) nevertheless remained unconvinced: “We cannot free ourselves from the belief that a woman is a woman and women’s sports should be adjusted accordingly.”125 Still, several female motorcycle

Figure 4.2  Ruth Ericson on her Henderson motorcycle in the competition Mälaren Runt (Around Lake Mälaren), 313  km, organized by the Swedish Motorcycle Club (S.M.C.K.) in 1921 Source: Photo: Unknown. Image courtesy of the Royal Automobile Club of Sweden. Reproduced by Tekniska museet from Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  159 enthusiasts insisted on joining competitions all across Sweden in the years that followed.126 Despite the male dominance in motorsports, motor journals did also occasionally take an interest in the phenomenon of female speed enthusiasts. In 1925, Svensk Motortidning featured a series of portraits of “Our Chauffeuses” that explored women’s experiences of driving and competing. Yet, while these interviewees characteristically celebrated the joy of speed and the freedom of the road, the question of professional racing turned out to be more complex. One young woman, Greta Berg, explained how she enjoyed the sensation of accelerating her car on a good road, which made her feel “almost airborne,” but when asked whether she perhaps wanted to join automobile races, she replied that she had never seriously considered any such attempt “to test her nerves” on the racetracks: “Some people have tried to encourage me to take up that vice. But it is said that women don’t belong there.”127 Moreover, though she wished she could have her own racecar, she had promised her father, as a condition for getting her own car, not to take part in any adventurous activities. In other words, in the case of young women, a privileged background and access to cars did not necessarily guarantee access to motorsports and automobile competitions. In contrast, another (older) “chauffeuse,” Mrs. Aina Sandberg explained that she was not only “caught up in the car craze” but that she particularly liked competing—and winning. In regard to the latter, she emphasized the importance of not being singled out as a woman: “The best thing of all is that I  never had to receive a ladies’ prize or some other kind of comfort-prize but instead got to share awards on equal terms with the masters of creation.”128 Equating prizes for women with “comfort prizes” reflects a hierarchical gender relationship, where women had to negotiate being subordinated to men, inside as well as outside of motorsports. To Aina Sandberg, winning a “ladies prize” was of considerably less value than an award won in a competition with men. This distinction also reveals why men would eventually become increasingly opposed to mixed-gender races (where women could potentially beat male drivers, as Charme had reported). If a woman, defined by her weaker nature, could win a challenging race, then this race could never be challenging enough for a man. Though lighthearted in tone, a male motorcycle commentator warned in 1921 that the womanliness of female motorcyclists would be threatened if they acquired those “male qualities” necessary for long, demanding competitions: “We like you to be, to a certain degree, weak and helpless, and we find it to be in accord with our male superiority to help you and protect you.”129 He concluded his argument by stating the obvious: “A woman who can sit on a motorcycle for a whole day does not need our help and protection.”130 While female motorists were thus routinely described as charming, adorable and plucky, men were described by Svensk Motortidning in

160  Changing Stories military terms, as “knights of the road” and as soldiers who fought lifeand-death battles on the racetracks.131 Even though one commentator in Svensk Motortidning admitted in 1929 that the achievements of the women of the Winter Reliability Competition had “turned on its head all previous scientific conceptions of the female psyche,” others tried to preserve at least boldness as an exclusively male quality.132 In a special report on “sports psychology,” the same magazine thus discussed how risk and danger effectively cleansed the sport of all “flimsiness” and how the professional driver was defined by “his heroic mindset” and “calm gaze.”133 Motorsports molded “men” as the article concluded with added emphasis, which effectively meant that the “heroic mind-set” (required for motorsports) was set up as an unimaginable female disposition.134 Women who sought out the same strenuous motor challenges as men were consequently described differently: As one female motorcyclist complained in 1921, women’s boldness and stamina tended to be described not as heroic but as “stubborn,” verging on foolhardy.135 Unlike the male driver, the female driver could not translate her passion for motorsports into commendable personal qualities. Women who insisted on exploring motor racing and the thrill of speed ultimately ran the risk of not being understood at all: If, as Mimi Sheller writes, “the car materializes personality and takes part in the ego-formation of the owner or driver as competent, powerful, able and sexually desirable,” the question is whether the female driver eventually would find herself not only in a masculine position but also in a queer one.136 After all, the purpose of a woman’s sexual “ego formation” was highly unclear, considering how female sexuality was discussed in terms of “coquetry” and “helplessness” rather than superiority and agency. Towards whom was she, the Motor Amazon, supposed to direct her “calm gaze”? And who would find her desirable? Though the respected, married upper-class female motorist was unlikely to have been associated with sexual “queerness,” the many comments regarding female drivers’ appearance and femininity nevertheless reflect an uneasiness around the competent woman behind the wheel. This uneasiness would later be explored in some depth in the Swedish novel Charlie (1932), tracing the fate of a tomboyish young woman intent on winning a Women’s Automobile Race in order to make an impression on the woman she has fallen in love with.137 At this time, the theme of driving and (lesbian) desire was also known from Radclyffe Hall’s British novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), featuring the female ambulance driver Stephen Gordon and her love for other women.138 Both novels highlight cultural anxieties that a woman’s agency, particularly conspicuous behind the wheel, was somehow connected to her sexuality. While this kind of explicit conceptual overlap between driving, female masculinity and homosexuality had rarely been articulated in Swedish popular media during the 1920s, rising cultural concerns can be discerned

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  161 at this time in connection with women’s presence in motorsports—a presence that was from the beginning conditioned on appropriate displays of heteronormative femininity. When the first women’s automobile competition in Sweden was organized in 1926 (as a reliability trial), the first reports thus covered in some detail not only the results of the competition but also the appearances of the drivers. The Women’s Automobile Competition When the Swedish Motor Club (Svenska Motorklubben) organized Sweden’s first women’s automobile race in the summer of 1926, fourteen women signed up: ten automobilists and four motorcyclists.139 The competition, a 700-kilometer reliability competition performed over two days, was afterwards reported to have been a great success, even though the organizers admitted that they had grossly underestimated the skills of the women: all but one completed the race penalty-free.140 While celebrated as a milestone, the Swedish Motor Club was not the first to come up with the idea of a Women’s Automobile Competition: At the famous Brooklands motor racing circuit, established in 1907 in the United Kingdom, two official women’s races were held before World War I, and after the war women participated at Brooklands in mixed as well as in women’s races.141 The number of Swedish women who participated in various (mixed) motor competitions had also been steadily rising during this period, from Alexandra Gjestvang’s participation in an automobile event in 1904 to the modern women of the 1920s who signed up for speed races as well as reliability competitions.142 To understand the impact of women’s presence in motorsports, it is important, as previous scholarship has pointed out, to understand the wider significance of automobile competitions at this time: Due to its technological components, motorsports was not merely seen as a sport but also, increasingly, as an integral part of the shaping of the modern nation. As sports historian Jean Williams writes, “mechanized sports came to stand for national fitness, for progress and a leading place in technocratic development.”143 Swedish motor enthusiasts were well aware of this international context, which created openings also for women to participate in the making of a national motorsports arena (see Figure 4.3). On the one hand, the establishment of the Women’s Automobile Competition worked to acknowledge the presence of female motorists in Swedish motorsports. At the same time, the competition also worked to highlight gender difference as much as driving skills. In a light-hearted summary of the premiere competition of 1926, published in the motor magazine Svensk Motorsport, the reporter noted jokingly to begin with how “real” skill tended to be seen as “male” but reassured readers that the driving skills of all women had been quite “real.”144 The reporter particularly noted how the female motorcyclist Signe Andersson, driving

Figure 4.3 Three chauffeuses (“Tre chaufföser i Göteborgarnas sommartävling. Överst t.v. Fru Jus; Därunder Fröken Fagerström; t.h. Fröken Signe Kassman”) Source: Photo: Unknown. Image courtesy of the Royal Automobile Club of Sweden. Reproduced by Kungliga biblioteket from Svensk Motortidning, July 15, 1927.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  163 the only motorcycle with a sidecar, had skillfully maneuvered her heavy vehicle and added that while “one would imagine” such a woman to be “big and hefty,” Mrs. Andersson had appeared “relatively slender.”145 Such reassurances of the slenderness of female motorists had been issued, as discussed by Julie Wosk, since the earliest days of motorsports: When British racecar driver Dorothy Levitt published a mechanical handbook for women in 1909, the editor found it best to underscore that Levitt was no “big, strapping Amazon” but rather “the most girlish of womanly women.”146 Almost two decades later, Svensk Motortidning’s reporter jokingly lamented that he was a motor critic and not a fashion reporter: Another driver in the 1926 competition, Eva Dickson, had appeared in a striking new outfit, involving a blue motor overall, a white “racing hat” and “scarlet red” shoes.147 Concluding that Dickson could be characterized as a woman who “lived to dress” but that she was also a woman “born to drive,” this motor critic utilized a theme that would recur many times, particularly in regard to Dickson, as I will come back to, celebrating both her fashion awareness and her motor skills.148 Beyond efforts to underscore the femininity of the female drivers, Svensk Motorsport also offered many glimpses of the women’s own motorsport experiences. In the 1926 competition, there were six “veterans” (who had competed before in mixed races) and eight debut racers. Among the veterans, one was particularly well-known, the “motor-boy” (motorpojken) Ester Lundqvist, who was reported to have lived up to her reputation in the competition, navigating her motorcycle skillfully on bumpy roads and through tricky curves.149 Lundqvist also frequently appeared in the score sections of the daily press at this time, which noted her motorcycle achievements in speed races as well as in reliability competitions. She was often commended for her driving skills with references to her male attitude, driving “like a real man,” which had also given her the nickname “the motor-boy from Flen.”150 Among the debutants, the young motorcyclist Dolores Lindhe was reported to have handled her machine surprisingly well, considering that she only had one year’s experience. On the other hand, as the reporter added, she was known to have commuted on her motorcycle from her home twenty kilometers outside of Stockholm to her work at a bank in the city every day, in all weather.151 Similar testimonies of women’s work-related driving habits in the press reveal that women who participated in motorsports at this time were not necessarily dependent on family and wealth—in some cases, their skills simply stemmed from commuting daily to work. In 1928 the Women’s Automobile Competition had become longer, 100 kilometers driven over three days.152 Co-organized by the Swedish Motor Club (SMK) and the popular magazine Bonniers Veckotidning, the event was now discussed as an established competition. Topics covered by Bonniers Veckotidning included map-reading tactics and mechanical advice as well as schedules and regulations. That women

164  Changing Stories could drive was no longer in doubt.153 The news of 1928 was instead that female navigators were allowed, which challenged the stereotype of lost and confused women on the road. Thus, even though jokes in the press continued to target women as hopeless motorists, the introduction of female map-readers in the Women’s Automobile Competition also shows that initiatives were taken to expand female participation more broadly in motorsports.154 Ultimately, the impact of the Women’s Automobile Competition was ambiguous: On the one hand, the event strengthened women’s visibility and presence in motorsports—the competition was organized yearly until 1937 when interest was deemed to have declined too much.155 At the same time, the competition itself did not necessarily change the fundamental gender hierarchies within motorsports: A continued focus on dress and appearances as well as an exoticizing rhetoric of “Amazons,” ensured that women’s gender rather than motor skills continued to be highlighted. When Ven Nyberg, one of the rare female motor critics in the 1920s who followed a number of competitions closely, usually from one of the cars, predicted in 1926 that the Women’s Automobile Competition would become a “permanent institution,” she also expressed her hope that women would still be welcomed to the men’s competitions in a joint arena of motorsports.156 However, the latter matter of joint or mixed events turned out to be increasingly controversial, particularly in the context of winter competitions. The Women of the Winter Competitions The Royal Automobile Club’s (K.A.K.) yearly winter competition between Gothenburg and Stockholm, established in 1906, functioned as an important propaganda event that was intended to prove that it was possible to use automobiles in Sweden in the wintertime. However, the competition was considered a fierce test not only of the reliability and quality of the participating cars but also of the endurance and skills of the drivers.157 By competing in the middle of the winter in freezing February temperatures, the race had an “aura of a manhood test” about it: The drivers had to drive 1,000 kilometers on bad winter roads (in open-top cars) with a stipulated average speed of 50 km/h.158 Eva Bäärnhielm, the first female participant who successfully completed the Winter Competitions of 1913, had been celebrated in the press as a remarkable female pioneer whose achievement had been reported as far away as Japan.159 More than a decade later, when “three plucky ladies” decided in 1927 to repeat Bäärnhielm’s pioneering feat, the magazine Svensk Motortidning declared that the three women, Eva Dickson, Ebba Cassel and Ingrid Lindau, were worthy of “a respectful salute.”160 After the race, detailed assessments were written in the same motor magazine covering both the race and the women’s performance in it.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  165 To begin with, Svensk Motortidning applauded all three “Amazons with Powder Puffs” for having surprisingly (“mirabile dictu”) completed the trial.161 However, even though the female participation was recognized as a new “milestone” in the history of automobile competitions, the reporter at the same time made this milestone less threatening, first, by noting how the competition of 1927 hadn’t been “so remarkable” and less difficult than expected, and, second, by focusing on the women’s appearances rather than driving skills.162 Noting particularly that Eva Dickson had brought along a powder puff, and how “small” and “charming” all of the three “Amazons” had appeared in their chauffer’s outfits, Svensk Motortidning underscored how these female drivers had, in fact, appeared as the opposite of Amazon-like: “One could hardly imagine anything nicer,” as the conclusion went, “than the sight of a small woman in a chauffeurs outfit and a helmet and those small, firm hands on the steering wheel.”163 That the women’s femininity had been unscathed by their motorized winter trial was also confirmed at the grand dinner party, where all women were reported to have successfully moved from “motor world” (motorvärlden) to “fashion salon” (salongsvärlden), particularly the “small, slender” Eva Dickson who looked like “anything but a sportswoman.”164 When interviewed, Dickson concluded that the greatest challenge to overcome had been her own doubts before the start, as people had looked at her with disbelief, making her feel “lightweight.”165 Her comment reveals how external expectations could easily create internal doubts, and, more generally, how women in motorsports at this time were faced with the same fundamental challenges as women in other sports: combining an appropriate feminine appearance (defined by Svensk Motortidning in terms of “smallness”) with the strength and stamina required by the sport of their choosing. When asked about the future of women’s participation in automobile racing, the three women of the 1927 Winter Trials reached somewhat different conclusions: while Lindau and Dickson argued that the recent trials had proven that women could compete against men even in winter competitions, Cassel concluded that this kind of automobile racing was ultimately a “man’s job.”166 As it turned out, Svensk Motortidning would side with Cassel’s conclusion, even though all three women received praise for their recent achievements.167 When planning the next major winter competition, a race around Lake Vänern set to take place in November of 1927, the organizers decided to bar women from entering. As noted by Svensk Motortidning, the Royal Automobile Club had decided that this race would be “too strenuous” for ladies.168 Unlike the previous “not so remarkable” Winter Reliability Competition, the Lake Vänern Competition was afterwards characterized as an “extreme trial of strength.”169 The decision to bar women from the race was described as fortunate and wise: “With all due deference to the ladies, who certainly are agile and have strong

166  Changing Stories hands, it was more sensible to let them stay at home this time. This was a real man’s job.”170 Surprisingly, women were still allowed to compete in the prestigious Stockholm-Gothenburg winter competition, but when three women again signed up for the race in 1929, the issue of female participation in winter competitions reappeared as a topic of discussion in Swedish motorsports journals. The three new female winter drivers of 1929, Dolly Paulitz, Ingeborg Stille and Signe Kassman, were later joined by a fourth, the increasingly famous Eva Dickson, whose style and looks had made an impression on male reporters two years earlier.171 At this time, experts and commentators were better prepared with arguments, both for and against female participants. While the women’s magazine Idun decided to create a special honorary prize for the most worthy female competitor, others expressed their doubts: As one commentator wrote in the morning paper Svenska Dagbladet, the four women would surely finish the trial, but they were still in many ways less capable than men—“physically weaker, not as experienced, not able to react in a split second in a critical situation, [. . .] and lacking, moreover, the imagination characterizing male masters behind the wheel.”172 After the competition, which all four women finished, the motor journal Svensk Motortidning published a critical objection to mixed races, written by the former secretary-general of the Royal Automobile Club, Erland Bratt.173 Bratt questioned whether women should participate at all in the Winter Reliability Competition since their presence would completely nullify the challenge: “The purpose of these competitions is to push the drivers to the edge of their capabilities, but if a woman can endure them, than these competitions should resign the title of being the toughest in Scandinavia.”174 The objection was characteristically grounded in concerns with the status of a male arena intended to measure the achievements of men. Somewhat paradoxically, the most extraordinary achievement in the Winter Competition of 1929 was recognized by many, including Svensk Motortidning, as having been performed not by a man, but by a woman, Dolly Paulitz, who had not arrived in Stockholm until Monday morning, after several mechanical breakdowns and almost fifty hours of driving. In one interview, Paulitz described how the last night had been the worst, as the temperature had dropped to −18 oC. Yet, she had never thought of giving up—not even when she was offered to stay at a baron’s estate. As concluded by Svensk Motortidning, Paulitz had shown an “exceptional feat of strength.”175 In the following days, much attention was given in print media to the female winter drivers, particularly Paulitz and her marathon drive.176 However, Idun’s special honorary prize was awarded Eva Dickson, who appeared on the cover of Idun’s March issue in a fashionable evening gown. While Dickson was subsequently praised not only for her driving but also for her feminine appearance and charming

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  167 attitude in the daily press, Paulitz was soon targeted, though not by Idun, for having the wrong attitude toward motoring.177 The critique directed against Paulitz was expressed in Svensk Motortidning by the influential columnist Bratt, who claimed that one of the women in the Winter Competition had confessed that she had failed to prepare her car properly and instead “enjoyed” watching her male mechanic at work during the recent competition.178 By Bratt’s conclusion, women were ill prepared to face the difficulties of winter driving and relied instead on luck and male mechanics. The woman (not named by Bratt) was Dolly Paulitz, who decided to step forward in Svensk Motortidning and counter the accusations. To begin with, Paulitz humbly “admitted” that she had only participated in eight races. However, as she also pointed out, she did have more experience than those who had never competed, a group to which Bratt himself belonged.179 Considering moreover that all four women had completed the race, while some of the “invincible men” had not, Paulitz declared that “[i]t is true that women do not know how to tune up a car, but—believe it or not—most of the men don’t know how to do this either!”180 Having carried out an “extensive investigation” in the matter, she concluded that no more than one fourth of the men in the competition knew how to repair their own car.181 Skilled or not, according to Paulitz’s findings, most men let their mechanics deal with repairs during the competition, which was “the point of bringing along a mechanic in any case.”182 In his reply, Bratt made clear that Paulitz’s experiences on the road weighed little against his twenty years of experience of judging automobile races.183 As indicated by the continuation of this debate, leading motormen were not used to women’s “extensive investigations” into men’s motor skills. In support of Bratt, the chairman of Stockholm’s Automobile and Motorcycle Club (Automobil- och motorcykelklubben i Stockholm), Patrick Welin, accused Paulitz for having attacked the honor of all Swedish male drivers and ultimately dismissed her as a “tourist” on the road and “a bad loser.”184 The proposition that a fondness for “tinkering” was not a gendered (masculine) quality was arguably not only a controversial one but also one that struck at the core of a long-standing “fraternity in overalls.”185 Turning the investigatory gaze to the construction of masculinity (rather than “womanhood” and femininity), Paulitz’s investigation offered a reversed perspective on gender in motoring. In effect, Paulitz had added a twist to the debate on women’s poor mechanical skills: Approaching the entire issue as a matter of choice, she did not try to incorporate automotive mechanics into femininity but, rather, she disengaged it from masculinity. The concerns expressed in Svensk Motortidning are typical for the next phase of objections to women in motorsports: Because women admittedly had shown that they could drive, even in tough conditions, critics now

168  Changing Stories turned their attention to specific skills believed to be difficult for women to develop. Most commonly, these skills and capabilities involved, as we have seen, the question of “nerves” (negotiating speed and risk), navigation (reading maps), endurance (pushing on for days in freezing temperatures) and mechanics (dealing with engines). However, the habit of contrasting a tool-orientated, ingenuity-based masculinity with a delicate, helpless femininity was challenged also in other automobile contexts in Sweden at this time. Driving schools, for instance, required all students to acquire some basic familiarity with the car’s engine, oil system, fuel and tires. While this demand was brought on by the poor conditions of roads and vehicles rather than considerations of gender equality, the experience of tinkering “with all those cogs, screws, sparking plugs and valves,” did appear to have positively affected women’s confidence and expectations in this area.186 As one (anonymous) woman concluded when relating in 1928 her experiences as an apprentice in an auto repair shop, she “was no longer hopelessly convinced that mechanical matters were irreconcilable with the feminine brain.”187 Even if only on a small scale, such stories provided an alternative image to satirical cartoons that ridiculed the “mechanically mindless” woman.188 Still, women who were seen as either overly interested in mechanics or not interested enough exposed themselves to accusations of being either unfeminine or incompetent. Ultimately, very few women in the interwar period succeeded in being respected as both women and drivers, and the option to pursue a professional motor career on equal terms with men generally remained unavailable. However, some nevertheless persisted. Motor Eve and the Motor Boy At the age of twenty-two, the “Heroine of the Winter Competition,” Eva Dickson, was celebrated as something of a new female motoring star: In 1927 Svensk Motortidning featured a five-page narrative that praised her driving skills as well as her femininity—“despite her manly spirit, she had not forgotten her powder whip.”189 Dickson later embarked on adventurous driving tours through Africa and the Middle East and acquired a pilot’s license, and she became part of a new Western culture of stardom surrounding female adventurers who raced their cars across continents and challenged the skies as bold aviatrixes.190 Like other famous European and American female motorists, Dickson created a glamorous persona that relied on a mixture of charm (perceived as “feminine”) and skills (perceived as “masculine”)—a delightful but competent “Motor Eve” (Motoreva).191 As revealed by her own writings, Dickson was intent on presenting the will and ability to drive as an essential part of her self-representation as a fashionable, modern woman.192 In her autobiographical travelogue, En Eva i Sahara (An Eve in the Sahara) published in 1933, Dickson related how she had come up with the idea to cross the

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  169 Sahara Desert in a conversation with a male friend who had questioned the capacities of modern women: “What does she do, the woman of today? She paints her nails red, she bleaches her hair, she drinks champagne or cocktails or smokes cigarettes until her fingertips are brown from nicotine. She does not even have children anymore. Look at you, Madame, what good are you?” “I can drive!”193 As the story went, in this conversation Dickson was inspired to wager that she was not just any driver: As an experienced motorist, she bet that she could cross the Sahara Desert by car. Following some preparations and two months of driving, Dickson successfully completed her task and won the bet. Accompanied by her male assistant from Nairobi, characteristically exoticized and belittled as the “negro boy” in the Swedish press, upon her return to Stockholm Dickson was celebrated as a heroine.194 However, like many of her adventurous sisters abroad, Dickson tended to downplay the challenges she had undoubtedly encountered: fatigue, solitude, hunger, disbelief and frequent mechanical failures.195 These were all aspects of long-distance motor journeys that signified not only adventure but also a rough masculinity that women had to approach with caution. Female motorized adventurers needed to shape a modern femininity that was structured not around fragility, technical incompetence and domesticity but around courage, ambition and path-breaking journeys, while at the same time avoiding the accusation that they were turning into men.196 To Dickson, the image of the modern woman was crucial: Even though portraits of the childless, champagne-drinking “woman of today” were often satirical in nature, such characterizations also relied on the wider narrative of increasing female independence and choice. Translating modern choice into mobility, Dickson conveyed her own lifestyle simply as a natural and fun aspect of modern womanhood—driving (and flying) towards new horizons. Dickson’s adventurous life ended violently in 1938 at the age of thirtythree in a car crash outside of Bagdad. As an ultimate recognition of her achievements, one of the many obituaries stated that several of her feats had been of “the highest masculine rank.”197 In a rare case of female recognition in the world of motorized adventures, Dickson had succeeded in achieving this rank while still being celebrated as a woman. However, while lauded as a bold motor star in the interwar period, Eva Dickson’s posthumous legacy quickly faded with time, both in the annals of motoring and in women’s histories. This type of historical amnesia seems to have affected most female motorists from this era, including the successful “Motor Boy from Flen,” Ester Lundqvist, who appeared frequently in print media in the 1920s. Photographs of Lundqvist usually showed her seated on her motorcycle in the context of a race, heavily

170  Changing Stories dressed in leatherwear, an image that contrasted that of Eva Dickson’s fashionable femininity, which fit with ideas of the modern woman—selfconfident yet self-aware of the male gaze. In contrast, Lundqvist was rarely interviewed and remained fairly anonymous, even though she competed frequently and successfully. However, in 1926, after her recent penalty-free finish in the Women’s Automobile Competition, she appeared in a rare motorcycle advertisement in the motorsport magazine Svensk Motor-sport, featuring a drawing of Lundqvist seated on her motorcycle, praising her vehicle’s “extraordinary driving position and phenomenal engine.”198 The use of a woman’s opinion to promote such technical qualities was highly unusual at the time, but Lundqvist’s credibility in this context was enforced by her decidedly non-feminine gender—as the “Motor Boy from Flen,” stern-looking and short-haired, she was hardly considered a woman at all. Yet, despite their differences, Lundqvist and Dickson shared one fate of pioneering female motorists: the lack of influence and the denial of legacy. The pattern is familiar within the history of women’s sports in general: The (masculine) ideal that scorned “flimsiness” created an impossible dilemma for the motor-interested woman: She could only be respected as a woman if perceived as preserving her femininity (bringing along her “powder puff” when driving), but she could only be respected as a driver if rejecting such feminine attributes. However, the fact that neither Dickson, the celebrated “Motor Eve,” nor Lundqvist, the “Motor Boy,” was later canonized in the annals of motorsports reflects how this sport was ultimately configured not just as a masculine but as a male arena. In this context, it is important to remember how women from the beginning were sidelined in the organizational structures of motor clubs. The significance of influence was recognized in 1921 by one of the female participants in the motorcycle race of that year, Cissi Schultz: Emphasizing that she was “not terribly political,” she argued that women should be allowed to participate not only in competitions but also in the organizing and rule-making of the sport. By Schultz’s argument, a stronger female organizational influence would in time increase female participation.199 Without this influence (which did not increase), the only recourse left was the plea. As exclaimed by motorcyclist Alice Sabelfelt in Svensk Motortidning in 1921, “Please allow us to participate and compete—it is so immensely fun!”200 However, even though early female motorists were somewhat cautious in the context of the feminist debate, they were in many ways feminists in practice, as they refused to be confined by traditional ideals of femininity.201 Looking back, one former female driver, who had competed in the 1920s herself, fondly recalled the friendship as well as the tough competition of the other female participants. This was Dolly Paulitz, who dared to challenge two of Sweden’s leading motormen to a debate in 1929. In retrospect, twenty years later, Paulitz did not forget to mention Ester Lundqvist, whom she remembered as “the motor girl from Flen.”202 Paulitz’s gendered re-labeling of Lundqvist can be seen as a quiet

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  171 attempt to expand the meaning of femininity in such a way that even a devoted female motorcyclist in leatherwear could be included. Paulitz’s brief memories were published in a new history of Sweden’s motor clubs, which included a collection of photographs of the pioneering female drivers of the 1920s, including Dickson, Lundqvist and Paulitz herself, grouped together as “Some successful women drivers.”203

Concluding Remarks By the 1920s the automobile was construed in Swedish popular media less as an eccentricity and more as a symbol of modernity and the nation’s rapid Americanization, as epitomized by the modern woman behind the wheel. At the same time, the many stories of modernity’s new “chauffeuses” driving in the city, competing, or conducting road trips across the country raised anxieties concerning the boundaries of femininity. While some were convinced that “cars and coquetry” were perfectly compatible, others remained skeptical, particularly in the context of motorsports and racecar driving. Swedish popular media produced conflicted images of the modern woman and her automobility, battling stereotypes while also invoking them: On the one hand, female racecar drivers were celebrated as pioneers, but at the same time detailed recommendations for “correct motor elegance” invoked a gendered materiality of driving that worked to remind the female motorist that she needed to consider style as much as skill. Sweden was, in this context, depicted as both advanced and behind: As remarked by the fashion magazine Charme, Stockholm’s confident chauffeuses were certainly skilled, but in matters of style they should look to their less sporty and more feminine American sisters. On the other hand, Charme also defended a new generation of Swedish female motorcyclists who set out to break new records, beating their male competitors.204 The gendered status of motoring was negotiated across a range of popular Swedish magazines, visually as well as textually: By auto advertisements and commercial imagery that suggested that driving was now modern more than masculine, by an accompanying rhetoric that reinstated gender by associating the small, easy, comfortable and lightweight with femininity, and by examples of individual women who defied such associations and signed up for the most extreme winter competitions. Thus, while cartoons in the daily presses continued to depict hopeless female drivers, wreaking havoc in the city, photographs of female winter drivers suggested, in contrast, that women’s motor capabilities were limitless. Meanwhile, motor magazines supported the modern woman behind the wheel through various “chauffeuse” portraits but questioned whether women should participate in the most demanding motor competitions. The initiative by the Swedish Motor Club (Svenska Motorklubben) to start a Women’s Automobile Competition in 1926 brought further attention to women in motorsports, but the competition also created an

172  Changing Stories arena where female motorists could be safely feminized (now prevented from beating men). The Women’s Automobile Competition nevertheless marked the height of a remarkable period of expansion of female participation in motorsports in Sweden, when the best female drivers were celebrated as glamorous “Motor Amazons.” This period of expansion was reinforced by a sense of international competition: Reporting from automobile shows and racetracks across the world, the Swedish press contributed to a progress narrative of modernity that was measured not only by statistics, counting automobiles, but also by achievements, performed by men as well as women. However, by the early 1930s, women’s place in motoring and motorsports was already shifting to the sidelines, as women were left outside of organizational influence as well as cultural memory. By now, the story of the modern chauffeuse, loading up her friends in her automobile for yet another motorized adventure, had been joined and challenged by visions of motorized family camping trips and a more domesticized way of being mobile.

