#onthisday in 1902 Alva Myrdal was born. She was a social scientist, writer, diplomat and politician. Myrdal was a prominent leader of the disarmament movement. In 1982 she won a Nobel Peace Price for her work to end the international arms race.
Since 1930’s she addressed the social welfare policies in Sweden. In contrast to the efforts to remove women from the labor force (because of The Depression), she called for equal economic opportunities and wanted greater political representation for women.
Myrdal wanted to make it easier for women to combine wage labor with raising children. She strived for state-sponsored day care, paid vacations for housewives, legalized contraception, and support for single mothers. Sweden implemented many of the reforms feminists recommended, supporting not only working mothers but working fathers as well.
“In Sweden as elsewhere popular attitudes toward women’s problems are still chaotic in most groups. Traditional thinking is enmeshed in an accumulation of vague interests, confused emotions, and pure nonsense, involving the whole question of women’s status. They are inherited from the epoch of early industrialism and focused in the doctrine that women’s place is in the home and not on the labor market. At bottom there lies a set of real and harassing problems. How is women’s scheme of life to be determined by their function as childbearers? In how far should young women’s work and life plans be geared to the future eventually of marriage and motherhood? How are the relations within the triangle of work-support-marriage to be organized in order to avoid an unreasonable degree of economic and personal waste?”
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“The organization of society will instead have to adjust itself to the new situation which is caused by the more general participation of women in work outside the jome. At the same time, however, the possibility for mothers to devote time to children during their infancy ought to be regained through social reorganization.”
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Fay Van Kerckvoorde 