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The Swedish Municipality Act, issued in 1862, consolidated a plutocratic system in which ownership and income, and the resulting level of taxation, translated into political power. However, as a measure to hinder large landowners from holding a majority of the votes, the Act guaranteed voting rights for tenants. The aim of the article is to analyse how power relations played out after this challenge to landlords’ hegemony. Through an analysis of tenants’ contracts, appeals to the King in Council and minutes from municipal board meetings, we show how landlords did not trust a political culture of deference to secure power, even if they had demanded subservience in contracts. In a deliberate and specific way, they also reserved voting rights for themselves, which we find to have been a widespread pattern although it was repeatedly pointed out as illegal by the King in Council. However, through the analysis of the board meetings, it becomes clear that the position of manorial landlords in these municipalities was so obvious that they rarely had to confront their tenants with their illegal contractual restrictions. The results empirically challenge a narrative of slowbut steady democratization and theoretically challenge the alleged reciprocity of landlord-tenant relations.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the power relations of labour and gender in the servant institution during the agrarian revolution in Sweden. The positions of servant, master and mistress are analyzed theoretically as a gendered, contracted position with both economic and moral dimensions attached to them. The analysis is applied together with a theory on bases of power, which are those areas where pretentions to power come in to force through material conditions; in this study being masculinity and access to land. The sources used are the Servant Acts, didactic and debate literature, and court cases. Though the formal condition for a servant system to evolve is inequality – in the agrarian setting primarily between landed and landless people – previous research has tended to view the servant system primarily as a solution to the changing need for labour over time in the agrarian household. Through the Servant Acts, the Crown delegated control over landless people to farmers and could thereby ensure that farmers had access to labour, but the Crown also demanded farmers to use inflexible year-long contracts for servants. I show that by using the well-established year-long contract as a frame, masters and male servants were able to create flexibility. At the same time, the subservient position of a servant became less acceptable for men, since the possibility to become a landed head of household at the end of the period of service was eroded during the agrarian revolution. I find that the servant position underwent a discursive feminization, and those aspects point to a situation where the servant position became feminized and wage labour became a new power base for men. The analysis of servants’ wages shows that there were considerable opportunities to use the court to demand unpaid wages, for both male and female servants, although only a quarter of the cases concerned females. However, the legal right to be taken care of in the event of sickness does not seem to have been complied with. Taken together, this leads to the conclusion that servants were already regarded less as family members and more as part of modern labour relations during the agrarian revolution. Finally, the concept of agency is analyzed, showing a subtle gender difference in that the labour of female servants was taken more for granted than that of male servants.

This article compares the opportunities that existed for trade union organisation by women and the scope for pursuing women’s issues in the Swedish Tailoring Workers’ Union (Skrädderiarbetareförbundet), the Swedish Textile Workers’ Union (Textilarbetareförbundet) and the Swedish Women’s Trade Union (Kvinnornas fackförbund). Trade union minutes are analysed using theories on women’s organisation, in which exposure of male standards in trade union organisation and the concept of women as powerless are central. The results reveal some differences in the opportunities for women to become members of the Tailoring Workers’ Union, which initially tried to exclude women, and the Textile Workers’ Union, which saw it as a priority to recruit more women. Nevertheless, both unions shared a similar view of women as weak and especially difficult to organise as trade union members. A lack of debate about women’s conditions is also clear in both unions. Comparison with the Women’s Trade Union shows that dedicated organisations for women played a major role in women’s opportunities for union involvement, but that gender-based union organisation was regarded as a threat to the supposedly genderless trade unions., Moving the Social, Vol 48 (2012): Social Movements in the Nordic Countries since 1900