Notes 1 Interview with Dagny Falk-Simon in “Våra Chaufföser,” Svensk Motortidning, February  22, 1925, 6. “Hur känns det att sitta vid ratten? Å, det är härligt . . . härligt . . . bara man får köra fort!” 2 On cultural representations of the modern woman behind the wheel in the interwar period, see Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Deborah Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Georgine Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 3 As related in interviews in Swedish popular media at the time (to be further examined throughout this chapter). 4 Interview with Dagny Falk-Simon in “Våra chaufföser,” Svensk Motortidning, February 22, 1925, 6. 5 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 111. 6 Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 12. 7 On this debate I  have particularly looked at concerns raised in the motor magazines Svensk Motortidning (The Swedish Motor Magazine), which was the official periodical of The Royal Automobile Club (Kungliga Automobil Klubben [KAK]), and Svensk Motorsport, the official periodical of Svenska Motorklubben (The Swedish Motorclub). 8 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 112. 9 Though several Swedish studies are available that outline the history of automobility in Sweden (see note 12), a substantive gender perspective in this context has been missing. As Helena Tolvhed notes, academic research has been particularly scarce with regard to women’s participation in racing and motorsports, with the notable British exception of Jean William’s study on female racecar drivers in the context of the Brooklands motor circuit. Helena Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920– 1990 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2015), 136; Jean Williams, A Contemporary

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  173 History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960 (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), 91–117. In the Swedish context, a few early female motorists are mentioned in histories of Swedish motor clubs. See, for instance, Helena Egerlid and Jens Fellke, I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903–2013 (Vimmerby; Stockholm: Effect Reklambyrå; Kungl. automobilklubben (KAK), 2013); Gösta Fallstedt-Lindholm, ed., SMCK— SMK: Svenska motor klubben 1913–1948—en återblick på de gångna 35 åren (Stockholm: Igo-förl., 1949). On women in motorsports later in the twentieth century, see Helena Tolvhed’s study of Swedish rally pioneer Ewy Rosqvist, active in the 1960s. Tolvhed, På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990, 128–69. 10 Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 9. Still, as Clarsen also points out, female motorists “have been neglected until very recently in both automobile histories and in histories of women.” Ibid., 34. 11 Laura Doan, “Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War,” Women: A Cultural Review 17, no. 1 (2006): 38. As Mimi Sheller concludes in this context, “cars are above all machines that move people, but they do so in many senses of the word.” Mimi Sheller, “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car,” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 4/5 (2004): 221. 12 Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren, Drömmen om bilen (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1996), 14; Rune Andréasson, Sven Gerentz, and Jonas Gawell, Bilismens genombrottsår i Sverige: om nätverken, aktörerna och spelet mellan organisationerna, företagen och myndigheterna (Uppsala: Uppsala Publishing House, 1997), 24. In contrast, mass-automobility was a growing reality in the US as early as the 1910s and 1920s, which prompted discussions in Sweden on the future of automobility. See, for instance, James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); Olle Hagman, Bilen, naturen och det moderna: om natursynens omvandlingar i det svenska bilsamhället (Stockholm: Kommunikationsforskningsberedningen (KFB); Göteborgs universitet, 2000), 30–31. On the historical phases of automobility internationally, from experimentation to mass-production, see Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry, Automobilities (London: Sage, 2005). On Swedish automobile history, see also Gert Ekström, Svenskarna och deras automobiler (Hudiksvall: Winberg, 1983); Olle Hagman, “Bilens århundrade,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Stockholm: Signum, 2009); Per-Börje Elg, Bilens århundrade: design, historik & nostalgi (Stockholm: Forum, 2005). On early Swedish motorsport and lobby organizations, see also Pär Blomkvist, Den goda vägens vänner: väg- och billobbyn och framväxten av det svenska bilsamhället 1914–1959 (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2001); Egerlid and Fellke, I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903–2013. 13 “Bilarnas utrotande av häståkdon berättad i siffror,” Svensk Motorsport, December  15, 1926, 541. “den våldsamma utvecklingen som automobiltrafiken genomgått på bara några få år.” The number of automobiles rose quickly in Sweden in the 1920s, from about 7000 in 1920 to more than 100,000 ten years later. Elg, Bilens århundrade: design, historik & nostalgi, 34. While these numbers may not impress contemporary urban commuters, the statistics (and consequences) of automobility was frequently discussed at the time (see, for instance, “Snart 100, 000 bilar i Sverige,” Svensk Motorsport, December 15, 1926, 548). 14 “Krönika som denna vecka handlar om samhällets automobilisering,” Bonniers Veckotidning, October 31, 1926, 13. “utvecklingen har gått med en sådan hastighet, att vi hava svårt att följa med, trots att vi vistas mitt i brännpunkten.”

174  Changing Stories 15 “Hur det går till att få körkort,” Stockholms-Tidningen, April  15, 1928. “Frapperande stort är de kvinnliga elevernas antal. Kanske förmågan att köra bil tillhör ‘Det’.” 16 “Krönika som denna vecka handlar om samhällets automobilisering,” Bonniers Veckotidning, October 31, 1926, 13. Motorized traffic problems were new and dramatic in the first decades of the twentieth century, including the deadly effects of alcohol intake and driving (see e.g. “Förnuftiga motorförare,” Tidevarvet, March 29, 1930, 3). Swedish commentators also debated congestion problems and the need for better traffic regulations (e.g. “Motortrafikens problem,” Svensk Motortidning, June 30, 1928, 696). Meanwhile, the sport sections of the daily presses reported frequently from exciting motorsports events, both abroad and in Sweden. 17 E.g. “Bilsport och koketteri,” Bonniers Veckotidning, December 5, 1926, 41. On the internationally widespread image of the glamorous woman at the wheel in the 1920s, see also Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 120; Laura L. Behling, “ ‘The Woman at the Wheel’: Marketing Ideal Womanhood, 1915–1934,” Journal of American Culture 20, no. 3 (1997); Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 135–64. 18 Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 24. 19 Ibid., 159. The example of Australia provides yet another context, as Clarsen shows, where women’s transcontinental journeys “were given meaning within the project of creating a modern, unified nation” (p. 140). 20 In 1928, Dodge still referred to the “aristocratic” style of their cars (Bonniers Veckotidning, April 22, 1928), whereas Ford often referred to reliability and affordability (e.g. advertisements in Veckojournalen, August 5, 1928; Idun, April 14, 1929). As noted by the motor magazine Svensk Motorsport, 85% of the Swedish car fleet was at this time American in origin; “Snart 100, 000 bilar i Sverige,” Svensk Motorsport, December 15, 1926, 548. 21 As Bonniers Veckotidning declared in 1928: “Democracy, in its personalized version, is now marching on at a speed of at least 45 kilometers” (Demokratien, den personliga, är på marsch med minst 45 kilometers fart.). “När damerna föra bil,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 5, 1928, 19. 22 “Statistik om bil,” Veckojournalen, May 20, 1928, 48. 23 Hagman, Bilen, naturen och det moderna: om natursynens omvandlingar i det svenska bilsamhället, 34, 54. The proportion of motorcycles in the Swedish fleet of motor vehicles at this time was substantial: In 1928, there were 49,603 motorcycles and 117,263 automobiles in Sweden. Ekström, Svenskarna och deras automobiler, 63. As noted by the Swedish motorcycle magazine Med motorcykel in 1923, technological quality improvements had enabled the use of motorcycles to shift from sport to transport. “Tio år,” Med motorcykel, March 1923, 80. 24 Such hopes and concerns could very well be expressed by one and the same commentator. See e.g. “När damerna föra bil,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 5, 1928, 19. 25 Henrik Cavling and Erik Sjöstedt, Paris (Stockholm: Silén, 1900), 216. “Automobilen är på modet, och liksom så många franska moder har också denna tills vidare karaktären av galenskap. Adliga damer, klädda till bal eller operan, fara genom folkvimlet på en inrättning, som liknar en surrande kaffepanna och injagar skräck hos alla lefvande varelser. Visserligen måste alla, som styra automobilen, aflägga ett prof, innan de få tillstånd att föra den, men herrar examinatorer äro visst lite för raska att gifva vackra damer laudatur.” 26 “Där Parisiskan väljer sin bil,” Charme, November 15, 1926, 14–15. Beyond the glamour of auto shows, the skepticism towards automobiles in the 1920s

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  175 tended to be strong in the Swedish countryside, where automobiles were seen as luxury products that disturbed horses and livestock. See Gert Ekström and Per-Börje Elg, Stinke-stånka och hatobjekt: svenskarna och deras bilar (Hudiksvall: Winberg Citybook, 2005); Vendela Heurgren, “När bilen drabbade landsbygden,” in Drömmen om bilen, eds. Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren (Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1996), 54–69. 27 “Kvinnor vid ratten,” Idun, February 13, 1921, 164. 28 As Virginia Scharff writes in this context, “The prospect of unleashing women on the American landscape deeply disturbed many observers, who worried that mobile women would be beyond control, socially, spatially, sexually.” Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 166. 29 Ibid., 35–50. The qualities of the electric car, such as its cleanliness and comfortable interior, were viewed as consistent with a delicate (bourgeoisie) femininity, as Scharff shows, whereas the qualities of the gasoline car—powerful, robust, mechanically challenging and geared for high speeds as well as long distances—were marketed towards men. However, as Scharff concludes, female nonconformity in this context both challenged and changed autoindustrial expectations: “When women refused to conform to expectations, when new technologies unsettled traditional assumptions, when entrepreneurs defied common wisdom in search for profits, change accelerated.” (p. 40). 30 Hagman, “Bilens århundrade,” 371. 31 Interview with M.D. Carolina Eskelin in Svensk Motortidning, April  12, 1925, 11. For the second reference, see Elisabeth Thiel, “Bilminnen,” Hertha, April 1929, 84: “Ska nu käringar köra också!” 32 Interview with Greta Berg in “Långkörningar är det roligaste på landet,” Svensk Motortidning, November 22, 1925, 538. “Kvinnan vid ratten . . . hon väcker ingen uppmärksamhet i våra dagar. Annat var det på den tiden, då jag började köra [. . .] När jag kom med bilen på landsvägarna, så tittade folket efter mig och tyckte, att det var ett egendomligt fall.” 33 Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 120. 34 E.g. Charme’s July summer issue of 1926 (no. 13) and Svensk Motortidning, January 30, 1926. It was not uncommon for entertainment magazines to produce special “motor issues” (see, for instance, Veckojournalen’s Motornummer, May 20, 1928, which, incidentally, featured a female driver on its cover). 35 “Kvinnan och bilen,” Idun, November 18, 1923, 1091. “Det finns väl knappast någon modern dam, som inte anser bilåkning, som det roligaste, hon vet och allt flera damer lära sig numera själva köra bil—ibland sin egen, oftare sin makes.” 36 “Stockholmskan bättrar sig,” Charme, Midsummer Issue, no. 12, 1926, 14–15. “det var lika sällsynta som äventyrliga tillfällen i hennes liv om hon någon gång fick följa med maken ut på restaurang.” A drawing of a woman in a sports car accompanied this article. 37 “Statistik om bil,” Veckojournalen, May 20, 1928, 48, “Glada chaufföser,” Veckojournalen, May 20, 1928, 33. In fact, as early as 1914 this particular magazine had claimed that driving was now a “common thing” in Sweden and that more and more people learned to drive, including women; “Kvinnliga bilister,” Veckojournalen, June 21, 1914, 614. 38 Margit Rosengren, “En skådespelerska vid ratten,” Bonniers Veckotidning, May 6, 1928, 36. “fruntimmer ska inte köra bil” 39 “Damer och bilar,” Bonniers Veckotidning, July  8, 1928, 25. Cartoons on this theme appeared in the daily presses, in satire magazines (e.g. Söndagsnisse-Strix) and also in motor magazines (e.g. Svensk Motortidning). 40 Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 127–28.

176  Changing Stories 41 “Hur det går till att få körkort,” Stockholms-Tidningen, April  15, 1928. “Om någon skola är fri från social åtskillnad, klass- och könshänsyn, så är det bilskolan. När de komma till bilskolan, så äro de alla lika dumma och oerfarna.” On driving schools in Stockholm and their support of female drivers, see also “Kvinnor vid ratten,” Idun, February 13, 1921, 164. While protests against gender stereotyping in automobility were outnumbered by cartoons that illustrated such stereotyping, protests were also occasionally published: For instance, an anonymous female motorist wrote in 1928 to Svensk Motortidning and objected to the insulting prejudice and satire that continued to belittle female drivers, in Sweden as well as in other countries. “Chauffösen har ordet,” Svensk Motortidning, June 30, 1928, 722. 42 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 23. 43 “När damerna föra bil,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August  5, 1928, 19. “Betecknande är också att medan så många andra ting äro indelade i hanoch honkön—det finns ju herr- och damparaplyer, herr- och damklockor, ja, till och med herr- och damrakhyvlar—så finns det bara ett kön på bilen.” 44 “Deras önskningar mötas,” Bonniers Veckotidning, July  31, 1927. “Han önskar en välkonstruerad, kraftig och praktisk bil till ett överkomligt pris. Hon vill ha en verkligt flott vagn, som det är en tjusning att äga.” However, few families could afford to buy two cars at this time (one for the husband and one for the wife), but as emphasized in this ad, Auburn had succeeded in “uniting their desires,” as illustrated by a man and woman united in a passionate embrace. As Virginia Scharff and others have shown, early auto advertising reflected an auto industry that struggled to develop marketing schemes that appealed to both men and women, not only because most families could not afford buying more than one car but also because driving patterns continued to indicate that men and women in fact seemed to share many basic preferences. Auto companies were thus forced to work with the idea that women too wanted power and speed, while increasing numbers of whitecollar men in the cities were not indifferent to aspects of comfort, style and mechanical reliability. Still, new improvements in the area of comfort were mostly discussed in terms of “concessions” to female drivers, which enabled the auto industry to preserve an idea and self-image of a rough, tool-orientated masculinity congenial to dirty garages and mechanical know-how. Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 10, 60. See also Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 23. 45 Georgine Clarsen, “The ‘Dainty Female Toe’ and the ‘Brawny Male Arm’: Conceptions of Bodies and Power in Automobile Technology,” Australian Feminist Studies 15, no. 32 (2000). These adventurous or speed-orientated themes also occurred in auto advertisements in Swedish media (e.g. Bonniers Veckotidning, April 22, 1928). Nevertheless, ads that were specifically directed to women still tended to emphasize women’s special needs for safety, comfort and cars that were easy to drive: When Buick promoted their latest model in 1925 as a ladies’ choice, the ad emphasized how a Buick was above all “easy to start, easy to steer, and easy to stop” (lätt att starta, lätt att styra, lätt att stanna) in “Varför vill damerna hellre köra Buick,” Charme, June 1, 1925, 32. As previous research has shown, this kind of rhetoric was internationally widespread. See Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 133–36; Penny Tinkler and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, “Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America: Corsets, Cars, and Cigarettes,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 3 (2008); Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 119.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  177 46 Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 38. 47 “När damerna föra bil,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 5, 1928, 19. “Det klär kvinnan att härska över stora tunga föremål, det må vara en bil eller en man.” 48 “Korrekt motorelegans,” Veckojournalen, May  20, 1928, 36–37. See also “Bilsport och koketteri,” Bonniers Veckotidning, December 5, 1926, 41. 49 Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 25. 50 “Stockholmskan som bilist,” Charme, July  1, 1924, 6–7. “iklädd tjocka pälsverk” 51 Ibid. “Hon tar bilismen som en hård, krävande idrott. Hon kör gärna på tävlingar och visar ett påfallande stort intresse—i motsats till sina kontinentala eller amerikanska systrar—att ‘rota i motorn.’ Alldeles säkert tar hon saken också betydligt mer allvarligt än dessa.” 52 Ibid. “Hon kopierar även de manliga moderna med skinnkläder och mekanikerutrustning, som om en liten tripp på förmiddagen gällde minst en världsmästarskapstävling i hastighetskörning. [. . .] Svenskan tycker om vagnen för motorns skull.” 53 Advertisers similarly construed the childish or child-like woman as more appealing than the serious woman, and, as shown by Erving Goffman, the “childish” woman has, in fact, constituted one of the most common and recurring themes in twentieth-century advertisements. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 54 “Stockholmskan som bilist,” Charme, July 1, 1924, 6–7. “En liten blondin anvisas sålunda att skaffa sig en ljusblå Pierce Arrow, under det att en mörk skönhet anses göra sig fördelaktigast i en Marmon, målad i den populära färg som kallas för sultan red. Någon motsvarighet därtill finns inte i vårt land. Men tro mig, det kommer vad tiden lider.” 55 Ibid. “Sveriges land skenar i väg med en fruktansvärd fart mot fullständig amerikanisering, gud vare lov.” 56 “Där parisiskan väljer sin bil,” Charme, November 15, 1926, 14–15. “Man tycker om att köra bil och göra 100 km, men man vill stiga ur i presentabelt skick med ansiktet oberört av väder och vind och med kläderna bevarade från damm och smuts.” 57 Ibid. “I  regel väljer parisiskan den lätta, komfortabla och täckta promenadbilen.” 58 “Bilsport och koketteri,” Bonniers Veckotidning, December 5, 1926, 41. 59 Ibid. “Under pälsen är hon idel crêpe georgette, eller pärlor eller sammet, ja till och med paljetter om det kniper. Från det ögonblick hon låst bilen, är hon beredd att vara precis lika hjälplös som unga vackra kvinnor alltid låtsas vara, när de förfoga över manligt beskydd.” 60 On the “cool” modern woman behind the wheel, see Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 120. See also Chapter 2 on fashion advice and discourses on femininity. 61 Ibid., 140. 62 When a female interviewee in Svensk Motortidning (The Swedish Motor Magazine) wondered in 1925 why even more women did not want to drive— considering how fun it was—the reporter speculated that they were perhaps nervous. Interview with Cajo Lindström in “Våra chaufföser,” Svensk Motortidning, May 24, 1925, 231. 63 For instance, as noted in a photo gallery of “ladies at the wheel,” published in Bonniers Veckotidning (“Damer vid ratten,” Bonniers Veckotidning, December 5, 1926, 36), the “dairy consultant” Anna Kroon drove herself “her little Ford on her many and long travels in her duty.” (Mejerikonsulten i Västernorrlands län, fröken Anna Kroon, kör själv sin lilla Fordkupé när hon är ute på sina många och långa tjänsteresor.) Some women found work in the

178  Changing Stories male-dominated business of driving schools, such as the female instructor Miss Karin Landgren who could be seen teaching a male student “the secrets of the car” (bilens hemligheter) in Stockholms-Tidningen in 1928. “Hur det går till att få körkort,” Stockholms-Tidningen, April 15, 1928. 64 “Kvinnor vid ratten,” Idun, February 13, 1921, 164. “Den kvinnliga läkaren, som med säkerhet och styrka styr sin egen bil liksom sin manliga kollega ute på landsvägarna, få vi med tiden allt oftare se.” 65 See, for instance, the article series “Damer vid ratten” in Bonniers Veckotidning in 1925. 66 Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 79; Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 124–27. 67 On Honorine Hermelin, see Kristina Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen (Stockholm: Wahlström  & Widstrand, 2014), 268–70. On Ellen Hagen, see “När man reser i Sverige,” Idun, May 12, 1929, 528. 68 Gunilla Thorgren, Ottar  & kärleken: En biografi (Stockholm: Norstedt, 2013), 226, 346. 69 Ibid., 337, 346. 70 On this theme, see Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991). 71 Barbro Hedvall, Vår rättmätiga plats: om kvinnornas kamp för rösträtt (Stockholm: Bonnier fakta, 2011), 43, 117. 72 Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 8. Lingering sentiments from the early years of automobility, when, as Jean Williams writes, “[m]otoring was rich, showy and did not fit with agendas of social reform” may have contributed to this scholarly oversight of female automobile pioneers. Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 93. 73 Ester Blenda Nordström (“Bansai”), “På långfärd med motorcykel,” Svenska Dagbladet, September 5–11, 1914, 7. 74 Fatima Bremmer, Ett jävla solsken: en biografi om Ester Blenda Nordström (Stockholm: Forum, 2017). Nordström, known today as a pioneering investigative (“Wallraffing”) journalist, continued her explorative traveling in the 1920s (hitchhiking across the US in 1923, and traveling to Kamchatka in the Soviet Union in 1925). She published several books and became known in Sweden as a remarkable adventurer and journalist. As an author also of several youth novels featuring a young, adventurous and motorcycling female protagonist, she continued to challenge the common notion that motoring was the turf of boys. See also Eva Wahlström, Fria flickor före Pippi: Ester Blenda Nordström och Karin Michaëlis: Astrid Lindgrens föregångare (Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2011). As Sherrie A. Innes has shown, motor adventures in youth novels for girls were, in fact, more common than one might think at this time. Sherrie A. Inness, “On the Road and in the Air: Gender and Technology in Girls’ Automobile and Airplane Serials, 1909–1932,” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 2 (1996). 75 As Mike Featherstone points out, “the term automobility works off the combination of autonomy and mobility,” denoting in a broad sense “self-directed movement.” Bound neither by rails or time schedules, the automobile has thus from its inception invoked “powerful cultural dreams of adventure and freedom: the capacity to go anywhere, to move and dwell without asking permission.” Featherstone, Thrift, and Urry, Automobilities, 1–2. 76 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 111.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  179 77 Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 76. As discussed by Scharff, the American auto industry early on recognized the commercial potential of sending out women on long road trips across the continent. However, these trips were intended to prove the reliability of the car rather than the skills of the women. 78 Hagman, Bilen, naturen och det moderna: om natursynens omvandlingar i det svenska bilsamhället; Lena Eskilsson, “Friluftsliv,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: Det moderna genombrottet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Atlantis, 2008). 79 Ekström and Elg, Stinke-stånka och hatobjekt: svenskarna och deras bilar. For examples of auto advertisements that encouraged customers to discover or explore Sweden or the nature of Sweden, see Idun, June  16, 1929, 662 (Ford); Bonniers Veckotidning, August 12, 1928 (Whippet). 80 The novelty of this kind of wholesome female mobile freedom can be discerned if one considers earlier moral anxieties in relation to unsupervised women on the road: To many, she had seemed at risk of escaping not only her domestic chores but also society’s sexual control, and, as Deborah Clarke notes, American critics, in fact, still warned in the early 1930s that the automobile would become “a house of prostitution on wheels.” Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America, 28. However, when Swedish author Ivar Lo-Johansson described in his novel Kungsgatan (1935) how two female prostitutes set out to buy a cheap car to spend their summer on the road, he placed the site of immoralities not to the automobile but to the city, from which the women were escaping. Quoted in Emin Tengström, Bilen & människan i svensk prosa och poesi (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2009), 111. 81 Greta Blomquist, Fyra flickor i en bil, Svenska turistföreningens årsskrift (Stockholm: Svenska Turistföreningen, 1926), 219. “verkliga ‘friherrar.’ ” 82 Ibid. “ ‘En vansinnig idé detta! Och bara damer!’ ” 83 Interview with Rut Segerdahl in “Våra chaufföser,” Svensk Motortidning, May 24, 1925, 231. “ ‘Min syster kör också, och när vi få tillfälle, stuva vi vagnen full med väninnor och kvistar iväg med dem på en långtur.’ ‘. . . och vilket är längdrekordet?’ ‘Ja, så där ett par hundra mil. Det blev något ditåt i somras, då vi körde härs och tvärs genom Norge.’ ” Older women explored this kind of explorative motor traveling too, whether on their own or with a husband, or with friends. See, for instance, “När man reser i Sverige,” Idun, May 12, 1929, 528; Hedda Key-Rasmussen, “Härs och tvärs i bil,” Kvinnornas tidning, August 30, 1925, 1. 84 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America, 114. 85 Ibid., 112. 86 “När man reser i Sverige,” Idun, May 12, 1929, 528. As noted in the same magazine, the automobile should entail “freedom and independence” but the lack of accommodation limited this freedom in reality. Sigrid Stjernswärd, “Värdshus förbi eller inte? Kan bilismen skapa en ny kvinnlig förvärvsgren?” Idun, May 5, 1929, 505. As suggested by this writer, women should go ahead and start inns and hotels themselves that would better cater to automobilists. 87 “När man reser i Sverige,” Idun, May 12, 1929, 528. 88 Gösta Segercrantz, “Få Stockholmsdamerna gå ifred på gatan?” Charme, November 15, 1926, 30. 89 Martin Martelius, “Camping: ett kapitel om modern friluftsliv,” Våra nöjen, July 24, 1926, 20, 21. 90 Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 137–38. By the late 1920s, advice to housewives on how to cook during a camping

180  Changing Stories trip could occasionally also be found in Swedish magazines (e.g. “Mat i bil,” Veckojournalen, May 20, 1928). 91 Svensk Motortidning, July 15, 1928, 794. 92 As suggested by a slightly optimistic Ford advertisement in 1928, illustrated by a camping family enjoying “wonderful days in August,” anyone “with a moderate income level” could these days buy their own car and go to the places they dreamed about. Veckojournalen, August 5, 1928. Though Swedish historical overviews of tourist traveling place the beginning of motorcar tourism to the 1950s, as this was the time when Swedes on a larger scale could afford to buy automobiles, it may thus be noted that the visions and dreams of motorized camping were formed much earlier—as early as the 1920s. Orvar Löfgren, “Turism och resande,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Stockholm: Signum, 2009), 222; Claes Johansson, “Svenskens första bilsemester,” in Drömmen om bilen, eds. Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1996), 97–103; Olle Hagman, Bilen, naturen och det moderna: om natursynens omvandlingar i det svenska bilsamhället (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 1999), 85. 93 As illustrated by one of Volvo’s earliest advertisements, the new spacious Swedish station wagon was perfectly suited for “long-distance touring” and “camping trips” while also serving as a “particularly good doctor’s car.” Svensk Motortidning, August 31, 1927. On the early years of Volvo, see Curt Borgenstam, Bilens historia: från ångdiligens till elektronikstyrd katalysatorbil (Hudiksvall: Winberg, 1990), 77–78. 94 “Volvo och camping,” Ratten: Volvos tidning, May 1930, 8. 95 On heteronormative automobility and “queer driving” in the context of interwar literature, see Jenny Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017). 96 Ekström, Svenskarna och deras automobiler, 85–90; Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 96. 97 As Jean Williams shows in the British context, motorsports was largely an upper-class affair in the early years, and the first women who raced were to some extent protected by their social standing. A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 114. Concerns were nevertheless raised, both in the U.K. and, as Julie Wosk notes, in the US: Following Joan Newton Cuneo’s speed records at the New Orleans Mardi Gras races in 1909, the American Automobile Association banned all women from racing. Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 129. 98 “När damerna föra bil,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 5, 1928, 19; “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921, 631. 99 As Anders Tunberg points out, automobile competitions in the 1920s are perhaps better characterized as propaganda events than actual “competitions.” Anders Tunberg, “Rally: en svensk folksport,” in Drömmen om bilen, eds. Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1997), 189. 100 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 46–47. 101 Ibid., 46. 102 E.g. Erland Bratt, “Vår krönika,” Svensk Motortidning, January 31, 1929, 65; “Sportpsykologisk studie,” Svensk Motortidning, November 30, 1929, 1162. 103 Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America, 45. 104 Sara Danius, “The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed,” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 1 (2001); Jeffrey T.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  181 Schnapp, “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 1 (1999). 105 “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” 9; Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 111. For studies that have addressed the cultural interconnectedness of modernism, mobility and speed, see also, for instance, Featherstone, Thrift, and Urry, Automobilities; Danius, “The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed”; Orvar Löfgren, “Kulturella kompressioner: till hastighetens etnologi,” in Etnologin inför 2000-talet, ed. Gösta Arvastson, Birgitta Meurling, and Per Peterson (Uppsala: Gustav Adolfs akad., 2000). 106 Doan, “Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War,” 29. 107 The resulting sidelining of women in motorsports has been reproduced in scholarship, where female racecar drivers have largely been overlooked. For a notable exception, see Jeans William’s study of early women motorists in the “age of speed” in a British context. Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 91–117. Women’s own narrations of speed has also tended to be overlooked (which has led to suggestions that women might not be as capable as men to enjoy speed. Tengström, Bilen  & människan i svensk prosa och poesi, 43). However, as Deborah Clarke notes, “Cars are very visible in women’s fiction once a reader begins to look for them.” Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America, 2. On female-authored themes of driving in a Swedish interwar context, see Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” 108 E.g. Bonniers Veckotidning, April 22, 1928 (Whippet-advertisement), and “Damernas egen tredagarstripp,” Bonniers Veckotidning July 15, 1928, 36. 109 On early Swedish reliability trials (tillförlitlighetstävlingar), see Bursell and Rosengren, Drömmen om bilen; Egerlid and Fellke, I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903–2013; Borgenstam, Bilens historia: från ångdiligens till elektronikstyrd katalysatorbil, 48. Henceforth I will use the word “competition” rather than “trial” so as not to confuse this historic term with modern understandings. 110 Egerlid and Fellke, I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903– 2013, 25–31. 111 “Ett nytt fält för våra sportande damer,” Charme, February  1, 1926, 10. “Allmänna meningen har länge nog varit den, att rekordjakten med bil hör till de prestationer, som kräva manligt fasta nävar och stålsatta yrkesmannanerver. Överraskningen, ja förbluffningen, var därför ganska allmän, när det i år visat sig att några av våra käckaste sportdamer vågat sig med i leken på hastighetstävlingarna och fullföljt dem med en sådan brio, att de slagit sig fram till têtplaceringarna, långt före mången manlig förare.” 112 “Ett nytt fält för våra sportande damer,” Charme, February  1, 1926, 10 “Fru Bergsten försöker förringa prestationens värde och säger: ‘Det är inte så märkvärdigt som folk tror.’ ” 113 “Vid styrstång och racerratt,” Charme, August 1, 1923, 3. 114 “Sportkvinnan,” Charme, October 15, 1924, 12. 115 “Ett nytt fält för våra sportande damer,” Charme, February  1, 1926, 10. “Varje människa har något av hastighetens demon i sig. Intet av alla de sensationsämnen, som stå nutidsmänniskan till buds, går upp mot känslan av svindlande fart. Att sitta i en bekväm, kraftig bil och känna hur farten ökar . . . känslan av fart, vanvettig fart—det är nu en gång för alla sensationernas sensation.” 116 “Sportkvinnan,” Charme, October 15, 1924, 12. “Med orubblig säkerhet körde hon sitt ekipage over 5,000 meters sträckan, tog doseringarna med

