Right-wing women and gender equality: The emergence of market-liberal feminism in Sweden, 1970-1990

The political and social impact of the 1970s feminist mobilization on the left is well researched.

In contrast, there is a lack of research on the impacts and trajectories of gender equality and of women as political actors on the political right from the beginning of the 1970s.

This project joins an international group of historians researching the impact of feminist ideas on right-wing politics.

With Moderata kvinnoförbundet as the main empirical case, the project analyses the double challenge of conservative women: to male authority and to socialist and radical feminism’s monopolistic claim to represent ”women’s interests”.

The project reformulates and intervenes in a feminist historiography where feminist activism is viewed as a unified phenomenon (Hemmings 2011).

The project historicizes the different understandings ascribed to gender equality as a value, and the separation of gender inequality from other dimensions of social inequality. It shows these processes as integral to the transformations of the Swedish welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s.

Furthermore, it exposes the role of progressive feminist ideas in the turn towards market liberalism in Swedish politics from the end of the 1970s.

Combining a historical biographical approach with a discourse analytical one, the project theorizes feminist ideas as mutable across time and space.

It builds on archival sources from MKFs archives (Riksarkivet), press material and biographical sources, including interviews.