182  Changing Stories flott Teknik.” The new velodrome in Stockholm (Hornsberg) was given much attention in the daily press these years. See, e.g. “Velodromen sensationernas stadion,” Svenska Dagbladet, August 2, 1925, 4. 117 Charme, June 1, 1926, 5. 118 Ibid. “När fröken Brusell, som aldrig förr kört fortare än vanlig landsvägstakt, i sitt debutlopp var uppe i den svindlande farten av 131 kilometer, fann hon det helt naturligt, och—roligt.” 119 “Våra motorsportande damer,” Charme, March 15, 1926, 29. “Att köra bil, ja det är det härligaste som finns [. . .] i synnerhet när man får upp en riktigt stark fart. . . . Då glömmer man vardagens alla små motigheter och tycker bara att det är härligt att leva.” 120 “Sportpsykologisk studie,” Svensk Motortidning, November  30, 1929, 1162. 121 “När damerna föra bil,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 5, 1928, 19. 122 Ibid. “ett renodlat maskulint fordon” 123 “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan,” Svensk Motortidning, September  15, 1921, 524. “en dam, som ju i allmänhet icke är konstruerad för svårare fysiska ansträngningar.” The competition, organized in August of 1921 by the Swedish Motorcycle Club (Svenska Motorcykelklubben, SMCK), was a reliability trial around Lake Mälaren (313 kilometers) with a stipulated average speed of 36 km/h for men and 30 for women. Out of thirty-nine competitors, five were women, and as reported by Svensk Motortidning, all five had successfully finished without penalty points. “SMCK:s propagandatävlingar: Damerna hedra sig,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921, 521. 124 “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan: Oppositionen bemött av dem själva,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921, 524. “Varför skulle inte vi kunna ledas av samma sportkänslor som de manliga motorcyklisterna, och är det inte att underskatta oss och överdriva ansträngningen, att säga att vi inte orkar med?” 125 “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan: Oppositionen bemött av dem själva,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921, 524. “Men vi kunna icke frigöra oss från den åsikten, att kvinna är kvinna och damsporten bör i tävlingshänseende anpassas därefter.” 126 Swedish print media reported of female motorcycle participants both in reliability trials and in speed races. Many participated in several types of competitions: For instance, the well-known automobilist Signe Kassman also competed in motorcycle speed races on frozen lakes (see e.g. “Fartsensationer på Edsviken,” Bonniers Veckotidning, February 3, 1929, 23). 127 “Långkörningar är det roligaste på landet,” Svensk Motortidning, November  22, 1925, 538. “Biltävlingar? Nej, det har nog funnits en och annan som försökt uppmuntra mig till den lasten. Men jag har aldrig reflekterat närmare på att pröva mina nerver på kapplöpningsarenan. Det sägs ju att kvinnan inte hör hemma där.” 128 “Våra chaufföser,” Svensk Motortidning, April 12, 1925, 11. “Nå, på tävlingarna, hur har det då gått? Bra. Och det bästa är att jag inte behövt taga emot något dampris eller annat tröstpris utan ärligt fått dela pris med skapelsens herrar.” 129 “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921, 631. “Vi tycka om Er till en viss grad svaga och hjälplösa och finna det förenligt med vår manliga överlägsenhet att hjälpa och värna er.” 130 Ibid. “En kvinna som sitter på en motorcykel en hel dag, behöver inte vår hjälp och vårt beskydd.” 131 “Sportpsykologisk studie,” Svensk Motortidning, November  30, 1929, 1162. “riddarna av ratt och styre”

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  183 132 Svensk Motortidning, March 15, 1929, 126. 133 “Sportpsykologisk studie,” Svensk Motortidning, November  30, 1929, 1162. “Faran ger stål i sinnet men rensar också bort pråligheten, fjanteriet.” 134 Ibid. “Sporten har danat massor av män.” Emphasis in original. 135 “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921, 524. “ett resultat av kvinnans kända envishet.” 136 Sheller, “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car,” 225. 137 Margareta Suber, Charlie (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1932; repr., 2005. Stockholm: Normal förlag). For an analysis of the theme of driving in Charlie, see Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” 138 Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–30. 139 Jan Ströman, “Dambiltävlingen,” Autohistorica, no. 4 1994. 140 “Damtävlingen,” Svensk Motorsport, July 15, 1926, 303. 141 Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 107, 11. 142 Ströman, “Dambiltävlingen.” 143 Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 108. See also Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America, 43. 144 “Damtävlingen,” Svensk Motorsport, July 15, 1926, 314. “verklig (=mannens) skicklighet” 145 Ibid., “Man skulle vilja föreställa sig en kvinnlig sidvagnsförare som en stor och kraftig dam [. . .] men fru Andersson är istället [. . .] relativt späd.” 146 Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 137. 147 “Damtävlingen,” Svensk Motorsport, July 15, 1926, 315. 148 Ibid. “leva för att klä sig”; “född att köra bil.” 149 Ibid., 314. 150 See, for instance, “Hårda uppgörelser väntas i damernas första motortävlan,” Svenska Dagbladet, June 25, 1926, 12. Occasionally, Lundqvist was also called the “motor girl” from Flen: As one commentator wrote in 1926, “Ester Lundqvist, motorflickan från Flen, körde som en hel karl,” quoted from “Premiär på Lindö,” Svenska Dagbladet, September 6, 1926, 13. In time, Lundqvist seems to have been called “motor-boy” more often. 151 “Damtävlingen,” Svensk Motorsport, July 15, 1926, 314. 152 “Dambiltävlingen,” Bonniers Veckotidning, July 8, 1928, 15. 153 “Damernas egen tredagarstripp,” Bonniers Veckotidning July 15, 1928, 36; “Vid ratt och karta,” Bonniers Veckotidning, July 15, 1928, 37–38. 154 This male initiative to “allow” female map-readers in 1928 was in itself a source of gleeful comments: As related by one of the navigators, Inga Rehné, it had afterwards been said that “since men these days wished to see women as clever and intelligent as men, it had been decided not only that women’s automobile competitions should be allowed, but even female map-readers! Well, thank you!” “Min debut som kartläsare,” Svensk Motortidning, July 31, 1928, 821. Well before the first Women’s Automobile Competition in 1926, Swedish popular media had, in fact, noted spectacular examples of the modern motorsports woman and her professional ambitions: Presenting in 1924 a remarkable “female motor professional” by the name of Cissi Schultz, one magazine explained how Schultz had begun her career by winning motorcycles races in Stockholm, and how she was now winning automobile speed races (in competition with men). Her recent victories had even been utilized in British auto advertisements. “En kvinnlig motoryrkesman,” Bonniers Veckotidning, March  22, 1924, 58.

184  Changing Stories Moreover, Shultz was now working as an automobile saleswoman, which, as this magazine noted, was an unusual female occupation. When Shultz entered the third Women’s Automobile Competition in 1929 she was thus already celebrated as a seasoned motorsports professional—a skilled “Motor Amazon.” “Motoramazonerna på sommarraid,” Svensk Motortidning, June 30, 1929, 667. On the importance of media coverage and visual culture in the context of motorsports, see also Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960, 101. 155 Ströman, “Dambiltävlingen,” 30. 156 Ven Nyberg (pseud. Askungen), “Damernas motortävlan permanent institution?” Svenska Dagbladet, June 28, 1926, 9. Nyberg reported on women’s participation in motor competitions also prior to the Women’s Automobile Competition. See, for instance, “Med en Lady-Driver på landsvägstävling,” Svenska Dagbladet, May 29, 1926, 33. 157 Borgenstam, Bilens historia: från ångdiligens till elektronikstyrd katalysatorbil, 48. 158 Egerlid and Fellke, I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903– 2013, 25. 159 “Strid på kniven i vintertävlingen,” Svensk Motortidning, January 15, 1927, 30. 160 Svenska dagbladets årsbok, (Stockholm: Svenska dagbladet, 1927), 225. “Strid på kniven i vintertävlingen,” Svensk Motortidning, January  15, 1927, 30. 161 “Amazoner med pudervippa,” Svensk Motortidning, February  28, 1927, 166–67. 162 Ibid. “inte så märklig” 163 Ibid. “För finns det något käckare och trevligare än en liten kvinna i förardräkt med hjälm på huvudet och de fasta små nävarna på ratten?” 164 Ibid., 166. “Fru Eva själv liten, finlemmad och spenslig, verkar allt annat än sportkvinna.” 165 Ibid., 167. “Folk gick omkring och tittade på mig, och undrade om en sådan liten lättviktare som jag skulle ha krafter nog.” 166 Ibid., 180. “Det är och förblir karlgöra.” 167 Ibid., 166. 168 “Inga damer med i ‘Vänern Runt,’ ” Svensk Motortidning, October  15, 1927. On the recourse to ban women from motor competitions see also, Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 70–75. 169 “Inga damer med i ‘Vänern Runt,’ ” Svensk Motortidning, October  15, 1927. “En synnerligen krävande kraftmätning.” 170 “Vänern runt,” Svensk Motortidning, December 15, 1927, 1142. “Damerna i all ära. Nog äro de spänstiga och i besittning av kraftiga nävar, men man ansåg det förståndigast att låta dem stanna hemma för den här gången. Här fordrades riktiga karlatag.” 171 “Hon som kör vinterbil,” Idun, February 24, 1929, 213. 172 “Vintertävlingsförarna klara för start idag,” Svenska Dagbladet, February 9, 1929, 13. “Den kvinnliga bilisten är först och främst fysiskt underlägsen sin manliga konkurrent, hon är inte lika rutinerad, kan aldrig i en kritisk situation handla lika blixtsnabbt—hennes rörelser äro inte gärna intuitiva utan föregås av betänksamt reflekterande—och framför allt saknar hon den fantasi över körningen, som kännetecknar de manliga mästarna vid ratten.” On Idun’s award, see Idun, February 3, 1929, 114. 173 On the Royal Automobile Club and Erland Bratt, see Egerlid and Fellke, I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903–2013, 15.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  185 174 Erland Bratt, “Vår krönika,” Svensk Motortidning, January 31, 1929, 65. “Dessa tävlingar avse nämligen att pressa förarna till det yttersta av deras motståndskraft, och äro pressningarna icke värre, än att jämväl kvinnliga deltagare mäkta med dem, då böra de avsäga sig titeln av nordens mest krävande tävlingar.” 175 “Vad förarna berättade,” Svensk Motortidning, March 15, 1929, 137. “en kraftprestation av rang” The trial started on Saturday morning, February 9, and was concluded the day after. Paulitz arrived 20 hours later to the finish, late Monday morning. 176 “Dolly Paulitz körde i mål på måndag f.m.,” Svenska Dagbladet, February 12, 1929, 14. See also, “Vintertrav och bilvintertävling,” Bonniers Veckotidning, February  17, 1929, 37; “Protokollet klart,” Svenska Dagbladet, February 15, 1929, 15. 177 Idun, March  17, 1929, 281 (cover). On Dickson as a fashion-model, see also “Lite Stockholmsflärd i sommarkylan,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 12, 1928, 40–41. As suggested by Svensk Motortidning, the most skilled driver was, however, neither Dickson nor Paulitz, but Signe Kassman (“Nya stjärnor och gamla,” Svensk Motortidning, February 28, 1929, 119). 178 Erland Bratt, “Vår krönika,” Svensk Motortidning, February 28, 1929, 167. 179 Dolly Paulitz, Svensk Motortidning, March 15, 1929, 234. 180 Ibid. “Det är sant att vi damer inte kunna trimma en vagn. Men—hör och häpna—det kan i regel inte våra manliga kolleger heller.” 181 Ibid. “ingående förfrågningar” 182 Ibid. 183 Erland Bratt, “Vår krönika,” Svensk Motortidning, March 31, 1929, 277. Bratt moreover got his revenge by including five cartoons on the theme of the frivolous female driver, interested in preserving her make-up more than driving. 184 Patrick Welin, Svensk Motortidning, April 30, 1929. “smakar något av ‘bad looser’.” Paulitz for her part had pointed out that Welin had not himself participated in the recent race and that he failed to respond to the issue at hand. Dolly Paulitz, Svensk Motortidning, April 15, 1929, 339. Patrick Welin, Svensk Motortidning, March 31, 1929, 294. 185 Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 13. See also Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 20–21. 186 Margit Rosengren, “En skådespelerska vid ratten,” Bonniers Veckotidning, May 6, 1928, 36. “Jag älskar att hålla på och hålla på och fingra på alla dessa olika kugghjul och muttrar, tändstift och ventiler.” 187 “Jakobsson och jag reparera bilar,” Bonniers Veckotidning, July 29, 1928, 22–23. “Jag är inte längre hopplöst övertygad om att mekaniska begrepp äro något som inte kommer en feminin hjärna vid.” 188 Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, 130. 189 Carl Johan Holzhausen, “Med Fru Eva från start till mål,” Svensk Motortidning, February  28, 1927, 174–86. “att den hurtiga unga frun trots sin karlavulna spänstighet vid ratten inte alls glömde bort—pudervippan!” 190 Lena Wisaeus, Ann Bjerke, and Eva Dickson, Eva Dickson—ett bedårande barn av sin tid: en äventyrlig livsresa i ord och bild (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2000), 48; Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America, 63. On motoring expeditions in Africa in the 1920s, see also Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 140–57. 191 “Motoramazonerna på sommarraid,” Svensk Motortidning, June  30, 1929, 667. “Lite Stockholmsflärd i sommarkylan,” Bonniers Veckotidning, August 12, 1928, 40–41.

186  Changing Stories 192 Wisaeus, Bjerke, and Dickson, Eva Dickson—ett bedårande barn av sin tid: en äventyrlig livsresa i ord och bild, 40. 193 Ibid., 147. “ ‘Vad är det som sysselsätter kvinnan av idag? Hon målar sina naglar röda, hon bleker sitt hår, hon dricker champagne eller cocktails eller röker cigaretter tills hennes fingertoppar är bruna av nikotin. Hon föder inte ens barn längre. Se på er själv, madame, vad duger ni till?’ ‘Jag kan köra bil!’ ” 194 “Fru Eva i Sahara,” Svensk Motortidning, January  10, 1933. “endast åtföljd av en negerboy” On Dickson’s Sahara-drive, see also Ellen Rydelius and Anna Odhe, Kvinnokavalkad: en bilderbok om svenska kvinnors liv 1918–1944 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1946), 165; Wisaeus, Bjerke, and Dickson, Eva Dickson—ett bedårande barn av sin tid: en äventyrlig livsresa i ord och bild. 195 Eva Dickson—ett bedårande barn av sin tid: en äventyrlig livsresa i ord och bild, 66. For other examples, see Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 122–23. 196 Bernhard Rieger, “ ‘Fast Couples’: Technology, Gender and Modernity in Britain and Germany During the Nineteen-thirties,” Historical Research 76, no. 193 (2003). 197 Quoted in Wisaeus, Bjerke, and Dickson, Eva Dickson—ett bedårande barn av sin tid: en äventyrlig livsresa i ord och bild, 110. 198 Svensk Motorsport, June 15, 1926, 302. “En makalös körställning och en fenomenal motor.” 199 “Våra damer på tävlingsbanan: Oppositionen bemött av dem själva,” Svensk Motortidning, September 15, 1921. 200 Ibid. “Och låt oss få vara med och tävla, för det är så gränslöst roligt!” 201 Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, 8. 202 Fallstedt-Lindholm, SMCK—SMK: Svenska motor klubben 1913–1948— en återblick på de gångna 35 åren, 219. 203 Ibid., 73. “Några framstående dambilister” 204 “Sportkvinnan,” Charme, October  15, 1924, 12; “Ett nytt fält för våra sportande damer,” Charme, February 1, 1926, 10; Charme, June 1, 1926, 5.

Bibliography Andréasson, Rune, Sven Gerentz, and Jonas Gawell. Bilismens genombrottsår i Sverige: om nätverken, aktörerna och spelet mellan organisationerna, företagen och myndigheterna. Uppsala: Uppsala Publishing House, 1997. Behling, Laura L. “ ‘The Woman at the Wheel’: Marketing Ideal Womanhood, 1915–1934.” Journal of American Culture 20, no. 3 (1997): 13. Blomkvist, Pär. Den goda vägens vänner: väg- och billobbyn och framväxten av det svenska bilsamhället 1914–1959. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2001. Blomquist, Greta. Fyra flickor i en bil: Svenska turistföreningens årsskrift. Stockholm: Svenska Turistföreningen, 1926. Borgenstam, Curt. Bilens historia: från ångdiligens till elektronikstyrd katalysatorbil. Hudiksvall: Winberg, 1990. Bremmer, Fatima. Ett jävla solsken: en biografi om Ester Blenda Nordström. Stockholm: Forum, 2017. Bursell, Barbro, and Annette Rosengren. Drömmen om bilen. Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1996. Cavling, Henrik, and Erik Sjöstedt. Paris. Stockholm: Silén, 1900.

The Chauffeuse Who Wished for a Racecar  187 Clarke, Deborah. Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Clarsen, Georgine. Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. ———. “The ‘Dainty Female Toe’ and the ‘Brawny Male Arm’: Conceptions of Bodies and Power in Automobile Technology.” Australian Feminist Studies 15, no. 32 (2000): 153–63. Danius, Sara. “The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed.” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 1 (2001): 99–126. Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ———. “Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War.” Women: A Cultural Review 17, no. 1 (2006): 26–41. Egerlid, Helena, and Jens Fellke. I samtidens tjänst: Kungliga automobil klubben 1903–2013. Vimmerby; Stockholm: Effect Reklambyrå; Kungl. automobilklubben (KAK), 2013. Ekström, Gert. Svenskarna och deras automobiler. Hudiksvall: Winberg, 1983. Ekström, Gert, and Per-Börje Elg. Stinke-stånka och hatobjekt: svenskarna och deras bilar. Hudiksvall: Winberg Citybook, 2005. Elg, Per-Börje. Bilens århundrade: design, historik & nostalgi. Stockholm: Forum, 2005. Eskilsson, Lena. “Friluftsliv.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: Det moderna genombrottet, edited by Jakob Christensson, 362–91. Lund: Atlantis, 2008. Fallstedt-Lindholm, Gösta, ed. SMCK—SMK: Svenska motor klubben 1913– 1948—en återblick på de gångna 35 åren. Stockholm: Igo-förl., 1949. Featherstone, Mike, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry. Automobilities. London: Sage, 2005. Flink, James J. The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Hagman, Olle. Bilen, naturen och det moderna: om natursynens omvandlingar i det svenska bilsamhället. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 1999. ———. Bilen, naturen och det moderna: om natursynens omvandlingar i det svenska bilsamhället. Stockholm: Kommunikationsforskningsberedningen (KFB); Göteborgs universitet, 2000. ——— “Bilens århundrade.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Stockholm: Signum, 2009. Hedvall, Barbro. Vår rättmätiga plats: om kvinnornas kamp för rösträtt. Stockholm: Bonnier fakta, 2011. Heurgren, Vendela. “När bilen drabbade landsbygden.” In Drömmen om bilen, edited by Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren. Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1996. Ingemarsdotter, Jenny. “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017): 38–70. Inness, Sherrie A. “On the Road and in the Air: Gender and Technology in Girls’ Automobile and Airplane Serials, 1909–1932.” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 2 (1996): 47–60.

188  Changing Stories Johansson, Claes. “Svenskens första bilsemester.” In Drömmen om bilen, edited by Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren. Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1996. Löfgren, Orvar. “Kulturella kompressioner: till hastighetens etnologi.” In Etnologin inför 2000-talet, edited by Arvastson Gösta, Birgitta Meurling and Per Peterson. Uppsala: Gustav Adolfs akad., 2000. ———. “Turism och resande.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Stockholm: Signum, 2009. Lundgren, Kristina. Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014. Rieger, Bernhard. “ ‘Fast Couples’: Technology, Gender and Modernity in Britain and Germany During the Nineteen-thirties.” Historical Research 76, no. 193 (2003): 364–88. Rydelius, Ellen, and Anna Odhe. Kvinnokavalkad: en bilderbok om svenska kvinnors liv 1918–1944. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1946. Scharff, Virginia. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation).” Modernism/ Modernity 6, no. 1 (1999): 1–49. Sheller, Mimi. “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car.” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 4/5 (October 1, 2004): 221–42. Ströman, Jan. “Dambiltävlingen.” Autohistorica, no. 4 (1994). Suber, Margareta. Charlie. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1932. Stockholm: Normal förlag, 2005. Svenska dagbladets årsbok. Stockholm: Svenska dagbladet, 1927. Tengström, Emin. Bilen  & människan i svensk prosa och poesi. Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2009. Thorgren, Gunilla. Ottar & kärleken: En biografi. Stockholm: Norstedt, 2013. Tinkler, Penny, and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh. “Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America: Corsets, Cars, and Cigarettes.” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 3 (2008): 113–43. Tolvhed, Helena. På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990. Göteborg: Makadam, 2015. Tunberg, Anders. “Rally: en svensk folksport.” In Drömmen om bilen, edited by Barbro Bursell and Annette Rosengren, 186–205. Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1997. Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. Wahlström, Eva. Fria flickor före Pippi: Ester Blenda Nordström och Karin Michaëlis: Astrid Lindgrens föregångare. Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2011. Williams, Jean. A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport: Part 1, Sporting Women, 1850–1960. London; New York: Routledge, 2012. Wisaeus, Lena, Ann Bjerke, and Eva Dickson. Eva Dickson—ett bedårande barn av sin tid: en äventyrlig livsresa i ord och bild. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2000. Wosk, Julie. Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Part III

Unfinished Stories Queer Female Masculinities

5 In No Certain Terms Female Masculinities and Queer Desires

As explored in previous chapters, representations and discussions of the “masculinized” modern woman varied in the 1920s across many different genres and themes, from light-hearted satire to concerned reports on the depravities of modern society. Whether the perceived transgressions were seen as playful or as indicative of something more profound, involving some sort of disruption of the “imagined binary oppositions between male masculinity and female femininity,” depended on context (a young, short-haired movie star was perceived differently than an older, shorthaired career woman, for example).1 In terms of cultural anxiety, some forms of transgressions appear historically to have caused more controversy than others, and as suggested by Jack Halberstam, “female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire.”2 Historical investigations of such connections need to consider nevertheless that the conceptual framework of sexual identities is itself very recent—the idea that one could or should be defined by one’s sexuality appears to have become more widespread only after World War II.3 In this context the interwar period has often been described as a period of transition, when “competing frameworks”—whether rooted in moral, medical or medial discourses—influenced the way people thought about (or did not think about) “the organization of sexuality.”4 For this reason, the figure of the female “invert,” described as an abnormal sexual type in late nineteenth-century sexologist literature, is less clear than one might think in the interwar era.5 In Swedish popular media, discourses on female masculinity in the 1920s were, as this book has argued, characterized by a paradox: On the one hand, young women’s masculine looks were configured as playful and modern more than threatening or “queer,” but at the same time, critics also expressed concerns with the fate of femininity and the institution of marriage in a world of challenged or even dissolved gender boundaries. Some warned that the fashionable garçonne type would also become masculinized in terms of her habits, interests and desires, even though women’s increasing agency, whether in sports, automobility or work life, was nevertheless accepted as part of modern progress. The question thus

192  Unfinished Stories remains: To what extent was female masculinity actually associated with “queerness” rather than modernity? This chapter explores a range of voices from the 1920s that were somehow concerned not only with the boundaries of women’s gender expressions but also with the boundaries of their sexuality. The materials to be examined include texts written by cultural critics worried about modern decadence, by youth advisors concerned with girls’ development into women, by medical experts explaining the science of sexuality, and by feminists who struggled to distance themselves from accusations of “mannishness.” Shifting the focus from representations in popular media, this chapter examines the carefully crafted arguments of experts, critics and scientists, whether published in new medical handbooks, in conduct books or in feminist periodicals. After turning first to the perspective of cultural critics and youth advisors, I  will then examine the medical perspective and Swedish initiatives in the 1920s to popularize theories on sexuality, and I will conclude by analyzing feminist strategies of defending the independence as well as the reputation of the emancipated woman.

Moral Concerns: From Hideous to Ambiguous The suspicion that the modern or emancipated woman could be transgressing not only her gendered but also, potentially, her sexual boundaries was not new to the 1920s. Women’s sexuality had been a subject of great interest across fin de siècle Europe, particularly in relation to the figure of the New Woman. As literary scholar Sally Ledger observed in the British context, the New Woman was almost from the start caricatured in the satire magazine Punch as a “ ‘mannish’ figure of fun”: “Lacking the conventional attributes of the ideal Victorian woman, preferring education and a career to marriage, children and domesticity, and preferring the company of like-minded women to that of eligible young men, the New Woman as she was constructed in the periodical press of the 1890s rapidly distinguished herself as a lesbian prototype.”6 Similar attacks on the emancipated woman appeared in Swedish culture at this time, in satire as well as in literature, perhaps most famously by August Strindberg, who warned against mannish “gynander” types, intent on “beating men’s records” (Inferno, 1897).7 Even more (in-)famously, Strindberg insinuated in another novel that he had lost his wife to a lesbian rival, described as “the most hideous creature in human guise” (Svarta fanor [Black Banners], 1907).8 As previous scholarship has shown, these kinds of frightful (fictional) female characters had inspired medical experts from the earliest days of sexology in their construction of “case studies” of sexually deviant women, while, at the same time, novelists were inspired by the field of sexology when constructing “abnormal” female characters.9 However, after World War I this reciprocal literary-medical

In No Certain Terms  193 axis of analysis was joined also by other cultural perspectives, inspired by films, magazines and a consumer-orientated culture that did not necessarily rely on specific “types” but also set out to explore the fashionable sexual ambiguity of young and modern women at large. After the landmark year of 1921 when Swedish women could vote for the first time in national elections, a range of critics, male as well as female, engaged in discussions on the wider cultural implications of this changing gender order. Many worried that equality would be confused with sameness (thinking that men and women who were equal would become indistinguishable from one another) and, moreover, that a decadent modern culture would further exacerbate this blurring of boundaries.10 The remarks of one of the staunchest Swedish critics of the “modern woman” at this time, the lawyer Arnold Sölvén, illustrate how the associations were made: To begin with, feminists had learned to “deplore” all men, and this attitude was further encouraged by an American “non-culture” (okultur) that encouraged women to indulge in entertainment or focus selfishly on their careers.11 Next, this new “spiritual perversity” was turned into a “perverted sexual drive” embraced not only by feminists but by a whole range of modern women: “In reality,” as Sölvén concluded, there is merely a difference of degree, not of species, between the tribade on the one hand, and the intellectual Amazon and the blaze, jaded female bohemian on the other hand, such as they appear in our modern feminist novels as representatives of the new woman ideal.12 To prove his point, Sölvén listed in a footnote five recent novels by female authors who had addressed “the theme of homosexuality.”13 Even though Sölvén’s alignment of feminism, Americanism, masculinity, modernity and homosexuality put essentially all women at risk of being associated with some sort of transgression, this type of antifeminism does not necessarily imply that the general public would have associated the modern career woman with sexual “perversity” at this time. The many new ways of being modern as a woman in the 1920s— whether manifested in short hairstyles, through sports or in women’s automobile races—could just as well be interpreted in the opposite way; that society was increasing its range of imaginable and acceptable female lifestyles. What can be argued is that the fun and the fears of modernity were deeply related to each other: As society was undergoing change in terms of a cultural as well as technological modernization, new opportunities as well as anxieties were constantly thrown into the mix. The modern world of new entertainments and career opportunities presented challenges also to youth advisors. While new vocational guidance books listed suitable modern occupations for young women, others emphasized that women’s main responsibilities were still defined by

194  Unfinished Stories marriage and motherhood.14 Such admonitions to young women not to forget their true calling indicate a growing concern that other possibilities were now on the table as well. The British doctor Elizabeth Chesser, whose advisory books (translated to Swedish) became very popular in Sweden in the 1920s, emphasized in this context the importance of moderation and limits, especially in regard to the “sex instinct,” described as “good when it is represented by love, motherhood, creative art, it is evil when lust and perversion dominate the mind.”15 Fortunately, the “normal” development of young women involved, as readers of The Woman Who Knows Herself (1926) were reassured, an awakening attraction to the opposite sex.16 However, this kind of normal progress was not guaranteed: As noted by a Swedish reviewer, Chesser had used certain “striking words” when describing women “consumed by a glowing admiration for their own sex.”17 The especially striking word was “homosexuality,” which Chesser had used in regard to the stages of young women’s development, but as insinuated in the review, such glowing admiration was related also to feminism.18 The lack of certainty in regard to the outcome of girls’ “normal” development ultimately left many conservative critics unsatisfied. Deterring images of emancipated but lonely women, preferring female company and devoting themselves to their careers instead of marriage, constituted a recurring feature in Swedish satire and press in the 1920s.19 In the year 1930 when working-class author Ivar Lo-Johansson summarized his experiences of European cities, his sympathies for farm girls slaving away in the rural areas of Sweden had been exchanged for a raging critique of irresponsible middle-class women.20 Using England as a warning example, Lo-Johansson described how British women had become “masculinized,” which he defined as being egoistic and dedicated only to their official duties and new positions.21 Even though Lo-Johansson emphasized that he did not expect women to stay at home and be content with cooking and cleaning, he deplored that women seemed not only to have lost all interest in romance and children but that they had also destroyed their “feminine essence.”22 This type of rhetoric was not unrelated to the political vision formulated in Sweden at this time of a well-ordered “people’s home” built by men and decorated by women: Though women were not necessarily expected to stay at home in a literal sense in this vision, they were nevertheless expected to devote themselves to issues in line with their womanly nature, such as children, healthcare and social welfare.23 From the perspective of conservative critics, a line was crossed, in other words, when “modern” became associated not only with youthful play but also with unruly, adult female agency: Whereas Hollywood’s modern girl had been described in the Swedish popular media in terms of her pleasantness and charm, Lo-Johansson’s modern career woman was intolerably demanding and restless.24 However, even though some

In No Certain Terms  195 critics, such as Sölvén quoted earlier, associated the new or modern woman also more specifically with homosexuality, this connection did not necessarily depend upon the stereotype of the “mannish lesbian”— rather, the critique targeted (more vaguely) urban scenes of “decadence” or women’s ongoing emancipation efforts. Though images of female masculinity remained a recurring ingredient in satire and cultural critique of women’s “unfeminine” habits and desires, Alison Oram’s observation that “[t]he masculine woman was not necessarily lesbian and the lesbian figure was not always masculine” can be extended also to the Swedish context.25 However, to those Swedish readers curious more specifically about Chesser’s “striking word,” insinuations or jokes in the press were not the only source: By the early 1920s a new genre of popularized medical literature was emerging in Sweden that aimed to enlighten the people on the latest findings of the organization of gender and sexuality.

Theories of “Normal Love”: Enlightening the People In 1927, addressing the topic of “abnormal sexualities,” the Swedish psychiatrist Viktor Wigert explained how homosexuality was different from “normal love.”26 Though Wigert also pointed out the many ways in which these feelings of desire were similar, the idea that love and sexuality could nevertheless be understood and defined by the categories of “normal” and “abnormal” appears to have become a self-evident premise in Swedish medical literature at this time. However, whether “abnormal” sexual desires were connected also to abnormal gender expressions, as nineteenth-century sexologist theories of gender inversion had suggested, was unclear. On the one hand, as argued by the physician Anton Nyström in 1919, homosexual women appeared to possess certain inborn masculine qualities, but at the same time he also discussed how homosexuality could just as well be acquired, as a result of seduction (an idea discussed by earlier sexologists as well).27 In any case, as Nyström concluded, homosexual people were no different from the “sexually normal,” except in terms of their sexuality, which meant that homosexuality should not be considered a crime.28 While Nyström’s plea for tolerance left Swedish policy-makers unconvinced, the state of normality of some people, such as the “masculine” woman, would during the 1920s continue to be debated. As Laura Doan has shown, the concept of normal originated in nineteenth-century scientific efforts to establish statistical norms based on averages but gained its real ideological momentum in the twentieth century, when the term was increasingly conflated with moral and medical value statements.29 During the interwar period and beyond, “good,” “healthy” and “normal” began to be used simply as interchangeable terms.30 In the Swedish media of the 1920s, an emerging rhetoric of normality can be found in fashion and beauty debates as the word “normal”

196  Unfinished Stories began to appear in discussions about the female body. For instance, in 1924, the magazine Charme featured a series of articles that explored in some detail the look of “normal hands,” “normal ears” and even “normal nostrils.”31 By mixing older discourses on physiognomy (that connected body shapes with a person’s “character”) with modern beauty ideals as well as discussions of normality, this rhetoric contributed to an effective blurring of aesthetic ideals and health recommendations. In this context, “normal” tended to be used in two ways: as a static descriptor (a “normal nose”) and a dynamic process (shaping the body to be “normal and healthy”). Thus, because “normal” was not necessarily a stable quality, women were recommended to stay vigilant in relation to their appearance and take action if needed (for a “normal hand” to stay normal, defined as “beautiful, useful and strong,” Charme recommended a strict regime of regular hand exercises).32 All in all, a modern woman should, as suggested by Charme, stay vigilant about her normality, attentive to her beauty and informed regarding new findings on women’s health. At this time, a similar language of normality was used in medical literature, as noted above, regarding categorizations of sexual behaviors. To what extent such sexual distinctions and theories made an impact on public discourse in the 1920s has been debated; in other national contexts, scholars have pointed to the impact of modern culture and popular media (rather than sexology) in regard to the formation of sexual knowledge in the interwar period.33 In the Swedish context, historical scholarship has focused on the later interwar years, following the founding in 1933 of the Swedish Federation for Sex Education (RFSU).34 However, as Lena Lennerhed shows, the founder of RFSU, Elise Ottesen-Jensen, was also very active in the 1920s, attending conferences abroad organized by the international sexual reform movement and touring the country to give talks on women’s sexual health.35 Yet, as Lennerhed also points out, debates on sexuality were at this time in Sweden focused almost entirely on the married couple and reproductive issues.36 To what degree sexual ambiguities or gender variance were also part of this new discourse of sexual enlightenment is less clear. However, as I will discuss next, there are indications that a wider array of sexual matters was becoming visible in Swedish culture in the 1920s. When the publishing house Bonniers launched a new book series devoted to popularized science in 1923, the aspect of raising people’s general level of education was central: In fact, as the editors of Bonnier’s Little Handbooks of Scientific Topics (Bonniers små handböcker i vetenskapliga ämnen) emphasized, the modern man was obligated to take part in “the advances of modern science,” which included knowledge about medicine and psychology.37 This educational spirit was consistent with a rising political interest in the status of “the people’s health” (folkhälsan), which in turn went hand-in-hand with an incipient Swedish political vision of building the nation as an enlightened “people’s home”

In No Certain Terms  197 (folkhemmet), knowledgeable and democratic but also disciplined and well-ordered.38 The aspect of order and control was not unimportant: As Anna Clark points out in a broader international context, the political interest in social reform in the first decades of the twentieth century was fueled by anxieties that sexual anarchy and degeneration threatened societies that did nothing to harness what was perceived as the “instinctual energy” of sexuality.39 Cities across Europe thus saw the rise in these years of various categories of “modern sex experts,” as Clark writes, including bureaucrats, psychiatrists, social workers and doctors, whose clinics contributed not only to guidance and knowledge but also to a new apparatus of sexual regulation.40 At the same time, the voices of progressive physicians and activists were also beginning to be heard, such as, in the Swedish context, Anton Nyström who supported the decriminalization of homosexuality, and Elise Ottensen Jensen who gave talks across the country on birth control and women’s sexual health.41 Paradoxically, while policy-makers hoped that science would encourage order and clarity in modern society, scientists and medical professionals themselves often emphasized the complexity of their work. For instance, readers of the Little Handbooks of Scientific Topics in the 1920s could engage themselves not only with the astonishing new propositions of Niels Bohr’s theories of the atom but also the challenges involved in “sex-determination” and the many varieties of intersexed people. In the latter case, the author, Gert Bonnier, described how biological sex was the result of a complex and volatile process, which scientists had not yet fully understood: In his opinion, it was difficult to even begin to summarize the knowledge in this area, as the rapid progress of science made new “truths” obsolete within a few years.42 The only thing certain was, as suggested by this author, that the determination of male and female seemed to be uncertain even on a cellular level. Such scientific challenges did not hold back new medical enlightenment projects. As declared by the editors of another new book series, The People’s Library of Medicine (Medicinskt Folkbibliotek) launched in 1924, the already knowledgeable Swedish people was yearning to “learn more” about medical matters.43 Their knowledge would not only benefit themselves, as the editors wrote, but also society at large, due to “the strongly growing social importance of medicine.”44 But what exactly were they expected to learn more about? Beyond specific topics on organs, bacteria and various physical ailments, two volumes in The People’s Library of Medicine were devoted to mental illnesses, including sexually related ones. The psychiatrist Viktor Wigert explained in the case of homosexuality (categorized under “abnormal sexualities”) that the signs could be quite obvious, such as the rare cases of “bearded women” and “men with breasts,” but in other cases the signs were hardly noticeable at all.45 This visual unreliability was not the only complexity at hand: Wigert noted that the question of “real” versus “acquired” homosexuality was still not settled.46 There

198  Unfinished Stories seemed in any case to be a certain risk, as Wigert wrote, that vulnerable individuals could be misled, particularly “wavering” people, who shifted in and out of same-sex desire.47 Wigert also discussed “homosexual acts without homosexuality,” which he claimed to be fairly common, especially in same-sex environments, saturated with “unsound erotic feelings.”48 Thus, on the one hand, same-sex desire was “abnormal,” but, on the other hand, it was also “common” and part of an expected spectrum of human behavior. Moreover, Wigert declared that a sure sign of female homosexuality was masculine characteristics, but at the same time, he also explained that these characteristics could be almost impossible to detect.49 As a final twist, homosexuality was not even necessarily about sex—as Wigert emphasized in a plea for greater tolerance, homosexuality was, just like “normal love,” about much more than sex.50 While this contribution to the People’s Library thus initially repeated the association of “masculine” women with homosexuality, Wigert did not stop at this model but, rather, troubled its validity. Efforts to educate “the people” in these sexual complexities were not restricted to the written word; some doctors also accepted invitations to give public lectures. In 1922, the physician Jacob Billström offered a lecture on “sexual pathologies” before “the academic citizens of Uppsala,” but asked that only a brief summary of his talk should be printed due to the “different impression the subject might give in speech and in writing.”51 Five years later, Billström had become bolder: In the spring of 1927, students at Stockholm University were offered a series of “sexualethical” lectures that were subsequently published in an abbreviated but still informative version.52 On both occasions, Billström admitted that the empirical basis of sexual knowledge was very thin and that his own lecture was therefore based more on his twenty years of being a “nervedoctor” (nervläkare) than on literature.53 A substantial part of Billström’s 1927 talk was devoted to homosexuality, described as a “common” as well as an “important” phenomenon that had played a vital role in history, “particularly in the era of Plato in Ancient Greek, but also during other eras.”54 Though Billström highlighted the importance of cultural context (“where the lines are drawn to normality”), he also recounted the sexological understanding of homosexuality as a consequence of gender inversion (noting cases of female “beards” in the case of homosexual women).55 Yet, Billström ultimately deemphasized the matter of biology and appearances, and argued not only that bisexuality could be seen as “normal,” but also that the “love felt by homosexuals” was just as “beautiful and as strong” as heterosexual love.56 This kind of popularized medical language, referencing “normal feelings” as well as “normal love,” appears as a textbook example of the familiar “normal/deviant” binary, as it has been discussed and deconstructed in queer theory.57 However, the arguments quoted earlier also point to a number of “queer” ambiguities: On the one hand, the authors

In No Certain Terms  199 repeated nineteenth-century theories of “abnormal” sexualities, but at the same time they also discussed how bisexuality was “normal” too and how same-sex desires were “common.” These types of qualifications and distinctions created, in turn, a discursive space for non-normative desires that could be connected to modern context rather than pathological conditions. Moreover, the emphasis on homosexuality as “common” in these popularized medical writings troubled the association of normal with common—apparently the “abnormal” was common too (and even normal!).58 On the whole, the language used in these medical lectures and books offered a fleeting understanding of sexuality where people could “waver” in and out of same-sex desires. While female masculinity was not entirely detached from sexual abnormality, Billström in particular appears to have put little weight on gender transgression as a trustworthy sign of homosexuality. This scientific nuance was not necessarily reflected in the contemporary press, where the phrase “not normal” was more likely to be used in a moral setting, in reference to people who failed to meet certain gender expectations. As one concerned observer wrote in a Swedish daily paper in 1925, “no normal woman” would want to be together with a “perfumed, fair-haired and adorned male freak,” and conversely, “no young man with sound sexual instincts would find himself attracted to women who neutralize everything that in the eyes of our forefathers made women into women.”59 Transgressive gender appearances thus remained, in popular media, a threat to the heteronormative model of desire.60 As Lena Lennerhed points out, the ongoing medicalization of homosexuality did not necessarily entail greater tolerance but, rather, a heightened awareness among critics as well as authorities.61 In terms of the popularization of sexology, the examples presented here suggest that the term “normal,” in reference to sexuality, was used intermittently in the Swedish language in the 1920s, particularly in popularized medical handbooks but also in the daily presses. Medical professionals meanwhile appears to have been uncomfortable with the fact that homosexuality constituted a criminal offense in the eye of the law in Sweden. The very last volume of Bonniers’ Little Handbooks of Scientific Topics (1933) drew together many of their arguments: Authored by Vilhelm Lundstedt, a member of Parliament and law professor, this volume offered a proposition to decriminalize homosexuality based on social, historical and medical grounds.62 Lundstedt even argued that homosexuality should be seen as “natural” and on par with heterosexual love.63 However, the argument of naturalness constituted a radical proposition that was not left unchallenged: Even those who supported the proposition to decriminalize insisted on the importance of upholding a clear distinction between normal and abnormal sexuality.64 Reflecting perhaps a lingering concern on behalf of policy-makers regarding the stability of this distinction, a higher age of consent was set for

200  Unfinished Stories homosexual intercourse than heterosexual when the Swedish parliament finally passed a decriminalization act in 1944.65 Scholarship in other national contexts has tended to downplay, as noted earlier, the importance of sexology in regard to the shaping of modern sexual identities, emphasizing instead the impact of urbanization and modern culture.66 In the Swedish case one has to consider that the impact of urbanization was still modest in Sweden in the 1920s, whereas reading traditions were strong across the country. Several new medically focused book projects were launched in the early 1920s, as this chapter has shown, with the stated intent to further strengthen the level of “common knowledge” (allmänbildningen) in Sweden.67 Physicians and psychologists were highly respected at this time not only as medical professionals but also as policy-influencers and as modern social engineers of sorts that were crucial to the building of the “people’s home.”68 Nevertheless, the message they conveyed on female sexuality and gender variance was ambiguous and inconclusive: On the one hand, they recounted the older theories of sexology, including the association of mannish women with homosexuality, but at the same time, they questioned the relevance of such types and boundaries in modern culture and society. Still, even though the individual reader was thus left with a palette of interpretative options, the framing of the subject was clear: homosexuality belonged to the field of medicine and, more specifically, to the subfield of pathology. In the next decade, the language of sexual (ab-)normality would become increasingly solidified. When Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (tracing the fate of Stephen, a masculine, or “inverted,” woman struggling with her same-sex desires) was published in Swedish in 1932, the review was written not by a literary critic but by the wellknown gynecologist Ada Nilsson.69 In her review, Nilsson related the novel primarily to recent psychiatric works that had discussed to what extent homosexuality also constituted a social and moral problem. As revealed by the quotes in Nilsson’s review, the once-statistical descriptor “normal” had now become deeply intertwined with the normative concepts of “healthy” and “moral” (and their negations, in connection to homosexuality).70 Nilsson herself sided with the perspective of tolerance and understanding and lauded the Swedish publisher who had enabled the translation of Hall’s “blazing protest novel.”71 While her interest in the subject appears to have had professional as well as personal grounds, her choice to speak about female homosexuality in public in this manner, as a woman, was not, as I will discuss next, without risk.72

The (Queer-)Feminist Perspective In 1924, Elin Wägner, one of Sweden’s most famous authors and journalists at the time, objected to filmmakers’ habits of portraying older feminists as conspicuously ugly.73 Her own novel, Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull

In No Certain Terms  201 Gang), which had recently been filmed, featured in its cinematic version such an older feminist (who urges a group of younger office girls to fight for their rights, see Figure  5.1). Wägner’s objection was of little avail. Two years later, even one of August Strindberg’s emancipated spinsters made it to the movies: Based on one of Strindberg’s novelettes published in 1884, the movie Giftas (Getting Married) told the story of a happily married couple in Stockholm whose bliss is almost destroyed by a feminist writer, Annie.74 As Annie pursues the young wife with strange ideas, she succeeds in alienating her new friend from her husband and even gradually takes his place in the couple’s home. The suffragette-styled Annie was described in the film magazine Filmnyheter as a familiar “snake in the paradise” (whose attempt to poison the young wife with feminist ideas nevertheless failed).75 Playing on well-known stereotypes, the film associated feminism with a kind of oldfashioned female masculinity that was unattractive and yet a threat to the institution of marriage.76 However, as Tommy Gustafsson has noted, the film was not received well in the press: Reviewers, in fact, dismissed the entire film as old-fashioned, arguing that the young wife as well as her feminist friend were both completely unbelievable types in a modern context (the one too submissive, the other too suffragette-like). Yet, as

Figure 5.1 An older feminist urges a group of young office girls to fight for their rights. From the film Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull Gang), 1923 Source: © 1923 AB Svensk Filmindustri. Reproduced by Svenska Filminstitutet.

202  Unfinished Stories pointed out by Gustafsson, if it had not been for the genre of exaggerated comedy, these kinds of stories—exploring female bonding as well as changing gender relations—would likely have been too serious for the movies.77 Meanwhile, Swedish feminist commentators continued to question the validity of gender as an organizing principle in and of society. In her many columns in the feminist periodical Tidevarvet, Klara Johanson, a well-known cultural critic, challenged the entire sexual system and particularly its foundation in a division of masculinity and femininity at a level of detail that she found absurd.78 This kind of critique also appeared beyond feminist periodicals: In a daily paper in 1926, another feminist critic, Gurli Linder, challenged not only traditional gender ideals but also the categories themselves, arguing that the division of “masculine” and “feminine” was entirely a matter of “convention” and “a product of culture.”79 While such radical statements were not unusual in the context of gender, they were less common or, in fact, almost non-existing in regard to sexuality.80 In her memoirs, professor Lydia Wahlström (who had been in a relationship with Johanson) described the subject of female homosexuality as the great “tremens tremendum” of culture, revolving around fear, anxiety and rejection.81 She deplored in hindsight that so few women had written on this matter, as she believed that men lacked important insights (Klara Johanson appears to have agreed: Having plowed through the works of Freud in the mid-1920s, she concluded that in the end nothing had struck her as relevant to her own experiences and declared that Freud simply “does not know our type.”).82 As previous scholarship has pointed out, it is hardly surprising that few women addressed the topic of female same-sex desire in public at this time, considering the already vulnerable position of the “emancipated” female writer, often accused of being less than a true woman to begin with.83 Taking on a stigmatized subject such as sexual deviance would simply have entailed a risk of being associated with the subject itself. Still, the topic of female “queer” desires was not entirely untouchable— Wahlström had written a novel that explored intimate friendships among female students (Sin fars dotter [Her Father’s Daughter], 1923), and Johanson frequently alluded to love between women in her sophisticated cultural essays.84 Johanson and Wahlström were both connected to the famous Fogelstad women—a circle of feminists engaged in new emancipation projects as well as in complicated and passionate affairs with each other during the 1920s.85 However, as Jens Rydström writes, the respectable standing of these women in Swedish society seem to have placed them “above suspicion” in regard to homosexuality.86 One contributing factor to the standing of these emancipated career women as above suspicion was in all likelihood connected to their own precautions, avoiding or distancing themselves from sensitive subjects and terms, including even the word “emancipated.” Feminist pioneer

In No Certain Terms  203 Alma Söderhjelm thus argued in 1923 that it was not right that this “outdated” word had been used about her friend, Doctor Ada Nilsson, one of Sweden’s first female gynecologists (who would later publish a positive review of The Well of Loneliness, as noted earlier).87 Söderhjelm insisted that Nilsson should rather be thought of as “up to date” (tidsenlig). Moreover, noting how the epithet of “man-woman” had always been ridiculed, Söderhjelm emphasized that her friend was different: Unlike many others, who had failed to balance the scales, Doctor Nilsson was a “solid” woman to begin with, only naturally blessed with many “male qualities.”88 Clearly, Ada Nilsson’s position as a well-known female gynecologist was seen as in need of defense; not only had she been one of leading figures in the Swedish suffrage movement but she was now also engaged in social reform work that focused on sexual enlightenment and women’s sexual health.89 Whether Nilsson’s relationships with other women also contributed to her friend’s defensive arguments remains less clear. As Marti M. Lybeck observes in the German context, in the 1920s emancipation alone was “no longer a standard marker of sexual deviance,” and professional women’s contributions were “generally, if grudgingly, accepted.”90 In the case of Ada Nilsson and the feminist Fogelstad group, Kristina Lundgren notes, on the one hand, how “everyone” knew about female couples living together in these circles but also how few would have thought about them in sexual terms.91 At the same time, as Lundgren also notes, these were times of change in regard to the silence surrounding female same-sex love.92 However, Söderhjelm’s concerns with the epithet of man-woman bear echoes not primarily of the gender ambiguity of the modern woman but, rather, of the fatal accusation of mannishness that had faced the first generation of New Women at the turn of the century. The feminist “hideous creature” described in August Strindberg’s 1907 novel Svarta fanor (Black Banners) was, in fact, modeled on the pioneering feminist Ellen Key.93 Such attacks came not only from male critics but also female: Key herself had warned of restless career women as well as fanatic feminists and derailed “viragoes.”94 In the 1920s, this kind of rhetoric was still at play, and it arguably affected not only established feminists but also younger women about to learn the gendered as well as sexual limits of modern femininity: Female masculinity may have been fashionable in some contexts, but the wrong kind of gender transgression still constituted a cautionary tale.95 Finally, the undetermined state of sexual knowledge in the 1920s can be illustrated by a letter to the women’s magazine Idun in 1927, written by a confused “bank girl” (Bankfröken).96 Her question was simple enough: Should she or should she not go ahead and live together with her female friend? Her aunt had advised against it. Idun, however, encouraged her to do so, based on an argument of happiness: “Life is short. The years run by. Perhaps much has been lost already. Move in with her.”97

204  Unfinished Stories Idun’s advice, which celebrated the idea of “twin souls,” was dressed in a language that tied into a nineteenth-century discourse of romantic friendships between women rather than concerns with “normal love” or sexual deviance.98 These different types of conceptual frameworks suggest that the 1920s was a time of mixed, parallel and competing discourses on gender, love, friendship and sexuality: While some consumed the entire works of Freud, others composed their arguments in the language of Jane Austen.99

Concluding Remarks Having examined little-explored Swedish source material from the 1920s, focusing on texts that in various ways approached the topic of the sexuality of the modern woman, this chapter has shown how the definition of “normal” appearances and desires was the subject of intense negotiations in this period of time. Even more fundamentally, the rhetorical practices investigated suggest that the concept of normal itself was being negotiated, referring variously to health standards, beauty ideals, statistical variance and moral boundaries.100 Though recent Anglo-Saxon scholarship has brought attention to the complex history of the idea of normality, the Swedish context has been less explored, particularly in regard to the interwar years preceding the founding of the Swedish Federation for Sex Education (RFSU) in 1933. This chapter has examined several types of texts, focusing first on the moral perspective of cultural critics and youth advisors, second, on the scientific perspective of medical experts, and, third, on the feminist perspective of the women’s rights movement. Even though female masculinity appeared in all of these discourses as a source of anxiety or concern, the potential “queerness” of the masculine woman remained, at the same time, highly ambiguous. From the perspective of conservative cultural critics, modernity’s pleasure-orientated and “Americanized” culture was accused not only of shallowness but also of being a major source of distraction to Swedish women, who seemed increasingly forgetful of their true calling, defined in terms of marriage and motherhood. Career women in particular were accused of transgressing their gender in many ways, focusing on the self rather than the family. As one critic concluded, “there is merely a difference of degree, not of species, between the tribade on the one hand, and the intellectual Amazon and the blaze, jaded female bohemian on the other hand.”101 Meanwhile, the topic of homosexuality was approached more explicitly in several new Swedish popularized publications on medicine and psychiatry, dedicated to “enlighten” the people on medical topics.102 However, even though homosexuality (categorized as “pathological”) was considered to be the opposite of “normal,” the authors made an effort in these books to explain the complexities of desire, emphasizing, for instance, how homosexual feelings could be seen

In No Certain Terms  205 as normal, too.103 Identifying “signs” of homosexuality was described as challenging by several authors: On the one hand, sexual “abnormality” could be recognized in “gender-inverted” habits and appearances (masculine women, in the case of female homosexuality), but, at the same time, it was also pointed out that same-sex love was common and impossible to detect. Thus, while nineteenth-century associations in sexology of inverted genders with perverted sexualities were still present in popular presentations of medicine in the 1920s, this connection was also troubled and challenged by the experts themselves. Meanwhile, in Swedish popular media at this time, the word “normal” appeared in a variety of contexts related to the gendered boundaries of the modern woman. In the fashion magazine Charme, for instance, “normal” referred not only to specific health recommendations but also to the requirements of a heterosexually defined feminine beauty ideal. These rhetorical practices thus effectively positioned the feminine, heterosexual woman as normal and the masculine woman as different, associated with ambiguous looks and uncertain desires. In addition, the older stereotype of the ugly mannish spinster continued to appear as an entertaining element in Swedish films and visual culture. Though reviewers in the press sometimes dismissed the most exaggerated stories and images as outdated, feminist writers still remained vigilant of associations with the wrong kind of emancipation. Thus, while they continued to challenge the categories of gender and essentialist notions of masculine and feminine qualities, many hesitated to approach topics related to sexual “abnormality” or homosexuality. Allusions to same-sex love nevertheless appeared in the 1920s in feminist-authored Swedish literature, where the vagueness of language allowed for a less determined interpretative framework. In conclusion, the potential “queerness” associated with female masculinity in Swedish culture in the 1920s was not necessarily tied to a distinct identity type; rather, the “queer” looks and desires of the modern woman constituted a well of uncertain terms and unfinished stories. How such desires were represented and negotiated beyond conduct advice and medical science at this time, particularly in novels, will be further discussed in the next chapter.

Notes 1 Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 133. 2 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 28. 3 Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 170. 4 Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

206  Unfinished Stories Press, 2016), 5; Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 175. 5 On sexology and “gender inversion,” see Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey, and Martin B. Duberman (New York: Meridian Books, 1989); Laura L. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 6 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 124. On the New Woman in a Swedish late-nineteenth century context, see Karin Johannisson, Den mörka kontinenten: kvinnan, medicinen och fin-de-siècle, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Norstedt, 2005); Eva Helen Ulvros, “Den nya kvinnan,” in Individer i rörelse: Kulturhistoria i 1800-talets Sverige, ed. Birgitta Svensson and Anna Walette (Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2012). 7 August Strindberg, Inferno (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1914; repr., Samlade skrifter, vol. 28), 160. “en gynander, som velat slå männens record.” The term “gynander” typically referred to a “woman with male characteristics,” as noted in Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, s.v. gynander. 8 Quoted in Jens Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 294. As discussed by Sally Ledger in regard to narratives of female same-sex love in literature, the model of “romantic friendships” was being challenged at the turn of the nineteenth century by a pathologised “lesbian” version of love between women, especially in male-authored literature. Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, 125. On Strindberg and the Swedish context, see Eva Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935 (Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2016), 20, 230; Kristin Järvstad, Den kluvna kvinnligheten: ‘öfvergångskvinnan’ som litterär gestalt i svenska samtidsromaner 1890–1920 (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2008), 137–38. 9 Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 230–32; Charlotte Ross, Eccentricity and Sameness: Discourses on Lesbianism and Desire Between Women in Italy, 1860s-1930s (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 59. 10 A concern voiced across the world at this time. See, for instance, Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935, 39. See also Chapters 1 and 2 for further examples. 11 Arnold Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan (Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist  & Wiksell, 1924), 88–89. 12 Ibid., 90–91. “Det är i själva verket ingen art- endast gradskillnad mellan tribaden å ena sidan och å den andra den intellektuella amazonen, och den blaserade illusionsfria kvinnliga bohêmen, såsom de i våra moderna kvinnoromaner figurera som representanter för det nya kvinnoidealet.” As Laura Behling notes in the American context, concerns that the emancipated woman would abandon her homestead were frequently voiced in anti-suffragist campaigns. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935, 38. As indicated by Sölvén’s argument, concerns in the 1920s were fuelled in Sweden moreover by anxieties regarding the influence of American popular culture. 13 Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan, 90. “Det är karakteristiskt i vilken omfattning i motivkretsen för denna litteratur upptagits homosexualiteten” (emphasis in original). On Sölvén’s arguments, see also Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 65–67. That Sölvén gathered his evidence from literature in this manner was

In No Certain Terms  207 consistent at the time with the understanding that art mirrored reality. On this point, see Kristina Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), 12. 14 Jeanna Oterdahl, Ditt ansvar som kvinna: ett ord till unga flickor (Stockholm: Diakonistyr., 1929). For examples of vocational guidance books for girls, see Fredrik Hjelmqvist and Knut Tynell, eds., Biblioteksbladet: Elvte årgången, Biblioteksbladet: Organ för Sveriges allmänna biblioteksförening (SAB) (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & söners förlag, 1926), 11. 15 Elizabeth Chesser, The Woman Who Knows Herself (London: W. Heinemann Ltd., 1926), 15. 16 Ibid., 38. “The young girl of sixteen or seventeen should, if she is normal and healthy, begin to take an interest in boys.” 17 “Känn dig själv,” Stockholms-Tidningen, October  24, 1926, 11. “hon har frappanta ord om den typ av kvinnor som ‘intagas av glödande beundran för sitt eget kön’ ” 18 Ibid. Chesser, The Woman Who Knows Herself, 38–39. 19 Emma Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016). See also Chapter 1. 20 Ivar Lo-Johansson, Mina städers ansikten (Stockholm: Wahlström  & Widstrand, 1930). 21 Ibid., 16–19. 22 Ibid., 20. “kvinnlig aand” 23 Yvonne Hirdman, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds., Sveriges historia: 1920–1965 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 202. See also Chapter 1. 24 “Flickan av idag och den närmaste morgondagen,” Filmnyheter, December 6, 1926, 12. On youth as a factor of tolerance in the context of female masculinity, see also Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 106. 25 Alison Oram, “ ‘A Sudden Orgy of Decadence’: Writing About Sex Between Women in the Interwar Popular Press,” in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, eds. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 176. 26 Viktor Wigert, Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker, 2nd ed., Medicinskt folkbibliotek (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927), 122–28. “den normala kärleken” (p. 124) 27 Anton Nyström, Om homosexualiteten inför vetenskapen och lagen (Stockholm: Svanbäck  & komp., 1919). On Anton Nyström’s arguments, see Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 49–50; Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 245–47. 28 Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900– 1935, 246. 29 Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 170. 30 For examples in the interwar context, see Anna Clark, “Twilight Moments,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005); Jenny Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017). 31 “Kraftiga händer äro vackra händer,” Charme, January  15, 1924, 9; “Ett kapitel om näsans form,” Charme, March 1, 1924, 14; “Öronen och vad de förråda,” Charme, April 15, 1924, 20. The science of physiognomy, popular in the late nineteenth century, assumed that the body, and especially facial expressions, revealed a person’s character. In the 1920s, the language of physiognomy was sometimes revived in the context of movie stars (interpreting

208  Unfinished Stories their personality and star qualities). On this rhetoric, see Therése Andersson, Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014), 13–14. 32 For instance, when Charme discussed the meaning of “normal hands” in 1924, the term was used as a way of clearing up certain historical misconceptions: While people in the past had perceived the “coarse” hands of working class women as ugly and the “lifeless pale hands” of ladies as beautiful, “the truth is that neither was normal.” See also “Kraftiga händer äro vackra händer,” Charme, January 15, 1924, 9. By Charme’s argument, normal hands were thus essentially the same as middle-class hands. Another example from the daily presses illustrates the same idea—that hard work was sometimes required to stay normal: Thus, for a “healthy, normal woman” (“frisk, normal kvinna”) who felt that her body shape was becoming too round, there was only one thing to do (to stay normal)—lose weight by exercising or working harder. “I form, utan former,” Svenska Dagbladet, November 22, 1924 33 See, for instance, Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Knopf, 2015); Lisa Z. Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012). On the cultural context and impact of sexology, see also Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds., Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). 34 Åsa Bergenheim, “Sexualdebatternas århundrade,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Stockholm: Signum, 2009); Pia Laskar, “Sexualfrågan som verktyg i könsdebatten: Två texter från mellankrigstiden,” in Seklernas sex: bidrag till sexualitetens historia, eds. Åsa Bergenheim and Lena Lennerhed (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1997); Lena Lennerhed, Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia (Hedemora; Uppsala: Gidlund, 2002). 35 Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia, 36–39. 36 Ibid., 157. 37 Gert Bonnier, Om könsbestämningen: en sammanställning av nyare undersökningar och teorier, Bonniers små handböcker i vetenskapliga ämnen (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1925). The quote can be found on the back cover (“för den moderna människan bör det kännas som en plikt att i största möjliga utsträckning hålla sig underkunnig om varje ny erövring i andens rike, till vilket område den än hänför sig.”). 38 In Sweden, the subject of sexuality had been discussed in policy terms since at least the early 1800s when the regulation of prostitution was debated. See Yvonne Svanström, Policing Public Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm 1812–1880 (Stockholm: Atlas, 2000); Bergenheim, “Sexualdebatternas århundrade,” 122. By the 1920s, the Social Democratic Women’s Union, founded in 1920, also became engaged in sexual health issues; Lennerhed, Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia, 32. On Swedish health policy debates in the 1930s, increasingly focused on the “population crisis,” birth rates and race issues, see Yvonne Hirdman, Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010); Annika Berg, Den gränslösa hälsan: Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009); Bergenheim, “Sexualdebatternas århundrade,” 121–28. 39 Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 165. 40 Ibid. 41 As Chris Waters concludes: “Many in the 1920s and 1930s did take the claims of the psychologists of sexuality seriously, and it is in these decades that we can therefore begin to map the ways in which they influenced state policy with respect to the regulation of homosexuality.” Chris Waters, “Sexology,”

In No Certain Terms  209 in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, eds. Harry G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 59. For the Swedish context, see Bergenheim, “Sexualdebatternas århundrade,” 121–28; Karin Johannisson, “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget,” in Lychnos. Årsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoria (Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991). 42 Bonnier, Om könsbestämningen: en sammanställning av nyare undersökningar och teorier, 5, 264. 43 Wigert, Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker. Quote from back cover: “I vår tid och vårt land, där allmänbildningen nått en höjd som aldrig förr, är behovet av och längtan efter kunskap i medicinska frågor större än någonsin.” 44 Ibid. “medicinens starkt växande sociala betydelse” 45 Ibid., 122–23. “Kvinnliga bröst hos en man, en utpräglad skäggväxt hos en kvinna.” 46 Ibid., 127. This debate continued, as Jens Rydström shows, throughout the interwar period. Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 167–73. 47 Wigert, Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker, 127. “övergångsfallen, som i sin erotiska inriktning mot det ena eller andra könet äro vacklande.” 48 Ibid., 127. “Mycket vanliga äro homosexuella handlingar utan föreliggande verklig homosexualitet. Så t.ex. i skolor, pensioner, kaserner o.dyl., där en mängd ungdomar äro församlade, avskilda från det motsatta könet och där atmosfären är övermättad av instängd och osund erotik.” 49 Ibid., 123. “manligheten hos kvinnan behöver emellertid icke vara så iögonfallande, utan den kan röja sig i detaljer, som mången gång endast fackmannaögat kan upptäcka” 50 Ibid., 124. “den normala kärleken” 51 Jakob Billström, “Sexuell patologi: referat efter föredraget,” in Sexuell hygien och etik: fyra föredrag, eds. Manfred Björkquist, et al. (Stockholm: Magn. Bergvall, 1922). Billström’s hesitation to publish the lecture was possibly motivated by previous experiences: Jens Rydström notes that Billström had already taken an initiative in 1906 to invite a German psychiatrist to speak before a student association, which caused a ‘ “minor scandal” ’ due to references in the talk to “sexual abnormalities.” Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 48. 52 Jakob Billström, “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser,” in Sexuell hygien: sexual-etiska föreläsningar, ed. Ivar Broman (Stockholm: Sveriges kristliga studentrörelses förl., 1927). Billström had given his talk in two versions, one for female students and one for male, but the printed version was the compilation of these two. On Billström, see also Fredrik Silverstolpe and Göran Söderström, eds., Sympatiens hemlighetsfulla makt: Stockholms homosexuella 1860–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 1999), 388–89. 53 Billström, “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser,” 26. 54 Ibid., 49. “särskilt under Platons tid under den grekiska antiken, men även under andra epoker.” References to history and particularly Ancient Greece were not uncommon among medical professionals at this time, arguing that homosexuality should be decriminalized. On this “historical” argument, see Waters, “Sexology,” 51. 55 Billström, “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser,” 49. “gränsen för normaliteten” 56 Ibid., 50. “lika vacker, lika stark.” Billström even suggested that “homosexual feelings” (känslan vid homosexualitet) constituted a “normal emotional state” (normalt känslotillstånd), even though the “homosexual act” (den homosexuella akten) was not. Ibid., 51.

210  Unfinished Stories 57 Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 58 Recent scholarship has suggested that the queer theoretical attention to normativity in terms of dichotomies may ultimately limit the queerness of the historical past that do not fit into such (modern) structures of thought. Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” differences 26, no. 1 (2015); Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. The examples in this chapter suggest that the terminology of sexual “normality” does not necessarily fit into a clear normal/deviant binary in the interwar period if understood as a mirror of hetero- and homosexuality. 59 “Den nästa generationen,” Svenska Dagbladet, June  27, 1925, 18. “ingen ung man med sunda könsinstinkter känner sig dragen till de kvinnoneutra som [. . .] sträva att utplåna allt som våra i våra fäders ögon gjorde kvinnan till kvinna [. . .] ingen normal kvinna . . . vill lämna sitt öde i händerna på de sista dagarnas heliga: parfymerade, skönlockiga, midjesnörda herräckel med armband och juvelringar.” 60 For instance, as noted in Chapter 1, a conservative Swedish publication was concerned in 1926 that one of Stockholm’s nightclubs, the so-called Grotta Azurra (The Azurra Cave), encouraged such gendered and sexual depravities. Fäderneslandet, April 10, 1926. Quoted in Kristina Lejdström, Grotta Azzurra, 2nd ed. (Everöd: Recito, 2016), 54. 61 Lennerhed, Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia, 168. In Sweden, the first arrests of lesbians occurred in the 1940s, just prior to the decriminalization act was passed. Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 308–13. 62 Vilhelm Lundstedt, ‘Otukt mot naturen’: Bör den vara straffbar? Bonniers små handböcker i vetenskapliga ämnen (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1933). 63 Quoted in Lennerhed, Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia, 162. 64 Ibid., 163. 65 Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 173. 66 See note 33. However, as Lisa Z. Sigel points out in the British context, “[f]ew read sexology, but the ideas of sexology began to affect the population through the work of such popularizers.” Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain, 44. 67 As Johan Kärnfelt has shown, efforts to spread useful scientific discoveries to farmers and manufacturers had been undertaken in the mid-nineteenth century by the Royal Academy in Stockholm (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien). The modern genre of “popular science” had its breakthrough in Sweden in the 1920s, when a scientifically based enlightenment was seen as an important foundation of a democratic society, which depended on educated people who could make well-informed choices. Johan Kärnfelt, Mellan nytta och nöje: ett bidrag till populärvetenskapens historia i Sverige (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2000). Beyond such book projects, a range of new magazines established in the early twentieth century similarly declared ambitions to reach broad sections of the population, “from castle to cottage,” as Ulrika Holgersson has shown. Ulrika Holgersson, Populärkulturen och klassamhället: Arbete, klass och genus i svensk dampress i början av 1900-talet (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005), 304. 68 As Roger Qvarsell writes, literature devoted to guiding people in living their lives had flourished even in the eighteenth century in Sweden. By the early twentieth century this was a growing genre that aspired to incorporate the latest scientific discoveries, but the line between medical enlightenment and moral admonitions was often blurry. Roger Qvarsell, “Hälsa och sjukvård,”

In No Certain Terms  211 in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Signum, 2009), 399–400. On the enlightenment spirit and the “utopian reformism” of the people’s home, see also Hirdman, Björkman, and Lundberg, Sveriges historia: 1920–1965, 216–18. 69 Ada Nilsson, “Tre böcker om själens kamps och nöd,” Tidevarvet, November 26, 1932. On Ada Nilsson, see Kristina Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014). 70 See also Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 170. 71 Ada Nilsson, “Tre böcker om själens kamps och nöd,” Tidevarvet, November 26, 1932. “flammande protestbok” 72 Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen, 186. 73 Tommy Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet (Lund: Sekel, 2007), 151. See also Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015). 74 En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 151–52. 75 “Giftas,” Filmnyheter, February 15, 1926, 12–13. “ormen i paradiset” 76 Jens Rydström and David Tjeder, eds., Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009), 224–28. On the history of anti-feminist attacks on the “New Woman,” targeting her as a “mannish lesbian,” see also Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935, 31–59; Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” 77 Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet, 151, 60. 78 Carina Burman, K.J.: en biografi över Klara Johanson (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2007); Anna Bohlin, Röstens anatomi: läsningar av politik i Elin Wägners Silverforsen, Selma Lagerlöfs Löwensköldtrilogi och Klara Johansons Tidevarvskåserier (Umeå: h:ström—Text & Kultur, 2008). In her early career, Klara Johanson used the signature Huck Leber (from Huckleberry Finn), which functioned as much as a playful male persona than an alias. By her own account, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn provided her with a relaxed way of delivering quick and clever observations for the paper she was writing for. While Huck thus seemed to have provided a certain playful (male) freedom and agency in her early career, she eventually grew tired of him and stopped using the alias in 1911. She approached the 1920s and the era of Freud only as “K.J.” See Burman, K.J.: en biografi över Klara Johanson, 134–39. 79 Gurli Linder, “Några riktlinjer inom den moderna kvinnorörelsen,” Sydsvenska Dagbladet, October 5, 1926. 80 Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 255. 81 Ibid., 23, 260. On the relationship between Klara Johanson and Lydia Wahlström, see Greger Eman, Nya himlar över en ny jord: om Klara Johanson, Lydia Wahlström och den feministiska vänskapskärleken (Lund; Stockholm: Ellerström, 1993). 82 Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 15, 257. Freud’s psychoanalytical theories were much discussed in Sweden in the 1920s, mostly from a male perspective that emphasized the rationale of a liberated sexual drive. Bergenheim, “Sexualdebatternas århundrade,” 123. Klara Johanson, in fact, preferred Otto Weininger, whose infamous book Geschlecht und Charakter, published in the

212  Unfinished Stories early twentieth century, was seen as misogynistic on account of its description of emancipated women as mannish and a product of “male” qualities. Still, as literary historian Anna Bohlin notes, Johanson seems to have enjoyed reading Weininger, particularly his approach to gender as a spectrum (rather than a binary), which contained bisexual implications: If most people were sexually mixed they should also be capable of desiring both men and women (by a heteronormative logic connecting attraction to difference). The reason Weininger was not liked by feminists was his conclusions that the ambitions of emancipated women were entirely a product of their male qualities (visible also in their mannish looks), and how most other women were not interested in being emancipated. Bohlin, Röstens anatomi: läsningar av politik i Elin Wägners Silverforsen, Selma Lagerlöfs Löwensköldtrilogi och Klara Johansons Tidevarvskåserier, 311. See also Judy Greenway, “It’s What You Do With It That Counts: Interpretations of Otto Weininger,” in Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, eds. Lucy Bland and Laura L. Doan (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). 83 Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 23, 255–60; Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, 131–32; Marti M. Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). 84 Bohlin, Röstens anatomi: läsningar av politik i Elin Wägners Silverforsen, Selma Lagerlöfs Löwensköldtrilogi och Klara Johansons Tidevarvskåserier, 322. In 1923, Johanson moreover translated Rosa Mayreder’s Gechlect und Kultur to Swedish (Sexualitet och kultur), which contained an unusual apology for homosexual love. Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 256. 85 Ulrika Knutson, Kvinnor på gränsen till genombrott: grupporträtt av Tidevarvets kvinnor (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2004); Lena Eskilsson, Drömmen om kamratsamhället: Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på Fogelstad 1925–35 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991). 86 Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 294. 87 Alma Söderhjelm, “Vad är emancipation?” Idun, March 18, 1923, 253. On the friendship between Alma Söderhjelm and Ada Nilsson, see Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen, 109–18. 88 Söderhjelm, “Vad är emancipation?” Idun, March 18, 1923, 253. “Det finnes knappast något ord som blivit så häcklat, som detta ordet ‘man-kvinna,’ [. . .] Och dock har vår tid just fordrat att nutidens kvinna skall vara man-kvinna, det vill säga, att hon inom sin egen livsform skall ännu ytterligare rymma in en mans livsinnehåll. [. . .] Alla dessa manliga egenskaper har redan en god genius gett henne. [. . .] Där har ni Ada Nilsson som kvinna—helgjuten.” 89 Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen, 78–83. 90 Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933, 149–50. 91 Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen, 185. How these women themselves defined or thought about their relationships is yet another matter, as Jens Rydström points out. Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950, 294. 92 Lundgren, Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen, 185. 93 Rydström and Tjeder, Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria, 225. 94 Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935, 9–10.

In No Certain Terms  213 95 During the 1920s, satirists and cartoonists continued to insinuate that certain types of emancipated and mannish-looking women seemed rather too passionate about other women See, for instance, “Guds beläte,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, September 7, 1927, 9. 96 “Damernas diskussionklubb,” Idun, October 2, 222, Supplement. 97 Ibid. “Livet är så kort. Åren rinna snabbt. Mycket kanske redan gått förlorat. Flytta tillsammans med henne.” 98 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 99 Narratives existed across an array of media: As Sigel writes in the British context, “Magazines offered a visual education based in symbolic erotics, novels made the world fraught with romance, marriage guides offered a how-to program on sex, and sexology offered a program on sexual variation. [. . .] Realms of information functioned simultaneously, only sometimes addressing each other or affecting each other, often creating disjunctions and gaps in culture that nonetheless felt saturated with sexuality.” Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain, 44–45. 100 For a more extensive discussion on this point, and more specifically the argument that not all norms have historically been connected with the idea of normality, see Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 168–73. 101 Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan, 90. 102 Billström, “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser”; Wigert, Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker. 103 E.g. Billström, “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser,” 50–51.

Bibliography Andersson, Therése. Beauty Box: filmstjärnor och skönhetskultur i det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014. Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York: Knopf, 2015. Behling, Laura L. The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935. Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Berg, Annika. Den gränslösa hälsan: Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009. Bergenheim, Åsa. “Sexualdebatternas århundrade.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900-talet, edited by Jakob Christensson, 116–37. Stockholm: Signum, 2009. Billström, Jakob. “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser.” In Sexuell hygien: sexual-etiska föreläsningar, edited by Ivar Broman, 26–57. Stockholm: Sveriges kristliga studentrörelses förl., 1927. ———. “Sexuell patologi: referat efter föredraget.” In Sexuell hygien och etik: fyra föredrag, edited by Manfred Björkquist, Jakob Billström, J. Vilh Hultkrantz and Josua Tillgren, 5–76. Stockholm: Magn. Bergvall, 1922. Bland, Lucy, and Laura Doan, eds. Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Oxford: Polity Press, 1998. Bohlin, Anna. Röstens anatomi: läsningar av politik i Elin Wägners Silverforsen, Selma Lagerlöfs Löwensköldtrilogi och Klara Johansons Tidevarvskåserier. Umeå: h:ström—Text & Kultur, 2008.

214  Unfinished Stories Bonnier, Gert. Om könsbestämningen: en sammanställning av nyare undersökningar och teorier: Bonniers små handböcker i vetenskapliga ämnen. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1925. Borgström, Eva. Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935. Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2016. Burman, Carina. K.J.: en biografi över Klara Johanson. Stockholm: Bonnier, 2007. Chesser, Elizabeth. The Woman Who Knows Herself. London: W. Heinemann Ltd., 1926. Clark, Anna. Desire: A  History of European Sexuality. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. “Twilight Moments.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005). Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ———. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Eman, Greger. Nya himlar över en ny jord: om Klara Johanson, Lydia Wahlström och den feministiska vänskapskärleken. Lund; Stockholm: Ellerström, 1993. Eskilsson, Lena. Drömmen om kamratsamhället: Kvinnliga medborgarskolan på Fogelstad 1925–35. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1991. Fjelkestam, Kristina. Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002. Greenway, Judy. “It’s What You Do With It That Counts: Interpretations of Otto Weininger.” In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, edited by Lucy Bland and Laura L. Doan, 27–43. Oxford: Polity Press, 1998. Gustafsson, Tommy. En fiende till civilisationen: manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet. Lund: Sekel, 2007. ———. Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Hirdman, Yvonne. Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2010. 1989. Hirdman, Yvonne, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds. Sveriges historia: 1920–1965. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012. Hjelmqvist, Fredrik, and Knut Tynell, eds. Biblioteksbladet: Elvte årgången, Biblioteksbladet: Organ för Sveriges allmänna biblioteksförening (SAB). Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & söners förlag, 1926. Holgersson, Ulrika. Populärkulturen och klassamhället: Arbete, klass och genus i svensk dampress i början av 1900-talet. Stockholm: Carlsson, 2005. Horak, Laura. Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Ingemarsdotter, Jenny. “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017): 38–70. Järvstad, Kristin. Den kluvna kvinnligheten: ‘öfvergångskvinnan’ som litterär gestalt i svenska samtidsromaner 1890–1920. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2008.

In No Certain Terms  215 Johannisson, Karin. Den mörka kontinenten: kvinnan, medicinen och fin-desiècle. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Norstedt, 2005. 1994. ———. “Folkhälsa: Det svenska projektet från 1900 till 2:a världskriget.” In Lychnos: Årsbok för idé- och lärdomshistoria, 139–95. Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 1991. Kärnfelt, Johan. Mellan nytta och nöje: ett bidrag till populärvetenskapens historia i Sverige. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2000. Knutson, Ulrika. Kvinnor på gränsen till genombrott: grupporträtt av Tidevarvets kvinnor. Stockholm: Bonnier, 2004. Laskar, Pia. “Sexualfrågan som verktyg i könsdebatten: Två texter från mellankrigstiden.” In Seklernas sex: bidrag till sexualitetens historia, edited by Åsa Bergenheim and Lena Lennerhed, 187–203. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1997. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Lejdström, Kristina. Grotta Azzurra. 2nd ed. Everöd: Recito, 2016. Lennerhed, Lena. Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia. Hedemora; Uppsala: Gidlund, 2002. Lo-Johansson, Ivar. Mina städers ansikten. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1930. Lundgren, Kristina. Barrikaden valde mig: Ada Nilsson, läkare i kvinnokampen. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2014. Lundstedt, Vilhelm. ‘Otukt mot naturen’: Bör den vara straffbar? Bonniers små handböcker i vetenskapliga ämnen. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1933. Lybeck, Marti M. Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey and Martin B. Duberman, 281–93. New York: Meridian Books, 1989. Nyström, Anton. Om homosexualiteten inför vetenskapen och lagen. Stockholm: Svanbäck & komp., 1919. Oram, Alison. “ ‘A Sudden Orgy of Decadence’: Writing About Sex Between Women in the Interwar Popular Press.” In Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, edited by Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, 165–80. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Oterdahl, Jeanna. Ditt ansvar som kvinna: ett ord till unga flickor. Stockholm: Diakonistyr., 1929. Qvarsell, Roger. “Hälsa och sjukvård.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, edited by Jakob Christensson, 393–414. Lund: Signum, 2009. Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Ross, Charlotte. Eccentricity and Sameness: Discourses on Lesbianism and Desire Between Women in Italy, 1860s-1930s. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Rydström, Jens. Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Rydström, Jens, and David Tjeder, eds. Kvinnor, män och alla andra: en svensk genushistoria. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009.

216  Unfinished Stories Severinsson, Emma. “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 97–118. Sigel, Lisa Z. Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012. Silverstolpe, Fredrik, and Göran Söderström, eds. Sympatiens hemlighetsfulla makt: Stockholms homosexuella 1860–1960. Stockholm: Stockholmia, 1999. Sölvén, Arnold. Kätterier i kvinnofrågan. Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924. Strindberg, August. Inferno. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1914. Samlade skrifter, vol. 28, 1897. Sullivan, Nikki. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Svanström, Yvonne. Policing Public Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm 1812–1880. Stockholm: Atlas, 2000. Ulvros, Eva Helen. “Den nya kvinnan.” In Individer i rörelse: Kulturhistoria i 1800-talets Sverige, edited by Birgitta Svensson and Anna Walette, 89–118. Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2012. Waters, Chris. “Sexology.” In Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, edited by Harry G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Wiegman, Robyn, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions.” differences 26, no. 1 (2015): 1–25. Wigert, Viktor. Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker: Medicinskt folkbibliotek. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927.

6 The Desire to Desire The Masculine Modern Woman in Fiction

In the 1920s, one much-discussed aspect of modernity’s “masculine” women and garçonne types was their relationships to men—or lack thereof. Whether seen as troubling or fascinating, this theme was explored not only in medical literature and in magazines but also, and in greater depth, in many novels. A key question was formulated in the novel Den nya kvinnan (The new woman), published in 1925: “However masculine a woman wants to appear—surely, the man, as a man and her relation to him—as a woman—constitutes her greatest interest? The young woman who denies this even at the depth of her heart is a monstrosity.”1 Insinuations of monstrosity in Swedish interwar literature constituted serious allegations, as Kristina Fjelkestam notes, as this rhetoric aligned the accused with something freakish and unnatural.2 However, even though medical discourse had associated female masculinity with homosexuality since the late nineteenth century, interwar novelists tended to make a more vague connection, and they generally “did not center on the fixed sexual identity of the ‘lesbian,’ ” as Anna Clark writes, “but portrayed desire for other women as hidden and shadowy, as twisted twilight moments.”3 Clark’s observation is also true in regard to the Swedish early interwar period, when many novelists set out to explore the desires of the new or modern woman without necessarily using the language or conceptual framework of sexual identities. Turning to novels, this final chapter brings together a range of themes related to early interwar concerns with the modern woman and her desires. While novels do not necessarily offer a “complete” image of interwar gender negotiations, they do provide access to a “mode of interiority,” as Laura Doan writes, that is less available in other materials.4 For instance, unlike the shorter format of magazine articles, novels offered a space to explore how different sites of tensions intersected, whether it was a matter of adding rural or class perspectives, tracing conflicts between modern and traditional values, or digging deeper into the complexities of gender and sexuality.5 Though far from every novel addressed such intersections, literature does provide an important prism of historical analysis, adding nuance and depth, as Jenny Björklund similarly argues,

218  Unfinished Stories to concerns that were oftentimes very much rooted in the “worldly.”6 However, because Swedish literary scholarship has tended to focus on the 1932 novel Charlie and other later interwar novels, the (queer) Swedish literary landscape of 1920s has been left rather unexplored.7 Focusing on two overlooked novels published in 1921 and in 1927 that explored the sexuality of the modern woman in different “shadowy” ways, I discuss in this chapter how “queer” female masculinities sometimes intersected not only with queer desires but also with queer femininities. The first novel, Ejnar Smith’s novel Kate Ranke from 1921, traces the relationship between a sporty young woman and her beautiful but unhappy sister-in-law. The narrative takes place in a secluded small-town resort, where the local townspeople pay close attention to the two new female tourists while they are also preoccupied with their own secret desires. The second novel, Sigrid Olrog’s Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) from 1927, follows the path of a simple shop girl in Stockholm to a cosmopolitan world of high fashion and luxury consumption, introduced to her by wealthy male patrons. Though she quickly learns how passion and desire flow in every direction in the modern world, involving both objects and women, and women as objects, she finds herself confused as she falls in love with another woman. Though neither of these two women is described as masculine, their relationship is ultimately both limited and tainted by references to female masculinity. Both novels thus approach themes of gender transgression and desire, though culminating not in sexual identities but, rather, in vaguely articulated desires to desire, focused in these cases on women rather than men. By way of introduction, I discuss first the meaning of “queer” perspectives in the context of literature in the 1920s.

Queer Perspectives on Literature in the 1920s I had never heard about it before, but I have read about it. Things that you don’t even know the name of are usually the worst!8 —Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Tony växer upp, 1922

Seeking to understand “the cultural processes by which the sexual could be known,” as Laura Doan writes, calls for an approach that is open to exploring different kinds of genres and source materials.9 For instance, even though several new medical reference books were published in Sweden in the 1920s, as discussed in the previous chapter, these did not constitute the only source of thinking about matters of gender and sexuality; magazines, movies, conduct books and novels were also instrumental in the shaping of dreams and desires in this context. These kinds of cultural and medical genres often influenced each other: As Charlotte Ross has discussed in her study of Italian novels in the period between 1860 and

The Desire to Desire  219 1930, “echoes” of medical debates began to sound in literary texts in this era, and vice versa, “reiterations of cultural figures” were present in sexological texts, influencing each other in “a complex process of reciprocal intertextual influence.”10 Novels may thus provide glimpses of the ways in which so-called sexual deviance was referenced and named, but they also demonstrate, as Jenny Björklund has shown in the Swedish context, how such categorizing was resisted and troubled.11 A queer analytical perspective considers in this context how fiction provides a wide explorative and interpretative space (to authors and readers alike), where non-normative genders and desires can very well be present without being named, insinuated or devised as such.12 In times of transition, when fundamental normative conceptual frameworks are felt to be fluid and shifting, cultural “queer moments” may also arise simply as a result of co-existing “competing frameworks”; what comes across as enticing to one observer might be invisible to someone else and outrageous to a third.13 This was often the case in Sweden in the 1920s, a time when modernity, science and the emancipation of women were all celebrated, whilst at the same time concerns were raised about all that which seemed to be challenged: male superiority, tradition, marriage and the sexual boundaries of young people—or to be more precise—of young women. Novelist Agnes von Krusenstjerna, later in her career known as one of the most decadent authors in Sweden, in her early books explored how young women struggled to speak about their own sexuality, even, or perhaps especially, in a modern era of medical encyclopedias. In her novel Tony växer upp (Tony grows up), published in 1922, the presence of medical literature is suggested, but its meaning still remains vague: As the young female protagonist Tony tries to find out why her friend Maud has suddenly been expelled from school, one of the other girls try to explain: “These things cannot be described. . . . But my mom has an entire book about the dreadful matters, which you can borrow if you want to learn about what sort you have befriended, if you did not know it before now!”14 Only now does Tony begin to realize that her own relationship with Maud—who is expelled for having engaged sexually with another girl in a school bathroom—might have been wrong too. Such “indescribable” matters could be at the center of a discussion, as suggested by Krusenstjerna in this episode in Tony växer upp, and still be almost impossible to speak about.15 Unlike the characters Maud and Tony, whose gender performances were not depicted as particularly transgressive or masculine, the contemporaneous 1921 novel Kate Ranke (to be discussed later) featured a central tomboy character, Gunvor, characterized by her love of sports and cars as well as ladies. Ten years later, Margareta Suber’s novel Charlie (1932), seen as a response to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), similarly emphasized how the protagonist challenged the boundaries of her

220  Unfinished Stories gender, whether through her actions (winning an automobile race), clothing (preferring a masculine appearance) or desires (directed at another woman).16 However, as indicated by Krusenstjerna’s novels, explorations of queer desires in the interwar period were not necessarily connected to representations of female masculinity, even though it can be argued that masculine characters made non-normative desires more visible in a time when Swedish society had become more attentive to the varieties of women’s gender transgressions. As discussed in previous chapters, critics in the press of the 1920s struggled with the figure of the New Woman in this context: In her younger version, she was a shallow temptress or reckless garçonne type, whereas her older version, the independent career woman, was tainted by associations with masculinized, lonely spinsters.17 Unsurprisingly, the new or modern woman was also an important figure in many novels at this time, exploring conflicting ideals of female independence and “true” womanhood (tied to marriage and motherhood).18 In the 1930s, several Swedish novels were published that featured more explicit “lesbian” themes, including Margareta Suber’s Charlie (1932), Karin Boye’s Kris (1934, Crisis), and Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s sevenvolume suite Fröknarna von Pahlen (1930–35; The Misses von Pahlen). As Jenny Björklund has shown, this was a time not only of concerns about Sweden’s “population crisis,” which had brought issues of family planning to the political agenda, but also a time when a new discourse of sexuality was gaining influence, “emphasizing sexuality as intrinsically good and something that could increase happiness in the population.”19 However, as Björklund also points out, the positive attitude toward sexuality was “strongly tied to the heterosexual couple,” a circumstance that authors who explored same-sex desire were soon made aware of. Causing “one of the most heated newspaper debates in Swedish literary history,” as Björklund writes, Krusenstjerna’s The Misses von Pahlen suite was criticized “for being too explicit and graphic on the subject of sexuality.”20 By now, the cross-dressed or masculine woman (present in both Suber’s and Krusentstjerna’s novels) had become more overtly associated with same-sex desires—an association that, in all likelihood, had been reinforced by the Swedish-language publication of Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness in 1932 (which had been banned in England). In contrast, novels in the 1920s that featured themes of gender transgression and same-sex desire more vaguely did not seem to have caused such extended critical attacks.21 This may partly have to do with the fact that these novels did not highlight same-sex or lesbian love in the way the later novels did, but it may also partly be because transgressive garçonne types in the 1920s were quite common features in entertainment media, where they were often seen as playful more than harmful, even though darker associations also surfaced (as discussed in Chapter 1).22 By comparison, the masculine woman in interwar German novels was frequently utilized as a symbol of a metropolitan vice and sexual

The Desire to Desire  221 immorality, but, as Katie Sutton has shown, the Berlin homosexual scene also “provided a backdrop against which characters and readers alike could begin to come to terms with their own, non-heteronormative gender and sexual identities.”23 Considering that Stockholm in the 1920s did not have a lively subcultural scene that catered to “urban club lesbians,” it comes as no surprise that female same-sex desire in Swedish novels was not at this time as strongly associated with metropolitan degeneracy (though critics in the Swedish press referred to Berlin as a deterrent example).24 The imagined place for queer experiences in the two 1920s novels to be discussed in the following sections was instead located at holiday resorts, peaceful and secluded places located at a safe distance from the big city. In both of these narratives, the city was not associated with sexual freedom but, rather, with patriarchal dominance—a place where husbands, fathers and businessmen dwelled, unaware of how their daughters, sisters and wives spent their days away on holiday.

Desiring Kate Ranke The Swedish novel Kate Ranke, first published in 1921, was written by Ejnar Smith, a popular author at the time, known mostly for his entertaining small-town narratives.25 He was, according to the reviewer of Kate Ranke in the morning paper Dagens Nyheter, moreover known for his “fine psychological portraits of women.”26 However, he had now failed, as this review went on, to make a convincing character in the case of the beautiful but unhappily married Kate Ranke. Still, as was also pointed out in this review, Kate’s “ugly sister-in-law” Gunvor, whose “loveless life had virtually transformed her into a man,” was a very believable type.27 Another reviewer similarly felt that Kate Ranke was less interesting than the “ugly, mannish and pushy sportswoman” Gunvor and her passions, leading her at one point even to “climb a ladder to break into Kate’s bedroom.”28 Because this once-popular but now-forgotten novel, with its many queer elements of female gender transgressions and complicated same-sex desires, has not been previously analyzed, I will in the following paragraphs introduce the narrative of Kate Ranke, while also relating the novel to recent academic work on queer literature. The story of Kate Ranke is set in an anonymous spa resort in the county of Östergötland.29 Escaping her dreary husband, a businessman in the city, Kate arrives incognito in the small town with the intent to meet her secret lover (and to avoid scandal she uses her maiden name, Ranke, rather than her married name Meidel). Meanwhile, Gunvor, the sister of Kate’s husband, Hugo Meidel, has embarked on a riverboat trip in the vicinity of the town. From the beginning, Gunvor is painted in decidedly sharper contours than Kate: Introduced in the narrative as an adventurous tomboy, Gunvor appears with a long list of modern attributes and habits: she has a camera, she smokes and she engages in lively conversations with

222  Unfinished Stories other passengers. A local townsman on the boat immediately identifies her as an “emancipated female” and “obtrusive sportswoman.”30 While disturbed by her presence, he cannot help but stare at her: “Her face was weather-beaten, almost burnt, and she wore a khaki blouse with a starched collar and a violet men’s tie. Her hair was red and wavy. She had military buttons in her cufflinks and a green leather wristwatch.”31 When the townsman realizes that the young woman was staring back at him, his discomfort increases further (“he felt a stinging blush grow from the neck towards his face.”).32 Gunvor’s (masculine) attributes are matched by a sexual agency manifested not only by her confidence but also by her way of shamelessly looking at others. Moreover, she boasts about having taken a picture of “a pretty girl” on shore.33 Clearly, Gunvor is not a girl to be looked at; she is the one who looks. Disturbed and confused by the brazen attitude of this female “globetrotter,” the townsman is struck by a feeling that something “not normal” is disturbing his “spiritual pulse.”34 Meanwhile Kate’s unhappiness at the resort has turned into despair: Her lover has abandoned her and she decides to commit suicide. However, her attempt to kill herself at the train station is thwarted by the stationmaster, Harry Werbeck, who saves her at the last minute. A few days later, Gunvor spots Kate walking by the river whereupon she decides to interrupt her riverboat trip and join Kate at the resort. From this point on, Gunvor makes it her mission to support and cheer up her unhappy sister-in-law. Gunvor’s presence by Kate’s side at the resort awakens the curiosity of the other hotel guests as well as the locals, who are all struck by the difference in appearance between the two women—the beauty of the one and the ugliness of the other. One guest even jokingly suggests that the odd one (Gunvor) is that “missing link of Darwin, dressed up in freedom.”35 Kate soon feels uncomfortable by the attention directed at her sister-in-law and herself, which Gunvor does nothing to meliorate. On the contrary, as they sit down on a bench in the park after dinner one night, Gunvor not only lights up her “vulgar pipe” but also takes out her camera and starts to take pictures of passing ladies.36 Kate finds Gunvor ugly and somewhat ridiculous—her way of leaning back on the park bench with her legs “ungraciously wide apart,” drawing attention to her “clumsy hiking boots.” In this passage, the ugliness of Gunvor is linked not only to her looks but also to her (masculine) body language and attitude. At the same time, Kate reluctantly admits to herself that she has been invigorated by Gunvor’s arrival and that she is still fond of her strange sister-in-law, despite her appearance and mannerisms.37 Gunvor is aware of her differences and struggles with feelings of selfcontempt in many ways that correspond with Stephen Gordon’s situation in The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Charlie’s in the Swedish novel Charlie (1932).38 In one passage Gunvor finds herself in front of a mirror, which causes a moment of tormented self-reflection: “She stared into her own ugliness in scornful contempt, but still regretfully aware that she was

The Desire to Desire  223 excluded from the purpose of life.”39 Drawing on Carolyn Allen’s discussion of the three M’s of early twentieth-century representations of female homosexuality—Masculinity, Mothering and Mirrors—Kristina Fjelkestam has shown how these kinds of mirror scenes constitute important passages in The Well of Loneliness as well as in Charlie.40 While the mirror had been used in nineteenth-century literature to explain lesbianism as a sort of narcissism, Fjelkestam argues that interwar novels utilized the mirror in a more complex, self-reflective manner. In the case of Charlie, the protagonist engages anxiously and critically with her strange/unfeminine appearance but ultimately refuses “to coalesce with her own mirror image.”41 Even though the mirror scene featuring Gunvor of the earlier novel Kate Ranke is less detailed (played out at the post office rather than at home), the passage similarly conveys a sense of mixed feelings—regret and repulsion as well as a sense of defiance, which causes Gunvor to stick out her tongue at her own image, before turning away.42 The two other themes discussed by Fjelkestam, mothering and masculinity, involve an absence of maternal love as well as a related lack of femininity in the protagonist’s path to womanhood. These topoi are also present in relation to Gunvor, whose mother’s premature death has left her with a dominant father, who has given his business (and love) to her brother while scorning his daughter for her ugliness.43 Still, as Gunvor concludes to herself when thinking back, her “stubborn nature” had saved her from being “broken,” and she had even developed a forthright self-will, of which she was proud but which had also made her “suspicious and hostile” towards men. This passage, offering an explanation for Gunvor’s affection and love for Kate, can be seen in light of the theme of mothering where lesbian desire was typically traced to a troubled or absent mother-daughter relationship, leaving the girl in a perpetual “search for a mother substitute in her love relationships.”44 In Gunvor’s case, the narrator also reveals that she had “confessed” to herself her hostility towards men but chose to hide it from others through an “attitude of comradeship and audacious jokes.”45 Masculinity, the third of the three Ms of (interwar) female homosexuality, is a recurring topic both in Kate Ranke and, later, in Charlie (as well as a central theme in The Well of Loneliness). Both Gunvor and Charlie are depicted as energetic sports girls, boyishly dressed and fond of various “masculine” items (cameras, cars, cigarettes), habits (smoking, driving, playing tennis, whistling) and attitudes (daring, chivalrous).46 However, this pallet of gender transgressions also makes Gunvor realize, as she studies herself in the mirror, that she is “excluded” from the “purpose of life.”47 While this purpose is left unspecified, an earlier remark on Gunvor’s slim chances of finding a husband indicates that marriage has something to do with it.48 In Suber’s novel, Charlie similarly concludes when out driving that “the little red roadster had not the power to detach her and her destiny from the hateful social structure in which,

224  Unfinished Stories nevertheless, she had no place.”49 Yet, these moments of realization does not in any way induce these queer protagonists to change their ways. In fact, Gunvor’s romantic resolve only strengthens as events unfold: As she and Kate walk by the river one day, arm in arm, she starts to sing along when they pass a boy who plays a familiar tune on his harmonica: Ev’ry little while I feel so blue Because I want you and only you50

At this point Kate retracts her arm from Gunvor’s. She is disturbed by the attitude of her sister-in-law, who, at the same time, is troubled by Kate’s moody “wilfulness.” Yet, Gunvor also realizes at this point that she would be willing to have “her heart ripped out” if only she could please Kate.51 Following this, the two women engage in an emotional discussion on happiness, love and marriage: Gunvor accuses Kate of being vain and living inside “the framework,” knowing “only one kind of happiness,” while Kate points out that Gunvor has limited life experiences (Kate also objects to Gunvor’s accusation about vanity, arguing that an exterior that is well-cared-for can just as well be seen as a reflection of “selfrespect”).52 To Gunvor’s consternation, Kate also states that she wishes that she had not been saved at the train station since then she would have been “done with it all.” Struggling to understand Kate, Gunvor in the end collapses in tears by the riverside, whereupon Kate experiences “a new kind of shame.” At the end of this passage, Kate suggests that they should at least try to “help each other.”53 As the tension between the two women deepens, the townspeople are inspired by their presence to discuss the meaning of beauty and desire. In a conversation between a married couple and their male friend, the beauty of Kate is once again contrasted with the ugliness of Gunvor. However, at this time, the townswoman Wally suggests that ugliness “can be attractive too.”54 Their friend Sten Danelius (who had first spotted Gunvor on the riverboat) agrees and even “confesses” that he felt more attracted to the “repellent ugliness” of Gunvor than the “symmetric beauty” of Kate.55 The idea that gender ambiguity, in this case female masculinity, could, in fact, be attractive was thus recognized in this novel in a way that would soon also be explored by cinema and the fashion industry. Wally, the female character who first introduces this idea in Smith’s novel, is herself trapped in a loveless marriage and struggles with her feelings for Sten. While desire is thus projected in many directions at once, the narrative does not contain one single happy relationship, which was also the case with Suber’s novel Charlie.56 Both of these novels thus explore the loneliness not only of their queer protagonists but also of their unhappily married characters, thus challenging the proposition that the “purpose” in life (for women) is heterosexual love and marriage.

The Desire to Desire  225 In Smith’s novel, Gunvor’s sexual agency, as it develops in the narrative, is consistent with sexological models discussed at the turn of the century, theories according to which a woman’s “masculine” desire for other women was seen as a consequence of gender inversion (a male soul trapped in a female body).57 Kate senses an “undercurrent of fear” when thinking of Gunvor, which she cannot fully explain.58 Meanwhile, Gunvor becomes increasingly possessive of Kate: When together at the beach one day, swimming and sunbathing, Gunvor becomes furious as she discovers a man hiding in the bushes with a pair of binoculars, spying on Kate. When Gunvor has chased him away and Kate asks her why, Gunvor declares that she cannot stand that a man looks at Kate in that way. Again, Kate is uncomfortable by Gunvor’s attitude and explains that Gunvor will only cause embarrassment.59 Gunvor then whispers “intensely” to Kate that she wishes she had a motor boat so they could take off to an island and be alone, but Kate is relentless: “I would not come.”60 Still, Gunvor does not give up: As she observes a young man diving from a diving board, she decides to jump herself in order to impress Kate. Gunvor rises from the sand with “tensed muscles,” gets out on the diving board and jumps “as skilfully” as the man.61 However, as she returns, she finds Kate more sleepy than impressed. When Kate finally leaves the beach, Gunvor stays behind and begins to caress the shape of Kate’s body in the sand.62 After this moment of lonely passion in the sand, Gunvor rents a “rickety car” and drives around “to get some air.”63 The use of a car as a means of negotiating or escaping queer desire was explored also in the novel Charlie, where a red little sports car enters the narrative not only as a means of transportation but also as a vehicle of emotional escape and erotic conquest (Charlie enters an automobile race in order to impress the woman she loves).64 This aspect of driving is less pronounced in Smith’s novel, even though Gunvor’s long drive after the day on the beach strengthens her commitment to “save” Kate.65 Towards the end of the narrative, Gunvor takes the wheel again, as I will come back to, this time racing through a storm with her terrified passengers. Paradoxically, in the end Gunvor tries to save the marriage between her absent brother and Kate. Gunvor explains this to herself through her fear that she would lose Kate entirely if the marriage would come to an end. As long as Kate stayed married to her brother, Hugo, she would at least be able to stay close to her.66 Eventually Hugo arrives at the resort, intent on winning back his wife. Just prior to his arrival, the tension between Kate and Gunvor has reached its climax: When Kate begins to lock her door at the hotel, Gunvor climbs a ladder one night and enters Kate’s room through an open window. As Kate begins to cry, Gunvor asks for forgiveness and starts kissing her feet, while Kate (again) asks to be left alone: “Let me be and leave.”67 At this point, Gunvor finally gives up, and there is nothing more left to say: “The silence was only interrupted by the two women’s gasping breaths.”68 Gunvor packs her bags,

226  Unfinished Stories but when she re-enters Kate’s room two hours later, at breakfast, Kate has changed her mind and begs Gunvor to stay, which she does.69 As Hugo arrives the reader is again reminded of Gunvor’s strange appearance, this time through the eyes of her brother, who is struck by her “failure as a woman.” Hugo finds his sister’s “emancipation” to be nothing more than a series of “desperate theatrics,” noticing in particular her sports badge, pinned visibly on her khaki blouse.70 Hugo accuses his sister of having “molested Kate with her caresses from the start,” and he commands her to leave Kate alone. At this point, Gunvor accidentally points to their rivalry: “It is as if you treat me as your rival!” Hugo’s response confirms what they both already know: “And what if I am?”71 While inconclusive, this conversation leaves Gunvor in a state of exhaustion, and she can only beg her brother “not to be too hard on Kate.”72 Tomboy Charlie in Suber’s 1932 novel likewise suffers from dominant male figures (a father and a brother) who eventually become a threat (the patriarchal guardian and the rival), to Charlie’s romantic interest in another woman, Sara.73 In Kate Ranke, Gunvor’s brother eventually arrives to reclaim his wife, which similarly disturbs her romantic pursuits. In both of these Swedish novels, played out in similar holiday resort settings, the arrival of male relatives thus creates a competitive situation vis-ὰ-vis the female object of desire. The resulting rivalry and emotional complications in Charlie have been discussed by Fjelkestam also in terms of the “love triangle,” where the female queer protagonist competes with her father for the attention of an older woman (a substitute for her mother)—a competition that is inherently imbalanced since the objects of desire (Sara in Charlie and Kate in Kate Ranke) ultimately fail to understand or receive the love of their female suitors (Gunvor/ Charlie).74 In parallel with the triangle drama between Gunvor and the married couple Kate and Hugo, the author of Kate Ranke also portrays the lives of a group of townspeople, who all suffer from unrequited or secret desires, particularly Wally Werbeck, the unhappy wife of the stationmaster. As the paths of Wally and Gunvor cross one day, the two women walk together through the town, and Gunvor confesses that she herself suffers from an “immense loneliness” and a “burden” that hinders her from accepting the tenderness of others. While Wally is left confused by this conversation, Gunvor’s words stay with her, and she asks herself why so many people seem to feel lonely.75 The novel concludes with a dinner and a disastrous storm: Hugo organizes a party for Wally and her husband (who had saved Kate from committing suicide) in order to buy their silence and prevent a scandal. Afterwards, the dinner party decides to go for a drive together in Hugo’s expensive car, and Gunvor is eager to take the driver’s seat: “ ‘I’ll drive,’ Gunvor shouted, ‘it shall be wonderful, to once again master this kind of monster machine!’ ”76 During the drive, the wind picks up, but Gunvor only increases her speed, which makes

The Desire to Desire  227 the others nervous, except for Hugo (who, in fact, has ordered his sister to drive as fast as she can, without consideration of speed limits, so that the stationmaster can get back in time for his duties at the train station). As a big tree crashes down behind them, they escape death by inches, but Gunvor is unperturbed and hardly notices that Wally was scraped on her cheek, and Kate is terrified. While the drive ultimately ends well, this climactic scene links speed, death and desire in a way that is familiar from later twentieth-century cinema and fiction, exploring themes of automotive heroism, madness, escape, passion and intimacy. In this 1921 novel, the author puts a young woman’s unresolved passions in the driver’s seat, but the substitution of acceleration for desire does not, in the end, release the tension of the protagonist.77 As the evening ends, the townswoman Wally is struck by the strangeness of the day, beginning with sun and ending in a fateful storm. Hugo meanwhile “commands” Kate to say goodbye to Gunvor and prepare to travel back with him to the city the next day. As the night comes to an end, the storm causes a fatal accident: the townsman Danelius, Wally’s secret love, falls into a well and drowns. The next day, as Kate departs with her husband for the city, an abandoned Gunvor seeks out Wally and tries to comfort her. Wally, in her grief, now suggests that they should fight the loneliness of life together, even though “we perhaps do not understand each other’s sorrow completely.”78 In the end, the novel thus concludes on a hopeful note, despite the failure of all characters to find the love (or peace of mind) that they were looking for. I have described the plot and characters of Kate Ranke in some detail, as this novel provides an early literary example of a masculine woman aware both of her gender transgressions and her sexual difference. While Gunvor is not confronted with medical literature as in the later cases of Radclyffe Hall’s Stephen or Margareta Suber’s Charlie, her pursuit of Kate is conspicuously passionate, and she is similarly tormented by feelings of exclusion and loneliness. Her masculinity (as masculinity was conceived at the time) is manifested not only in her way of dressing or her love of sports, cars, cameras and cigarettes, but also by her actions— particularly by her impulse to protect Kate and by her effort to make an impression by being athletic and courageous. Many narrative features of Kate Ranke can also be found in Charlie: the setting at a resort, the presence of a beautiful woman who rejects the love of a younger tomboyish woman, strange desires on a beach, the arrival of male relatives who disrupts the younger woman’s romantic quest, and, finally, the association of automobiles with danger and desire as well as escape and freedom. Both novels, but Smith’s in particular, also explore the meaning of beauty through different gazes—male and female. Smith’s novel opens with a townsman looking at a young woman (Gunvor), who stares back, and later Gunvor turns her gaze at another woman (Kate), while others (townspeople looking from the side at the resort guests) find cause to

228  Unfinished Stories rethink ugliness, thus allowing for a multitude of different directions and objects of desire to be imagined, regardless of marital status or sex. As Jenny Björklund concludes in her chapter on “the political scene of love” in Swedish literature in the 1930s, several novels at this time (Suber’s Charlie, Boye’s Kris and Krusenstjerna’s The Misses von Pahlen) suggested that lesbianism could be seen in a positive light, as empowering for women, connected to self-growth and independence.79 However, since images of lesbianism still referred to “the largely negative medical discourse on homosexuality established at the turn of the twentieth century,” love between women was at the same time represented “in an ambiguous and often contradictory light.” In Björklund’s conclusion, medical discourses were acknowledged but also challenged, as the queer or lesbian protagonist tended to be portrayed as young and strong, associated with nature, health and light rather than deviance.80 Many of the themes and ambiguities found in these novels of the 1930s are present also in the earlier novel Kate Ranke, with its queer character Gunvor. Interestingly, reviewers in 1921 found the married Kate Ranke as the more incomprehensible figure, defined only by her unhappiness, whereas the lively tomboy Gunvor was considered more “believable.”81 This comment raises questions regarding which character was actually seen as (the most) “queer”: While Gunvor’s embodiment of female masculinity was evidently seen as a valid or at least recognizable “type,” the feminine but unhappy character Kate came across as strange in her inexplicable married discontent. Finally, the novel Kate Ranke can be analyzed not only in terms of its queer protagonists but also in terms of its queer setting, the resort.82 However, the spatial queerness was not in this case related to any type of subcultural or identity-based sexuality but, rather, was invoked by its own premises—delimited both in space and time, this was a non-lasting stay that offered anonymity as well as familiarity, tranquility as well as opportunity—whether in terms of courtship, adultery, same-sex affairs or other relations. Neither rural nor urban, the resort can thus be viewed as a privileged exit place, inhabited by strangers.83 For instance, in Smith’s novel, Kate’s adultery is, to begin with, enabled by the seclusion of the resort, but as this affair is ended and Gunvor arrives, another kind of forbidden passion begins to take shape in the tranquility of spa life. At the resort, removed from their ordinary life, any and all guests are essentially thrown into a new micro-cosmos of expectations, performances and intimacies, an artificial society surrounded by fresh air and nature. Thus, rather than a space for queer people, the resort offers a queer space for all.84 However, because guests eventually leave, the queer potentiality of their stay is also limited in time and thus less threatening—for characters and readers alike. Hence, a perfect place for secret revelations. In Kate Ranke, the “queerness” of the resort is, in the end, expressed most clearly by Hugo, the husband/brother, who finds it both odd and

The Desire to Desire  229 unbefitting of his wife to have chosen to stay at an unknown resort in the middle of nowhere, and he wonders whether his sister has organized it all.85 As soon as he has concluded his business (silencing the townspeople), he resolutely drives away with his wife, safely tucked away in the passenger seat of his big car. Like many other Swedish interwar novels, Kate Ranke ultimately challenged the idea that happiness would necessarily be fulfilled through heterosexual love and marriage—a challenge that would become even more controversial in the socio-political climate of the next decade.86 In the following section, the meaning of queer genders and desires will be further explored in the context of the 1920s through another novel, Sigrid Olrog’s Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) from 1927, that explored same-sex desire without the presence of masculine female characters, though not entirely without female masculinities.

High Fashion and Queer Desires Sigrid Olrog’s novel Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) from 1927 traces the path of a poor shop girl in Stockholm from rags to riches, from a rough life to a cosmopolitan world of high fashion and cocktail parties. Even though Olrog only published this one novel, which was dismissed in the press as a cheap dime novel inspired by the movies, the narrative drew from a range of concerns in the 1920s related to modern consumption, female independence, social inequality and unruly desires.87 In Olrog’s novel, desire is placed at the center from the beginning: Lena from Stockholm’s poor southern quarters finds work as a delivery girl for a hat store that is filled with beautiful creations from Paris. Whenever she can, she watches these splendors of modernity from the back of the store (one hat in particular, decorated with a golden bird, awakens her desire). This theme of female obsession with fashion, accessories and the materiality of culture was not new in the context of literature: As previous scholarship has shown, several Swedish critics as well as novelists in the 1920s critiqued what they saw as a shallow consumer culture that turned women into mannequins and encouraged them not only to desire soulless objects but even to become such soulless objects rather than agents in their own lives.88 However, in Olrog’s novel, Lena’s material desires soon translate into a determination to escape her life in poverty, which sets in motion a series of events that, in the end, troubles the idea of femininity as a state of passivity and superficiality. One day Lena receives a generous tip from a customer (whose hat—the one with the golden bird—Lena is secretly obsessed with), and, using this money, she is able to get rid of her rags and buy a beautiful dress. The narrative then shifts its focus from woman as consumer to woman as commodity and object of desire: A painter discovers Lena’s beauty and asks her to become his model. Having thus turned into an eroticized object

230  Unfinished Stories herself, “owned” by the painter and his jet set crowd, Lena is now passed between artists and rich patrons, essentially transformed into a human article of trade. At one point she is even sold for money at a party—a joke that is taken seriously by her “buyer.”89 However, having escaped a life of scarcity and abuse, Lena accepts the conditions of her new reality, which includes a cosmopolitan life of traveling, new clothes and expensive jewelry. Through this narrative, the author brought together two anxieties voiced in the press at this time: one involving sexually boundless “hyper-modern circles of decadence,” and the other related to the superficiality of modern culture, turning women into commodities.90 Of course, as Anna Clark writes in the British context, “The idea that female sexuality was bound up in commodity culture was not new—after all, aristocratic girls in the Victorian marriage market were expected to show off their décolletés.” However, modernity’s commercialized playing fields of desire had partly changed the conditions for women’s self-fashioning, and as Clark notes, the New Woman was now “a consumer as well as a commodity, a familiar figure in the new mass advertising.”91 However, consumption still remained a matter of class and privilege: In Olrog’s novel, the penniless protagonist is to begin with neither consumer nor commodity but an invisible delivery girl. Lena at one point finds herself in the seclusion of a high-class mountain resort in Norway, without male company, and she quickly becomes a source of gossip among the other guests, suspicious of her background.92 However, here she also meets Violette, an alluring and elegant woman, who, unlike the other women at the hotel, is kind to her. For the first time Lena now experiences real friendship and perhaps even love. As she embraces her feelings for Violette, the narrator steps in and explains that Lena’s love is caused by her loveless upbringing, which has kept her from experiencing a child’s love for a mother, female friendship and youthful admiration—“feelings now all concentrated to Violette.”93 When Violette tries to convince Lena that men are, in fact, easier to understand and be around than women, Lena exclaims in protest, “No man could be like you!”94 As Violette goes on to explain the meaning of true love and marriage, she eventually also admits that marriage is not for everyone: “There are, of course, no rules without exceptions: I  have spoken about the most common phenomenon, regarding masculine men and feminine women, but as you know there are also men with pronounced feminine features, and women with masculine tendencies, which, of course, affect these issues.” She grows silent and leans back on her red silk pillow, wondering how much the girl at her side has understood.95 As Violette thus attempts to explain to her young protégée the varieties of human desires, this information does not seem to help Lena—a

The Desire to Desire  231 feminine woman skeptical of love and marriage. If anything, her feelings for Violette only deepen: “That anything could be higher—loving the right man; she does not believe it.”96 Meanwhile, Violette’s own desires remain vague; because her husband is an invalid she travels with a female companion with whom she shares a “true friendship,” but since none of these other women are depicted as masculine, they also fall safely outside of Violette’s own definition of love’s exceptions.97 Unlike the narratives of Kate Ranke and Charlie, where the protagonist’s same-sex desires were portrayed as both unrequited and connected with a masculine gender identity, Olrog’s novel did not delimit such desires either to masculinity or to an emotional one-way street. In fact, as events unfold, the author reveals why Violette had decided to save Lena from the rich businessman who had “bought” her: Violette knew the artist who had once painted a portrait of Lena, and when she had first laid eyes on the unknown girl in the painting she had been deeply touched.98 However, when Violette, as a new female patron takes Lena to Paris, she does not keep her as an object but makes sure that her protégée gets an opportunity to educate herself in order to become an independent woman. When Lena’s former patron, Midas, learns of Lena’s new whereabouts, he sets out to retrieve “his” girl. Puzzled by Lena’s new female protector, he comes to the conclusion that she must be his rival: So, he shall fight for a woman against a woman. This was something entirely new. He laughs coldly. Who is she, this aristocratic lady, who had lured away his paradise bird? A degenerate product of culture, of course. There were plenty of those around.99 In short, Midas does not understand Violette’s motives, and he continues to speculate whether she would turn out to be a “masculine monstrum” or perhaps merely a “capricious woman of the world.”100 As he finally meets Violette he realizes that he had been wrong on both accounts: Unlike other emancipated women he had met, “masculinized half-measures” who talked about education and equality, Violette had not allowed her independence to destroy her femininity—she was, in fact, a beautiful woman.101 At this point in the narrative, when Midas agrees to give up “his” girl, the female protagonists are also re-orientated into a traditional mold of marriage and heterosexual attraction: Lena uses her new freedom to marry a German aristocrat (which turns out to be an unhappy marriage), while Violette stays true to her hospitalized husband. Like Smith’s 1921 novel Kate Ranke, Olrog’s novel from 1927 highlights the complexity of female same-sex desire in a culture that idealized heteronormative love while stigmatizing women’s love for other women as “monstrous,” “degenerate” or “masculine.” The two feminine women Lena and Violette, who are clearly drawn to each other in Olrog’s novel, are thus left outside of any intelligible “model” of love. Despite Violette’s

232  Unfinished Stories insistence that it is important to follow one’s own heart and not take any heed of prejudice or “public opinion,”102 the narrative also takes care to distinguish between, on the one hand, feelings that belong in the “development” of young girls (mother-daughter affection, admiration and friendship), and, on the other hand, desires that are “exceptions to the rule,” felt by women with “masculine tendencies.”103 At the same time, even though neither of the two female protagonists in Olrog’s novel is depicted as “masculine,” the very invocation of this sexually incriminating term (to women) casts a queer shadow on their desires. In relation to the other novels discussed in this chapter, Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) explored desire in relation to a different set of modern attributes; rather than cars and sports, Olrog focused on passions inspired by art and fashion. When Lena as a shop girl cannot help but follow the female customer who bought the hat with the golden bird, her pursuit eventually brings her into a new cosmopolitan world of leisure and splendor. Meanwhile Violette’s interest in the girl in her brother’s portrait turns her into a female patron, determined to help Lena and guide her to independence. Disturbed by the relationship between the women, the male patron Midas finds this aspect of womanhood without men and (female) masculinity as incomprehensible: “ ‘Woman made by woman.’ A remarkable thought.”104 As Kristina Fjelkestam notes in regard to the popular theme of Paris as the city of self-fulfillment in Swedish female-authored novels in the 1920s, the idea that a woman could shape herself entirely through female, rather than male, guidance and inspiration—without turning into an emancipated “monstrum”—simply appeared remarkable to male observers.105 At a crucial juncture in the story, when Lena’s finds her life to be meaningless, despite having found a husband, she turns again to a female figure, this time in the form of a bronze statue of an Amazon that inspires her to go to war and “help the wounded and dying.”106 Though Lena in the end does not join the ambulance services at the front lines as she had planned, she does find strength in the Amazon to take action. Through this counter-image of female masculinity, the author thus suggests an alternative perception of the independent or emancipated woman— rather than monstrous and “degenerate,” the Amazon is described as “a symbol of freedom, a fighter against spiritual pettiness and low suppression.”107 As Lena walks away from the statue, she is determined not only to gain the respect of her husband, who is already in the military, but also “to do some good in the world,” which would perhaps finally “end her restless worry and yearnings.”108 However, before she has a chance to set her plans into motion, Lena finds out that her husband has died in the war, and that Violette has fallen ill and is dying. At this point she has already realized that her true love had always been Violette, “the only one who really mattered.”109

The Desire to Desire  233

Concluding Remarks The two novels discussed in this chapter, Ejnar Smith’s Kate Ranke and Sigrid Olrog’s Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird), both traced the fate of female protagonists troubled by the cultural limitations placed on their gender as well as their innermost desires. These overlooked Swedish novels from the 1920s suggest that the cultural stereotype of the “mannish lesbian” has masked a wider set of queer representations of female masculinities as well as femininities in literature at this time. In Ejnar Smith’s 1921 novel, the camera-shooting, fun-loving, red-haired sportswoman Gunvor is portrayed as both “queer” and masculine but not as particularly burdened (to begin with) by her difference, in the manner the literary “mannish lesbian” was later made out to be.110 When Gunvor comes crashing into a small-town resort, she is instead confronted with a well of feminine loneliness, as embodied by beautiful, suicidal Kate. However, as this narrative evolves, the notion of female masculinity as all play and agency is also troubled, as Gunvor is forced to realize the limits of her passions in a world of rejection and locked hotel rooms. In the case of Olrog’s 1927 novel, the protagonist Lena realizes in the seclusion of a Norwegian mountain resort the meaning of true love, as she meets the mysterious Violette. While Olrog’s novel was dismissed in the press as shallow and inspired by the movies, the narrative, which placed human desire at its explorative center, did bring to light several major themes in modern culture, not only in terms of women’s desires for fashion and the related problem of women as consumers/commodities, but also, and even more so, in terms of women’s desires for art, independence and each other. The queerness of this narrative lies in the dissonance between, on the one hand, a clear articulation of the “rules” of sexuality (defining feminine women as heterosexual and masculine women as exceptions), and, on the other hand, the failure of the (feminine) protagonist to entirely subscribe to these rules. Even though Den gyllene fågeln is set during the war, the novel addresses many concerns related to the modern woman of the 1920s. This was a decade of change in Sweden, when concerns with consumption trends, the state of marriage, the impact of medical science and an increasingly democratized society were all analyzed through the gender and sexuality of the modern woman. In this context novels offered a space for exploring her perspective, from an imaginary inside position. Both novels discussed in this chapter utilized the seclusion of the resort as a type of “queer space” that worked as a temporary refuge from male authority and power, whether in the shape of a husband, a brother or a patron. The holiday resort also formed an important backdrop to the narrative in Margareta Suber’s later novel Charlie, known as the first “lesbian” Swedish novel, published in 1932. The 1921 novel Kate Ranke

234  Unfinished Stories in fact exhibits many striking similarities with the later novel Charlie, particularly in regard to the triangle drama between two women and one man (mostly absent). Though reviewers in 1921 tended to interpret Gunvor’s passion for Kate foremost as a will to “save” and help her unhappy sister-in-law, one review also pointed out how Gunvor’s persona constituted a clearly recognizable “type.”111 In the novel, this type was described through a range of specific epithets (“emancipated,” “sportswoman,” “ugly”) as well as attributes (masculine clothing, a rifle, a camera, sturdy boots etcetera) and interests (sports, taking photographs of women, driving powerful automobiles etcetera). Gunvor’s masculinity was manifested also by her sexual agency, focused entirely on Kate who becomes the object of Gunvor’s passionate attention (culminating in Gunvor’s climbing of a ladder in order to break into Kate’s hotel room). However, Gunvor does not stumble across medical literature (as in the later cases of Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist Stephen or Suber’s Charlie) that clarifies exactly what type she is. Nevertheless, Gunvor is struck by feelings of self-contempt and loneliness in similar ways that would later also be explored in Charlie, tracing likewise the fate of an automobileloving modern tomboy in love with a beautiful woman. By the mid-1930s, themes of female masculinity, including crossdressing, and lesbian desire, were explored also in Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s infamous The Misses von Pahlen suite.112 However, as previous scholarship has pointed out, these novels in the 1930s did not simply confirm medical discourses of female masculinity and lesbianism but, rather, challenged, through the complexity of their queer characters, the rigidity of such categories. Still, the articulation of queer genders and sexualities appears to have become more controversial at this time: Reviewers in the press now criticized Krusenstjerna’s novels for being deeply “immoral.”113 While the queer female masculinity of Gunvor in the 1921 novel authored by Ejnar Smith could be dismissed as the typical “emancipated sportswoman” this lightheartedness thus appears to have been exchanged ten years later by a more serious tone, colored by the ideals of a more conservative era. At the same time, the fictional cases of passionate sportswomen and rebellious shop-girls discussed in this chapter show that “queer” genders and desires were explored and taken seriously in literature also in the 1920s, in ways that has previously been given little attention in the Swedish context. In the novels Kate Ranke and Den gyllene fågeln, the ambiguity of modern boundaries, whether between “masculine” and “feminine” or between “modern” and “masculine,” was not only placed at the center, but was also challenged and explored—across a spectrum of play, agency and desire.

Notes 1 Märta Björlingsson-Ivanovsky, Den nya kvinnan: första steget (Stockholm: Fram, 1925), 229. “Hur maskulin kvinnan än vill verka. Nog är mannen som man och hennes förhållande till honom—som kvinna—det stora

The Desire to Desire  235 intresset. Den unga kvinna, som förnekar det även i djupet av sitt hjärta, är ett monstrum.” 2 Kristina Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), 95. The term “monstrum” (monstrosity) was not only used in fiction. When journalist Barbro “Bang” Alving struggled in her youth to understand her same-sex desires and her masculine gender identification, she expressed fears in her diary, in 1927, that she was “a monstrum, half-finished, half girl, half boy.” Quoted in Eva Vaihinen, “Queera Barbro: Ur Barbro Alvings dagböcker och brev 1927–1935,” lambda nordica 10, no.1/2 (2004‑2005): 14. On the cultural anxiety surrounding this theme, see also Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey, and Martin B. Duberman (New York: Meridian Books, 1989); Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880– 1930 (London: Pandora, 1985). 3 Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 170. 4 Laura Doan, “Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War,” Women: A Cultural Review 17, no. 1 (2006): 29. 5 An argument made also by Katie Sutton in The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 152. On rural/urban tensions in Swedish interwar novels, see Anna Williams, Tillträde till den nya tiden: fem berättelser om när Sverige blev modernt (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2002). 6 Jenny Björklund and Anna Williams, eds., Tänd eld! Essäer om Agnes von Krusenstjernas författarskap (Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag, 2008), 120. 7 Sigrid Olrog’s novel is however mentioned by Kristina Fjelkestam in her survey of Swedish interwar novels. See, Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 49, 95. For literary scholarship on Swedish twentieth-century lesbian novels, see also Eva Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935 (Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2016); Liv Saga Bergdahl, Kärleken utan namn: identitet och (o)synlighet i svenska lesbiska romaner (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2010), 57–66; Jenny Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). While these studies have cast new light particularly on lesbian themes, they do not explore queer literary perspectives in a wider sense, involving, for instance, cross-dressing, female masculinities or queer desires that were not necessarily configured by an identity-based model of organizing sexuality. For an example of a queer approach in a broader sense in regard to Swedish novels from the 1920s, see Eva Heggestad, “Cross-dressing, genustrubbel och queert läckage i några svenska 1920-talsromaner,” lambda nordica 14, no. 1 (2009). In her article, Heggestad takes a queer perspective on three novels, addressing the theme of cross-dressing in Hjalmar Bergman’s Flickan i frack (1925), the female prostitutes in Maria Sandel’s Droppar i folkhavet (1924), and the queer love story in Sigge Stark’s Uggleboet (1924), where a young man falls in love with another man, who turns out to be a woman in disguise. 8 Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Tony växer upp: scener ur ett barndomsliv (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1922), 278. “Jag har aldrig hört talas om sådant där förr, men jag har läst  om det. Saker som man inte ens vet namnet på äro i allmänhet de farligaste!” All English translations from Tony as

236  Unfinished Stories well as the two novels Kate Ranke (1921) by Ejnar Smith and Den gyllene fågeln (1927) by Sigrid Olrog are my own in collaboration with line editor Rebecca Ahlfeldt. 9 Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 141. 10 Charlotte Ross, Eccentricity and Sameness: Discourses on Lesbianism and Desire Between Women in Italy, 1860s-1930s (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 59. Similar observations have been made in the Swedish context. See Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900– 1935, 229–60. 11 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair. 12 As previous queer theoretical scholarship has pointed out in this context, “queer readings” do not require texts to be authored by gay writers or to be texts otherwise identified as “queer”; rather, this constitutes a methodological approach that is sensitive to the potentiality of ambiguities and non-normative representations of gender and sexuality in any text. Katri Kivilaakso, AnnSofie Lönngren, and Rita Paqvalén, Queera läsningar: litteraturvetenskap möter queerteori (Hägersten: Rosenlarv, 2012), 10; Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 8; Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 189–205. 13 On “queer moments,” see A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 191; Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, 3. On “competing frameworks,” see Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 5. See also Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War; Anna Clark, “Twilight Moments,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005). 14 Krusenstjerna, Tony växer upp: scener ur ett barndomsliv, 279. “Men mamma har en hel bok om fasligheterna på sin hylla, och den kan du ju få låna, så får du se vad din vän är för en sort, om du inte har reda på det förut.” On Krusenstjerna’s Tony-novels, see Kristin Järvstad, Att utvecklas till kvinna: Studier i den kvinnliga utvecklingsromanen i 1900-talets Sverige (Stockholm: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1996), 17–84. 15 Scientific literature also plays a part in Margareta Suber’s novel Charlie, a decade later, but this time the protagonist opens the book she has encountered—a work by Otto Weininger (while its title remains undisclosed to the reader, the book alluded to is in all likelihood Weininger’s Geschlecht und Character, first published in 1903 and known for its misogynistic stance and theories of homosexuality). Charlie’s negative response can be read as an awareness of society’s norms related to homosexuality, but these extrinsic elements remain vague in the narrative. Karin Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla. . . ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i Ensamhetens brunn,” lambda nordica 3, no. 11 (2006): 17–18. 16 Margareta Suber, Charlie (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1932; repr., 2005. Stockholm: Normal förlag). On Charlie, see Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla. . . ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i Ensamhetens brunn”; Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 49–52; Kristina Fjelkestam, “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden,” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 13, no. 1 (2005). 17 On the theme of “freedom or love,” in the press, see Emma Severinsson, “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress,” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016). See also Chapter 1.

The Desire to Desire  237 18 Yvonne Hirdman, Den socialistiska hemmafrun och andra kvinnohistorier (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1992). 19 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 13. See also Lena Lennerhed, Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia (Hedemora; Uppsala: Gidlund, 2002), 158. 20 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 14. 21 Though individual critics, skeptical of feminism and suspicious of female homosexuality, made their voices heard also in the 1920s. See, for instance, Arnold Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan (Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist  & Wiksell, 1924), 90. 22 Some novels were also simply met with silence: This was the case with Elsa Gille’s (pseud.) novel Vi stackars kvinnor. . . (1917; We Poor Women), one of the rare novels at this time which placed female homosexuality at the center of the narrative, telling the story of an emerging lesbian relationship between two women. Kristin Järvstad, Den kluvna kvinnligheten: ‘öfvergångskvinnan’ som litterär gestalt i svenska samtidsromaner 1890–1920 (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2008), 155; Elsa Gille, Vi stackars kvinnor. . . (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1917). 23 Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 177. 24 Ibid., 166. 25 “Märkligare dödsfall i Sverige 1928: Ejnar Smith,” Svenska Dagbladets Årsbok: Sjätte årgången (Stockholm: Svenska Dagbladet, 1928), 287. As noted by Svenska Dagbladet in 1921, Smith was one of the most advertised authors in Sweden, but this “strong mercantile noise” (“starka merkantila bullret”) did not disturb or affect his writing. Sigfrid Siwerts, “Kate Ranke: Smiths senaste roman,” Svenska Dagbladet, November  5, 1921, 5. The now-forgotten novel Kate Ranke was “a huge success” in the Christmas sales of 1921 (“julens största boksuccess”), as stated in an advertisement in Dagens Nyheter in 1921 (Dagens Nyheter, December 20, 1921). 26 Torsten Fogelqvist, “Ejnar Smiths nya roman: Några randanteckningar,” Dagens Nyheter, October  25, 1921, 5. On Smith’s skills as a narrator of women, see also “Märkligare dödsfall i Sverige 1928: Ejnar Smith,” Svenska Dagbladets Årsbok: Sjätte årgången (Stockholm: Svenska Dagbladet, 1928), 287. 27 Torsten Fogelqvist, “Ejnar Smiths nya roman: Några randanteckningar,” Dagens Nyheter, October 25, 1921, 5. “Då är hennes fula svägerska, som av brist på kärlek måste förvandla sig till man och ta livet globetrotteraktigt och journalistiskt, bättre som typ.” 28 Sigfrid Siwerts, “Kate Ranke: Smiths senaste roman,” Svenska Dagbladet, November 5, 1921, 5. 29 Reviewers identified the spa resort as the town of Söderköping. Sigfrid Siwerts, “Kate Ranke: Smiths senaste roman,” Svenska Dagbladet, November 5, 1921, 5. 30 Ejnar Smith, Kate Ranke (Stockholm: Åhlén  & Åkerlund, 1921). “den påflugna sportkvinnan” (p.  68), “detta närgångna emanciperade fruntummer” (p. 69). 31 Ibid., 66. “Ansiktet var väderbitet, nästan brunbränt och hon hade fått på sig en khakifärgad blus med stärkkrage och violett herrslips. Håret stötte i rött och låg yvigt över hjässan. Hon hade militärknapparna i manschetterna och ett klockarmband av grönt läder.” 32 Ibid. “han kände en stickande rodnad stiga från halsen uppåt kinderna.” 33 Ibid., 66. “Jag hittade en vacker flicka att stoppa i gluggen.” 34 Ibid., 71. “Ju mera han kände på sin andliga puls, desto mera onormal föreföll den.”

238  Unfinished Stories 35 Ibid., 89. “Darvins felande länk, dresserad i frihet.” For another example of the use of Darwin in the context of women’s natural or unnatural gender and sexuality, see the magazine Charme’s comment on “Darwin’s nature logic,” which referenced heterosexual attraction, in “Problemet om mannen,” Charme, May 1, 1923, 15. 36 Smith, Kate Ranke, 90. “De funno en bänk litet avsides; fröken Meidel tog fram sin chokeringspipa och retade än ytterligare justitierådinnan genom ett oförskämt bruk av sin kamera, vars objektiv uppfångade de förbipasserande ‘brokadhästarna’ på hemväg.” 37 Ibid., 91. “Som hon satt bara—med armarna bakom soffans ryggstöd, ograciöst bredbent, så att man ovillkorligen måste lägga märka till de klumpiga, bruna fjällvandringsskorna.” 38 For a comparison between Charlie and The Well of Loneliness, see Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla. . . ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i Ensamhetens brunn.”; Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 112. Though reviewers argued that these two novels were similar, they also differed, as Lindeqvist and Fjelkestam points out, in terms of how they employed literary topoi and how the two protagonists ultimately approached their future (Charlie as confident, and Stephen as appellant). 39 Smith, Kate Ranke, 96.“Hon stirrade in i sin egen fulhet, hånfullt överlägsen, men ändå förgrämt medveten om att vara utesluten från livets ändamål.” 40 Fjelkestam, “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden,” 16–18. See also Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 41 Fjelkestam, “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden,” 18. 42 Smith, Kate Ranke, 96. “Idiotiskt bar hon sig åt, det var henne obehagligt klart, men ändå kunde hon inte låta bli att räcka ut tungan, fräckt som en gatpojke, mot sin egen bild.” 43 Ibid., 94. “Men lika mycket som fadern beundrat sin son, lika mycket hade han föraktat sin dotter. Tidtals tålde han knappast se henne. ‘Du är så ful, att det skulle kosta en förmögenhet, att få dig gift’ sade han [. . .] Så länge Gunvors mor levde, hade hon tagit flickan i försvar.” On the literary mother-topoi in Charlie, see Fjelkestam, “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden,” 15. 44 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 20. On this theme in medical discourse and psychoanalysis, see also Kristina Fjelkestam, “Masculinity, Mothering, Mirrors: teorier kring orsakerna till kvinnors homosexualitet,” lambda nordica 9, no. 1/2 (2003). 45 Smith, Kate Ranke, 94–95. “Gunvor hade väl ändå något av sin brors styvsinta natur, eftersom hon icke låtit sig brytas, utan vunnit det rättframma egensinne, varöver hon var så stolt och en misstänksam ovilja mot män, som hon erkände inför sig själv, men dolde genom kamratlig ton eller gaddigt skämt.” 46 As an example of the latter, a chivalrous attitude, Gunvor wants to protect and “save” Kate in various situations. This attitude of protective chivalry can also be found in Charlie, where Charlie jokingly calls herself a “knight,” when she offers her depressed friend Elisaweta a ride in her car. See Jenny Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, Or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017): 48. In the novel Kate Ranke, it is also revealed that Gunvor had served as a nurse at the front lines during the war in France (p. 164).

The Desire to Desire  239 7 See note 39. 4 48 Smith, Kate Ranke, 94. 49 Quoted in Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” 54. 50 Smith, Kate Ranke, 98. 51 Ibid., 99. “Gunvor betraktade förstulet sin brors hustru, retlig över hennes egensinne och fåfänga, men ändå gripen av hennes skönhet och varmt förvissad att kunna slita hjärtat ur bröstet för att vara henne till behag.” 52 Ibid., 100. “ ‘Det är synd om er vackra kvinnor,’ Gunvor blev häftig. ‘Ni bli åtrådda och bortkastade och endast en form av lycka kan ni tänka er. [. . .]‘Kan det inte ligga självbehärskning och självaktning i att upprätthålla den yttre människan?’ ” 53 Ibid., 107. “Kate tyckte sig nedtryckt av en ny skam. Till sist gick hon med självövervinnelse fram till Gunvor och lade handen på hennes axel. ‘Vi får stödja varandra, Gun.’ ” 54 Ibid., 117. “Även det fula kan ha något intagande” 55 Ibid., “ ‘Jag får bekänna [. . .] att jag i ett ögonblick har blivit mera attraherad av fröken Meidels frånstötande fulhet, än någonsin av den regelbundna skönheten hos hennes svägerska.’ ” 56 Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla.  .  .  ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i Ensamhetens brunn,” 19. 57 As noted in the previous chapter, there was not one sexological model but several that used a palette of terms and theories. However, these still tended to conceptualize, as Katie Sutton writes, “female sexual and gender behavior as derivative of male identity.” Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, 19. 58 Smith, Kate Ranke, 125. “Ändå närde hon under apatin en dov fruktan för Gunvor.” 59 Ibid., 127. “Du gör oss löjliga.” 60 Ibid. “Jag följde inte med” 61 Ibid., 128. “musklerna sträcktes i hennes seniga lemmar. [. . .] Hon var lika skicklig.” 62 Ibid., 129. 63 Ibid., 130. “Hon hade hyrt en av stadens skraltiga bilar och körde omkring på vägarna för att få luft.” As discussed in Chapter  4, the automobile in the 1920s constituted an important but also controversial attribute of the independent “modern woman.” On the one hand, the car was associated with freedom and independence, in line with the emancipated woman, but at the same time, because motor vehicles also symbolized masculine power and agency, female drivers were always at risk of being seen as “out of place” when driving. 64 I have explored these themes of driving and queer desire more extensively in Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” 65 Smith, Kate Ranke, 130. “Men hon var också styrkt i tron på sin mission att stödja Kate, hjälpa henne och uppoffra sig för henne.” 66 Ibid., 126. 67 Ibid., 130–31. “i ett rus av samvetsförebråelser började hon kyssa Kates fot, som stack fram vid täckeskanten. [.  .  .]‘Ingen betyder så mycket som du. [. . .] Åh gud vad skall jag göra?’ ‘Släppa mig och gå din väg,’ svarade Kate otydligt.” 68 Ibid., 131. “Tystnaden stördes endast av de båda kvinnornas flämtande andedrag.” 69 Ibid., 133.

240  Unfinished Stories 70 Ibid., 156. “Hon var misslyckad som kvinna och hennes emancipation bara ett förtvivlat narrspel, hennes trots mot honom ett vågspel. [. . .] Idrottsmärket, som hon idag bar på sin khakidräkt, hade hon säkert satt dit bara för att markera sin oavhängighet.” 71 Ibid., 157–58. “ ‘Från första stund började du antasta henne med dina karesser.’ ‘Det är, som du misstänkte mig för att vara din rival,’ flämtade Gunvor. [. . .] ‘Och om så vore, Gunvor?’ ‘Säg inte mer,’ bad systern nedbruten.” 72 Ibid., 159. “Skona Kate. Var inte så hård mot henne som mot mig. Hon är av ett annat virke.” 73 Lindeqvist, “ ‘Den där lilla.  .  .  ’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i Ensamhetens brunn,” 21–22. 74 Fjelkestam, “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden,” 15. 75 Smith, Kate Ranke, 164. 76 Ibid., 188. “ ‘Jag kör,’ ropade Gunvor, ‘det skall bli härligt, att åter känna ett sådant här vidunder till maskin i sitt våld.’ ” 77 Similar driving scenes can be found in Suber’s novel Charlie (1932). See Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, Or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” 78 Smith, Kate Ranke, 217. “Även om vi inte fullt fatta varandras sorg, så har ensamheten lärt oss ett medlidande som inte sårar. Låt oss hålla ihop!” 79 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 54–55. 80 Ibid. 81 Torsten Fogelqvist, “Ejnar Smiths nya roman: Några randanteckningar,” Dagens Nyheter, October 25, 1921, 5. 82 The resort setting appears also in Charlie, where the entire narrative is played out at a fashionable seaside resort. See Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” 46. 83 While resorts may be rurally located geographically, they also stand apart culturally from their countryside surroundings (as they generally catered to urban and upper-class people), whether positioned by the sea (as in Charlie), or in a small town (as in Kate Ranke). Yet another example of a queer, or lesbian, narrative that plays out in the setting of a resort is Elsa Gille’s (pseud.) 1917 novel Vi stackars kvinnor.  .  . (We Poor Women). On this novel, see Järvstad, Den kluvna kvinnligheten: ‘öfvergångskvinnan’ som litterär gestalt i svenska samtidsromaner 1890–1920, 145–55. As Elisabeth Mansén has shown, the spa culture, which in Sweden goes back to the seventeenth century, offered from the beginning a site for friendship and romance. Elisabeth Mansén, “Vänskap och kärlek inom kurortskulturen,” in Ljuva möten och ömma samtal: om kärlek och vänskap på 1700-talet, ed. Valborg Lindgärde and Elisabeth Mansén (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1999). 84 While “queer” spaces, sites, places and geographies have been much explored in recent scholarship, many studies seem to share an identity-based approach, leading to a focus on “queer people” (rather than a space that encourages queer experiences). Jack Halberstam has defined queer space as “the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.” Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 6. Historically orientated studies have in the same vein tended to understand queer spaces in terms of emerging gay subcultural sites, such as the Left Bank or Greenwich Village (for instance, Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites: Gay

The Desire to Desire  241 Urban Histories Since 1600 (London; New York: Routledge, 1999). This interlocking of queer spaces with modern sexual identities unnecessarily precludes a wider range of theoretical and historical investigatory uses of the concept. For a broader approach, see David Bell and Gill Valentine, eds., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London; New York: Routledge, 1995). 85 Smith, Kate Ranke, 157. “Jag tycker inte om att finna dig här i denna avkrok till badort.” 86 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 40–41; Gunilla Domellöf, Mätt med främmande mått: idéanalys av kvinnliga författares samtidsmottagande och romaner 1930–1935 (Hedemora: Gidlund, 2001). 87 “En debutroman,” Dagens Nyheter, June 14, 1927, 5. “Två debutböcker,” Svenska Dagbladet, July 12, 1927, 7. 88 Johan Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001), 95; Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 26–29. 89 Sigrid Olrog, Den gyllene fågeln (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927), 65, 77. 90 See, for instance, “ ‘Storstädning’ på Dramaten,” Dagens Nyheter, September  13, 1925, 11. “hypermoderna dekadentkretsar.” On the theme of women as consuming subjects, and objects of consumption, see also Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 64; Söderberg, Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960. 91 Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, 168. 92 Olrog, Den gyllene fågeln, 143. 93 Ibid., 169. “Barnets kärlek till sin mor, backfishens svärmeri för sitt ideal, unga flickors vänskap, allt det i en kvinnans första utveckling, som Lena aldrig haft en aning om, koncentrerar sig i vad hon känner för Violette.” In medical discourse, a troubled or absent mother-daughter relationship was often listed at this time as an important contributing factor that could explain female homosexuality. See also previous notes on Charlie and Kate Ranke. 94 Ibid., 122. “Ingen man kan vara som du!” 95 Ibid., 125. “Det finns förstås inga regler utan undantag; jag har talat om det vanligaste fenomenet, där det gäller maskulina män och feminina kvinnor, men som du vet finns det även män med starka kvinnliga drag och maskulint betonade kvinnor, vilket naturligtvis inverkar på problemen. Hon tystnar och lutar sig tillbaka mot sin röda sidenkudde, medan hon undrar hur mycket flickan vid hennes sida har fattat av vad hon sagt.” 96 Ibid., 169. “Att det finns något ännu högre—kärleken till den rätta mannen, tror Lena icke på.” 97 Ibid., 129. “den sanna vänskapen” 98 Ibid., 149. 99 Ibid., 162. “Såå, han skall kämpa mot en kvinna om en kvinna. Det är något alldeles nytt. Han skrattar kallt. Vem kan hon vara, denna aristokratiska dam, som lockat bort hans paradisfågel? En degenererad kulturprodukt förstås. Sådana finns det gott om.” 100 Ibid., 166. “Är hon ett maskulint monstrum som han först tänkt eller endast en nyckfull världsdam?” 101 Ibid., 179. “De kvinnor ‘med intressen’ och jämlikhetspretentioner han kommit i beröring med talade alltid om sina sociala och enskilda rättigheter, rösträtt och löner, de verkade i hans ögon knappast kvinnor—endast tvärsäkra, maskuliniserade halvmesyrer.”

242  Unfinished Stories 02 Ibid., 122. “allmänna opinionen” 1 103 Ibid., 125, 169. 104 Ibid., 178. “ ‘Kvinnan skapt av kvinnan,’ en otrolig tanke.” 105 Fjelkestam, Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige, 49. 106 Olrog, Den gyllene fågeln, 224–25. “Hon skall gå ut i kriget för att hjälpa de sårade och döende.” 107 Ibid., 224. “Hon verkar mera en frihetens genius, en kämpe mot andlig småaktighet och lågt förtryck.” 108 Ibid., 225. “Kanske kan hon på det sättet döda sin rastlösa oro och längtan.” 109 Ibid., 215. “den enda som betyder något för henne!” 110 Compare, for instance, Stephen Gordon in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). 111 Torsten Fogelqvist, “Ejnar Smiths nya roman: Några randanteckningar,” Dagens Nyheter, October 25, 1921, 5. 112 Björklund and Williams, Tänd eld! Essäer om Agnes von Krusenstjernas författarskap. On the cross-dressing theme in Krusenstjerna’s Fröknarna von Pahlen (1930–35; The Misses von Pahlen), see also Anna Williams, “Unge herr Agda,” in Omklädningsrum: könsöverskridanden och rollbyten från Tintomara till Tant Blomma, eds. Eva Heggestad and Anna Williams (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2004). 113 Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair, 14.

Bibliography Allen, Carolyn. Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine, eds. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. Bergdahl, Liv Saga. Kärleken utan namn: identitet och (o)synlighet i svenska lesbiska romaner. Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2010. Björklund, Jenny. Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Björklund, Jenny, and Anna Williams, eds. Tänd eld! Essäer om Agnes von Krusenstjernas författarskap. Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag, 2008. Björlingsson-Ivanovsky, Märta. Den nya kvinnan: första steget. Stockholm: Fram, 1925. Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Borgström, Eva. Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935. Göteborg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2016. Clark, Anna. Desire: A  History of European Sexuality. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. “Twilight Moments.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005). Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ———. “Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War.” Women: A Cultural Review 17, no. 1 (2006): 26–41. Domellöf, Gunilla. Mätt med främmande mått: idéanalys av kvinnliga författares samtidsmottagande och romaner 1930–1935. Hedemora: Gidlund, 2001.

The Desire to Desire  243 Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Fjelkestam, Kristina. “Masculinity, Mothering, Mirrors: teorier kring orsakerna till kvinnors homosexualitet.” lambda nordica 9, no. 1/2 (2003): 115–20. ———. “Tale of Transgression: Charlie and the Representation of Female Homosexuality in Interwar Sweden.” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 13, no. 1 (2005). ———. Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer: modernitetens litterära gestalter i mellankrigstidens Sverige. Stockholm; Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002. Gille, Elsa. Vi stackars kvinnor. . . . Stockholm: Bonnier, 1917. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Heggestad, Eva. “Cross-dressing, genustrubbel och queert läckage i några svenska 1920-talsromaner.” lambda nordica 14, no. 1 (2009): 9–23. Higgs, David, ed. Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Hirdman, Yvonne. Den socialistiska hemmafrun och andra kvinnohistorier. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1992. Horak, Laura. Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Ingemarsdotter, Jenny. “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017): 38–70. Järvstad, Kristin. Att utvecklas till kvinna: Studier i den kvinnliga utvecklingsromanen i 1900-talets Sverige. Stockholm: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1996. ———. Den kluvna kvinnligheten: ‘öfvergångskvinnan’ som litterär gestalt i svenska samtidsromaner 1890–1920. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2008. Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880– 1930. London: Pandora, 1985. Kivilaakso, Katri, Ann-Sofie Lönngren, and Rita Paqvalén. Queera läsningar: litteraturvetenskap möter queerteori. Hägersten: Rosenlarv, 2012. Krusenstjerna, Agnes von. Tony växer upp: scener ur ett barndomsliv. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1922. Lennerhed, Lena. Sex i folkhemmet: RFSUs tidiga historia. Hedemora; Uppsala: Gidlund, 2002. Lindeqvist, Karin. “ ‘Den där lilla . . .’: Charlie och inversionsdiskursen i ‘Ensamhetens brunn’.” lambda nordica 3, no. 11 (2006): 7–25. Mansén, Elisabeth. “Vänskap och kärlek inom kurortskulturen.” In Ljuva möten och ömma samtal: om kärlek och vänskap på 1700-talet, edited by Valborg Lindgärde and Elisabeth Mansén, 111–45. Stockholm: Atlantis, 1999. Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey and Martin B. Duberman, 281–93. New York: Meridian Books, 1989. Olrog, Sigrid. Den gyllene fågeln. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927.

244  Unfinished Stories Ross, Charlotte. Eccentricity and Sameness: Discourses on Lesbianism and Desire Between Women in Italy, 1860s-1930s. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Severinsson, Emma. “Frihet eller kärlek? Äktenskap, singelliv och vägen till lycka i 1920-talets veckopress.” LIR.journal, no. 7 (2016): 97–118. Smith, Ejnar. Kate Ranke. Stockholm: Åhlén & Åkerlund, 1921. Söderberg, Johan. Röda läppar och shinglat hår: konsumtionen av kosmetika i Sverige 1900–1960. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2001. Sölvén, Arnold. Kätterier i kvinnofrågan. Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924. Suber, Margareta. Charlie. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1932. Stockholm: Normal förlag, 2005. Sullivan, Nikki. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Vaihinen, Eva. “Queera Barbro: Ur Barbro Alvings dagböcker och brev 1927– 1935.” lambda nordica 10, no. 1/2 (2004‑2005): 7–30. Williams, Anna. Tillträde till den nya tiden: fem berättelser om när Sverige blev modernt. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2002. ———. “Unge herr Agda.” In Omklädningsrum: könsöverskridanden och rollbyten från Tintomara till Tant Blomma, edited by Eva Heggestad and Anna Williams. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2004.

Conclusion

This book has explored discourses on the “masculine” modern woman in Swedish popular media in the 1920s across several themes—film, fashion, sports, automobility, medicine and literature. As a symbol of progress and a new era, the fashionably short-haired modern woman was seen as connected both to women’s emancipation and to a modern, or even decadent, female avant-garde. Sweden was at this time largely an agrarian nation with a small capital described by some as provincial rather than metropolitan.1 However, Sweden and Stockholm in particular were changing rapidly in the 1920s, in terms not only of a growing population and an ongoing migration to the cities, but also in terms of new movie theaters, dance palaces, restaurants, shops and automobiles. In an effort to analyze Sweden’s standing as a modern nation, many observers turned to “the modern woman” for answers. Even though it was often stated as fact that women’s new short hairstyles and clothing had become “masculinized” compared to the generation of women before the war, opinions diverged regarding the merit and meaning of this development.2 Trousers, sportswear and cigarettes constituted in this context more than “masculine” attributes to be worn, used or smoked; they were signs to be read, highlighting modern gender confusion, historical change or future trends. The suggestion made by a Swedish film magazine in 1925 that the modern “garçonne girl” appeared to be “harmless” was based on an assumption that la garçonne, a label originating in Victor Margueritte’s scandalous bestseller novel La Garçonne from 1922, now referred merely to playful fashions and not sexual promiscuity.3 Meanwhile, other commentators continued to be weary of associations with foreign decadence or signs of an emancipation movement that had gone off the rails, confusing equality with “sameness.”4 A range of critics (both men and women) questioned whether the modern woman, desiring restlessly to participate everywhere, would ever be interested in marriage and motherhood, seen as the foundations of both the nation and true womanhood.5 As modernity thus was pitched against tradition, order against chaos, and “harmless” play against emancipated agency, “the modern young woman”

246 Conclusion continued to be scrutinized for signs of masculinization. In examining the cultural space for female masculinity in Sweden in the 1920s, I have in this study considered how these aspects of play, agency and desire shaped the response to women’s perceived gender transgressions, whether in the context of ambiguous fashions, the physical agency of female athletes, or women’s desire to participate in new (male) fields, pushing the boundaries of their gender. Though previous research has focused on discourses on the “masculine” woman in the 1920s in a range of national contexts, the Swedish case has been less explored.6 Tracing how the “masculine” or “masculinized” young woman in early interwar Sweden was configured in many different ways, whether as an object of desire, as a target of moral objections, or as a symbol of the opportunities of modern life, this book has taken a comprehensive approach, investigating popular media as well as literature, medical handbooks and conduct advice. While previous Swedish historical scholarship has tended to focus on political and social reform in relation to the “new” or modern woman, I have in this study set out to examine the impact of a modern visual culture that tended to place the modern young woman at the center, while also exploring how these discourses in popular media were related to ongoing debates on women’s emancipation.7 The Swedish case adds new perspectives to interwar studies on the modern woman, as this was a country that was defined at the dawn of the 1920s neither by the horrors of the recent war nor an established urban, consumer culture. Perspectives that dominated in Swedish media were instead defined by a sense of rapid progress and change, whether in relation to an ongoing urbanization, technologization or democratization. Placed at the symbolic center of this change was the “masculinized” modern girl or woman, celebrated for her bold spirit of adventure and her cosmopolitan look but also left to bear the brunt of accusations of all that seemed to threaten the nation—decadence, a superficial mass-market culture and a crumbling gender order. In this book, I have traced how cases of female “gender stretching” unfolded when associated variously with youthful playfulness, female agency or strange desires.8 Throughout this analysis I have also considered the interconnectedness of play, agency and desire in an increasingly commercialized culture that encouraged women to desire and consume the images and goods of modernity, while also admonishing them to be weary of too much or even “perverse” desires.9 In the following paragraphs I will briefly summarize the main points of this analysis. Exploring in the first two chapters how the garçonne style was debated in Swedish media and how efforts were undertaken to restore the boundaries of femininity, I showed that many commentators in popular media tended to approach modernity as an international competition. When establishing that Sweden was not “behind” (other countries), reporters

Conclusion  247 adduced not only statistical facts related to technological progress (such the size of Sweden’s car fleet) but also the style and habits of Swedish women.10 In this context, women’s short hair, interest in sports and ability to drive were seen as proof that Sweden was indeed establishing itself as a modern nation. Concerns were nevertheless raised in regard to modernity’s independent young women. Whether associated with an ongoing Americanization of culture or decadent “orgies” in Berlin’s hidden locales, the gender ambiguity of flappers and garçonne girls was at times described not only as boyishly modern but also as unwomanly “hyper-modern.”11 The term “garçonne” denoted in this context more than style (featuring, typically, a tuxedo, short hair and a monocle); a garçonne type was a girl with an attitude who put herself in the symbolic as well as actual driver’s seat. In this context, the garçonne girl could be seen as an embodiment of decadence, provokingly masculine in her attitude and disturbingly devoted to selfish or even perverse pleasures. Though Stockholm’s dance palaces were often described as charming rather than decadent, conservative voices warned that women’s masculinization was ultimately a matter of attitude, not merely looks (concerns were particularly raised in regard to women’s roles as wives and mothers). However, the tendency in Sweden to intertwine the goal of becoming modern as a nation with the style of the modern woman nevertheless ensured that she—however ambiguously—remained a powerful symbol of progress. A growing discourse on health and sports in Sweden moreover created an incentive to describe the physical agency of the modern woman as modern more than masculine. Nevertheless, efforts to establish the appropriate boundaries between modern and masculine and between feminine and masculine quickly turned into a complicated exercise. Advising young women how to preserve their femininity in a world of masculine demands constituted a task that engaged many in the Swedish society in the 1920s. Fashion advisors provided detailed instructions on how to achieve “graceful” body language, and discussed at length which hairstyles were fashionably masculine—or too masculine. Several strategies emerged that aimed to define more clearly the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. These involved methods of containment (shifting back to feminine dress after masculine activities, such as sports), compensation (emphasizing the continuity of a feminine style when entering traditionally male arenas, such as the university or the work place), or self-control (learning how to be graceful and monitor one’s appearance). By the end of the 1920s, several fashion experts reported that the masculine garçonne style was now out of fashion, leaving room instead for a return to femininity.12 However, whether everything about the garçonne style was doomed or if just certain elements of the look were out of fashion continued to be debated.13 In the end, the sporty ideal of modern womanhood, celebrating practical sportswear and the utility

248 Conclusion of short hair for modern career women, contributed, as I  discussed in Chapter 2, to an expanded notion of modern femininity. Determining the boundaries between masculine and feminine turned out to be particularly challenging in fields that revolved not only around “playful” fashions but also around physical agency. Turning in Chapters 3 and 4 to sports and automobility, I showed how Swedish male as well as female organizers struggled to combine ideals of feminine modesty and “coquetry” with the requirements of physical confidence and boldness in sports and driving. While it was widely agreed that sports contributed to the health of both men and women—and potentially to the national honor of Sweden—doubts nevertheless lingered about whether women would be masculinized by sports, or, conversely, that sports would be feminized.14 The solution that many female sports leaders put forth distinguished sports (idrott) from play (lek), where women were expected to play and engage with healthy exercises, but not compete. However, because girls seemed to be more motivated when competing, a paradoxical practice emerged where adult women were encouraged to approach sports as play and girls were encouraged to compete. To some extent the “play” approach to sports thus ameliorated concerns with female masculinity; after all, sports could then be seen as a boyish rather than a mannish activity even for those who were no longer young. However, neither youth nor “play” constituted a guarantee of the harmlessness of the sports girl or woman: Not only was the limit between adolescence and adulthood difficult to establish, but also, as suggested in numerous popular magazines, (adult) women wished to be youthfully “modern” too. By the early 1920s Swedish women were entering yet another field considered to be decisively masculine: motorsports. Commentators in women’s magazines as well as in motorsport journals noted that women performed well in competitions (sometimes beating their male competitors) even in the most extreme ones, including long-distance motorcycle competitions and grueling winter automobile races.15 The many stories of accomplished female drivers in Swedish popular media, explored in Chapter  4, appeared by the late 1920s to have challenged the idea of automobility as a strictly masculine arena. Women working on their oily engines were not necessarily seen as masculine but rather as modern heroines. However, commentators often gave special praise to the modern “Motor-Amazon” who had succeeded in retaining her feminine style. In time, a language emerged that signaled that femininity was not an option but rather a requirement for acceptance in the case of female motorists. At the same time this expectation excluded women from an ongoing professionalization of motorsports where frailty and modesty (associated with femininity) had no place. Following the Winter Reliability Competition in 1929, in which four women had participated, a debate ensued where leading motormen questioned whether women should be allowed to compete in a competition known as “the toughest in Scandinavia.”16

Conclusion  249 Even though women were sometimes barred from participating in competitions perceived to be too strenuous (though they were not barred from the Winter Reliability Competition), Swedish motorsports magazines and motor organizations also supported female drivers throughout the 1920s. The motor magazine Svensk Motortidning (The Swedish Motor Magazine), which was the official periodical of The Royal Automobile Club (K.A.K.), featured many interviews with female motorists whose love of driving was acknowledged and encouraged. The initiative by the Swedish Motor Club (Svenska Motorklubben) to start a Women’s Automobile Competition in 1926 brought further attention to women in motorsports, even though this competition also created an arena where female motorists could be safely feminized—now prevented from beating men. Beyond motorsports, female automobilists were also visible in numerous “chauffeuse” interviews in popular weekly or monthly magazines, where they revealed that they had learnt to drive for a range of different reasons: for work, for commuting, for road trips and for traveling. Through this rising visibility of female motorists, the boundaries were ultimately pushed regarding expectations of women’s place in the modern world—a place no longer limited to home. The modern woman was as much “at home” on the road. Having explored the perspectives of play and agency in the context of fashion, film, sports and motor sports, the final and third part of this volume turned to the perspective of desire, particularly in relation to “queer” female masculinities. While pointing out that the potential “queerness” associated with female masculinity in Swedish culture in the 1920s was not tied to a distinct identity type, I showed in Chapter 5 that consolidating ideals of feminine beauty by the end of the 1920s positioned the “masculine” look of modernity’s garçonne types as different or even “queer.” With her angular pose and defiant gaze, the no-nonsense attitude of la garçonne ultimately constituted a queer fit within a binary system of two opposite genders, defined by male masculinity and female femininity. As emphasized by Charme, Bonniers Veckotidning and other popular magazines in Sweden at this time, the roots of women’s desire to be beautiful were unambiguous: Women wished to “please men.”17 By emphasizing how women’s “coquetry” served this deep-felt wish to “please” (men), an unambiguous link between gender and sexuality was established: The feminine woman was also heterosexual. Meanwhile, Swedish medical experts writing in new popularized works on medicine and psychiatry suggested that the look of “normal” love was in reality rather unclear: On the one hand, sexual “abnormality” could be recognized in “gender inverted” habits and appearances (masculine women in the case of female homosexuality), but at the same time they also discussed the commonness of same-sex love and how such feelings could be considered “normal” too.18 Thus, while nineteenth-century associations in sexology of “inverted” genders with “perverted” sexualities

250 Conclusion were still present in Swedish popularized presentations of medicine in the 1920s, this connection was also troubled and challenged by the experts themselves. A key factor in the launching of the new medical book series in Sweden was the “enlightenment” ideal embraced by publishers and authors, who declared that they were part of a larger educational tradition that now included the medical sciences.19 However, even though the sexual types and theories of sexology to some extent were challenged or troubled in these books, the medical perspective remained foundational: People could be defined by their desires, and knowledge of such definitions would benefit not only the health of individuals but also the order of society at large. Beyond modernity’s fashionable female masculinity, the older stereotype of the ugly mannish spinster had also continued to appear from time to time as an entertaining element in Swedish films and in popular media. Though reviewers in the press dismissed the most exaggerated stories and images as outdated, feminist writers still remained weary of associations with the wrong kind of emancipation (the “mannish” feminist, suspiciously passionate about other women).20 Allusions to same-sex love and desire nevertheless appeared in female-authored novels and in essays, where the vagueness of language allowed for a less determined interpretive framework.21 Turning in Chapter Six to literature, I chose however not to revisit the relatively well-known interwar novels that have already been studied in some detail, such as Margareta Suber’s 1932 novel Charlie, but focused instead on two overlooked novels from the 1920s that featured “queer” protagonists and narratives: Ejnar Smith’s Kate Ranke from 1921 and Sigrid Olrog’s Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) from 1927.22 Both of these novels placed at the center themes of female independence and sexual agency that did not fit within a heteronormatively defined model of love. The first novel, Smith’s Kate Ranke, traced the relationship between a young woman, Gunvor, described as an “ugly” and “emancipated” sportswoman, and her beautiful but unhappy sister-in-law, Kate. Set in a vacation resort, this novel has many striking similarities with the later novel Charlie (1932), particularly in regard to the triangle drama between two women and one man.23 In Kate Ranke, Gunvor’s masculinity is manifested not only through a number of interests and attributes (sports, cars, a rifle, a camera, sturdy boots etcetera), but also by her sexual agency, focused on Kate. At one point, Gunvor is struck by feelings of self-contempt and loneliness in similar ways that would later also be explored in Charlie.24 While exploring the meaning of love, beauty and desire, Smith’s novel ultimately left unresolved the mystery both of Kate Ranke’s sadness and Gunvor’s emotional investment in Kate.25 Reviewers in the Swedish daily presses characterized the book as an entertaining small-town narrative, though one review also pointed out that Gunvor’s persona constituted a clearly recognizable “type.”26

Conclusion  251 The second novel, Olrog’s Den gyllene fågeln (The golden bird) from 1927, portrayed the fate of a simple shop girl, Lena, in Stockholm, thrown into a cosmopolitan world of high fashion and luxury consumption, introduced to her by wealthy male patrons. Having established how a patriarchal modern culture treats women as objects on a market of desire, this narrative also traced how Lena eventually becomes her own subject as she meets another woman with whom she experiences for the first time feelings of love. However, Lena’s feelings are gently dismissed by her new, beautiful female patron who explains that same-sex love constitutes an “exception” characteristic of masculine women. Since neither of the two women is described as masculine, their desires are safely—and inexplicably—contained. While both of these two 1920s novels approached themes of samesex desires, neither culminates in the articulation of sexual identities but, rather, in vaguely described desires to desire, focused on women rather than men. The queerness of both narratives lies in the dissonance between, on the one hand, a clear articulation of the “rules” of sexuality (defining marriage as the normative goal for women and configuring feminine women as heterosexual), and, on the other hand, the failure of the protagonists to entirely subscribe to these rules. In conclusion, it can also be argued that these overlooked Swedish novels from the 1920s highlight how the cultural stereotype of the “mannish lesbian” has masked a wider set of queer representations of female masculinities as well as queer femininities in literature in the early interwar period. Both of the novels discussed in this volume troubled the idea of welldefined boundaries, whether gendered or sexual ones, not only in terms of the related problem of modern women as consumers/commodities but also, and even more so, in terms of women’s desire for agency and independence. Having explored a spectrum of play, agency and desire, this study has shown how the “masculine” modern woman was not one “type” in Swedish popular media in the 1920s, but, rather, a mirror face of many different varieties of cultural anxieties, concerns and also hopes. While accepted as a youthful symbol of modern progress in some contexts (the “harmless” garçonne girl or perky “chauffeuse”), she was criticized when her modern playfulness appeared to be migrating into male spheres of agency or into “hyper-modern” circles of decadence.27 However, the tendency in Swedish popular media to view modern progress as an international competition, where some nations were “behind” and others, at the forefront, ensured that the style and essence of the modern woman continued to generate debate. Whether perceived as a fashionable trend or as a disturbing foreign influence, the idea of an ongoing “masculinization” of women in Sweden in the 1920s thus inspired not only debates on female masculinity but also a pushing of the boundaries of femininity.

252 Conclusion

Notes 1 Yvonne Hirdman, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds., Sveriges historia: 1920–1965 (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 54–65; Kristina Lejdström, Grotta Azzurra, 2nd ed. (Everöd: Recito, 2016), 14, 17. 2 For debates on women’s short hairstyles, see Chapter 2. 3 “En tip-top bild ur Dollarmillionen,” Filmnyheter, November 2, 1925, 7. 4 See, for instance, “Kvinnans och mannens likställighet,” Upsala Nya Tidning, June 11, 1920; Nils Erdmann, “Moderna kvinnor,” Nya Dagligt Allehanda, March 26, 1926 (and further examples in Chapter 1). 5 On these types of concerns, see especially Chapters 1 and 2. 6 For instance, Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Laura L. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For further references, see the Introduction and Chapter 1. 7 For research on the Swedish women’s rights movement, see notes in the Introduction. 8 On women’s “gender stretching” in the British context of World War I, see Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 111. 9 For quotes on this theme, see Chapter 5. 10 E.g. “Testens betydelse i äktenskapets psykologi,” Filmnyheter, January 11, 1926, 8. See also Chapters 2 and 4. 11 As discussed in Chapter 1, this theme was common in the 1920s in Swedish entertainment magazines as well as in the daily presses. See, for instance, “Nativitet,” Söndagsnisse-Strix, February  22, 1928; Nils Erdmann, “Moderna kvinnor,” Nya Dagligt Allehanda, March 26, 1926; “Ögonblicksbilder från Berlin,” Charme, November 15, 1924, 22. For an example of concerns in Sweden with the Americanization of culture, see Arnold Sölvén, Kätterier i kvinnofrågan (Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924), 90. See also Martin Alm, “Bilden av Amerika,” in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, ed. Jakob Christensson (Lund: Signum, 2009), 185–86. 12 “La Garçonne är död—Leve kvinnan!” Våra nöjen, September  27, 1929, 16–17. 13 “Frisyrens nya modelinje,” Charme, Christmas Issue, no. 24, 1926, 31. “Garconneidealet är utdömt.” 14 This gendered “double threat” in sports has previously been discussed in the Swedish context by Helena Tolvhed in På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2015), 258. 15 See, for instance, “Ett nytt fält för våra sportande damer,” Charme, February 1, 1926, 10; “Amazoner med pudervippa,” Svensk Motortidning, February 28, 1927, 166–67. See also Chapter 4. 16 Erland Bratt, “Vår krönika,” Svensk Motortidning, January 31, 1929, 65. 17 B.V.T.-serien, no. 4. Shinglad och bobbad: Hur man skall sköta sitt hår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1926), 3. See also Chapter 2. 18 See, for instance, Jakob Billström, “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser,” in Sexuell hygien: sexual-etiska föreläsningar, ed. Ivar Broman (Stockholm: Sveriges kristliga studentrörelses förl., 1927), 50–51. 19 Ibid.; Viktor Wigert, Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker, 2nd ed., Medicinskt folkbibliotek (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927). 20 As discussed in Chapter Five. 21 For examples of feminist writings and literature, see Chapters 5 and 6.

Conclusion  253 22 Ejnar Smith, Kate Ranke (Stockholm: Åhlén  & Åkerlund, 1921); Sigrid Olrog, Den gyllene fågeln (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927). 23 On Margareta Suber’s novel Charlie, see Jenny Björklund, Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 49–55. For further references, see Chapter Six. 24 The 1932 novel Charlie traced the fate of an automobile-racing tomboyish young woman in love with an older, feminine woman. For an analysis of the themes of driving and desire in Charlie, see Jenny Ingemarsdotter, “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed,” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017). 25 In the end, Gunvor is left behind when Kate’s husband decides to bring his wife back to the city. 26 Torsten Fogelqvist, “Ejnar Smiths nya roman: Några randanteckningar,” Dagens Nyheter, October 25, 1921, 5. 27 A theme discussed in Chapter 1.

Bibliography Alm, Martin. “Bilden av Amerika.” In Signums svenska kulturhistoria: 1900talet, edited by Jakob Christensson. Lund: Signum, 2009. Behling, Laura L. The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935. Urbana; Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Billström, Jakob. “Könslivets sjukdomar och avvikelser.” In Sexuell hygien: sexual-etiska föreläsningar, edited by Ivar Broman, 26–57. Stockholm: Sveriges kristliga studentrörelses förl., 1927. Björklund, Jenny. Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Hirdman, Yvonne, Jenny Björkman, and Urban Lundberg, eds. Sveriges historia: 1920–1965. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012. Ingemarsdotter, Jenny. “Normal Cars and Queer Driving, or Why Charlie Loved to Speed.” lambda nordica 22, no. 1 (2017): 38–70. Lejdström, Kristina. Grotta Azzurra. 2nd ed. Everöd: Recito, 2016. Olrog, Sigrid. Den gyllene fågeln. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927. Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Smith, Ejnar. Kate Ranke. Stockholm: Åhlén & Åkerlund, 1921. Sölvén, Arnold. Kätterier i kvinnofrågan. Uppsala; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924. Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Tolvhed, Helena. På damsidan: femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990. Göteborg: Makadam, 2015. Wigert, Viktor. Psykiska sjukdomstillstånd: deras väsen och orsaker: Medicinskt folkbibliotek. 2nd ed. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1927.

Index

Abate, Ann 8 Alfvén, Margita 1, 2 Allen, Carolyn 223 Andersson, Signe 157, 161 Andersson, Therése 78, 80 Andreen, Andrea 122 Austen, Jane 204 Bäärnhielm, Eva 164 Behling, Laura 8, 117 Berg, Greta 159 Bergner, Elizabeth 51 Bergvall, Erik 114 Billström, Jacob 198 – 9 Björklund, Jenny 13, 217, 219 – 20, 228 Blomberg, Eva 78 Boni, Carmen 49, 52 Bonnier, Gert 197 Boye, Karin 68 – 70, 220, 228 Bratt, Erland 166 – 7 Breger, Claudia 9 Bremer, Fredrika 108 Burr, Jane 76 – 7, 79 Butler, Judith 102 Cahn, Susan K. 104, 116 – 17, 120 Cassel, Ebba 164 – 5 Chesser, Elizabeth 194 – 5 Clark, Anna 12, 197, 217, 230 Clarke, Deborah 146, 152 – 5 Clarsen, Georgine 142 – 3, 146, 148, 151 Conor, Liz 15 Dickson, Eva 110, 163 – 6, 168 – 71 Dietrich, Marlene 84

Doan, Laura 12 – 14, 142, 155, 195, 217 – 18 Dyer, Richard 44 Edelman, Lee 14 Ederle, Gertrude 110 Ekman, Gösta 6 Erdmann, Nils 47 Ericson, Ruth 158 Finkelstein, Joanne 7 Fjelkestam, Kristina 41 – 2, 116, 217, 223, 226, 232 Garber, Marjorie 73 Garbo, Greta 84 Gjestvang, Alexandra 144, 161 Gustafsson, Tommy 6, 48, 50, 201 – 2 Hagen, Ellen 150 Halberstam, Judith (Jack) 8 – 9, 11, 39, 191 Hall, Radclyffe 9, 12, 160, 200, 219, 227, 234 Halperin, David 14 Hansson, Per Albin 37 Hermelin, Honorine 150 Hesselgren, Kerstin 75 Hirdman, Yvonne 7, 11, 37, 39 – 40 Holm, Magda 50 Holmén, Erik 70, 83, 112, 147 Horak, Laura 9, 36, 50 – 1 Huizinga, Johan 103 – 5, 114 Jacobsson, Maj 122 Jay, Karla 79 Johannisson, Karin 81 Johanson, Klara 202

Index  255 Kassman, Signe 162, 166 Key, Ellen 203 Krane, Vikki 102 Krusenstjerna, Agnes von 38, 218 – 20, 228, 234 Lambert-Chambers, Dorothea 113 Ledger, Sally 192 Leffler, Anne Charlotte 118 Lenglen, Suzanne 113 Lennerhed, Lena 196, 199 Levitt, Dorothy 163 Lindau, Ingrid 164 – 5 Linder, Gurli 202 Lindhe, Dolores 163 Lo-Johansson, Ivar 194 Lundgren, Kristina 203 Lundqvist, Ester 163, 169 – 71 Lundstedt, Vilhelm 199 Lybeck, Marti M. 203 Mackaill, Dorothy 43 – 4 Marcus, Sharon 8 Margueritte, Victor 1, 41, 245 Morris, Violette 123 Nilsson, Ada 200 – 3 Nordin, Margit 123 – 4 Nordström, Ester Blenda 151 Nyberg, Ven 164 Nyström, Anton 195, 197 Olrog, Sigrid 18, 218, 229 – 33, 250 – 1 Oram, Alison 195 Ottesen-Jensen, Elise 150, 196 Pallin, Erik 109, 124 Paulitz, Dolly 166 – 7, 170 – 1 Pikkuniemi, Elin 110, 124 Reeser, Todd W. 8 Riviere, Joan 79 Roberts, Mary Louise 7 Rolley, Katrina 82 Rosengren, Margit 145

Ross, Charlotte 218 Rück, Berta 47 Rüder, Inga 157 Rydström, Jens 202 Sabelfelt, Alice 158, 170 Sandberg, Aina 159 Scharff, Virginia 141, 144, 153 Schnapp, Jeffrey 155 Schultz, Cissi 170 Scott, Joan 15 Sheller, Mimi 160 Sigel, Liza Z. 36 Skillen, Fiona 110, 115 Smith, Ejnar 18, 218, 221, 224 – 5, 227 – 8, 233 – 4, 250 Snickars, Pelle 15 Söderberg, Johan 69, 84 Söderhjelm, Alma 203 Søland, Birgitte 39, 111 Sölvén, Arnold 193, 195 Starke, Pauline 50 Stille, Ingeborg 166 Strindberg, August 192, 201, 203 Suber, Margareta 119, 219, 220, 223 – 4, 226 – 8, 233 – 4, 250 Sutton, Katie 3, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 51, 79, 80, 84, 110, 115, 117, 221 Svalling, Ester 107 – 8, 122 Teje, Tora 45 Tolvhed, Helena 103 – 4, 106 – 7, 114, 121 – 2 Torslow, Ragnvi 122 Virilio, Paul 155 Wägner, Elin 200 – 1 Wahlström, Lydia 79, 119, 202 Wallenberg, Louise 51 Wigert, Viktor 195, 197 – 8 Williams, Jean 104, 161 Wilson, Elizabeth 68 Wolfe, Janet 152 Wosk, Julie 145 – 6, 149, 163