Den självstyrda periferin: Lanthushållsundervisningen och styrningen av den svenska landsbygden, 1890-1970

Through the formation and development of industrial societies between 1890 and 1970, rural life and agriculture in Europe were made subject to a high degree of social, economic and political planning. This phenomenon of rural governance in the age of high modernity is explored in this thesis, which analyzes the governance of the Swedish countryside through studies of rural domestic education. In this thesis, rural domestic education refers to a complex of three educational institutions. Together they formed an arrangement to shape the work and lives of rural girls and women in Sweden in order to manage larger issues connected to the fate of agriculture and rural life in industrial society. The arrangement consisted of rural vocational schools, targeting young, unmarried women; the home demonstration extension service, directed towards rural housewives, and colleges for rural domestic teacher education. By framing rural domestic education as a case of rural governance, the thesis seeks to further the discussion of rural self-governance during the period. In contrast to previous studies in the field, which have favored the agency of the modern state and the notion of high modernism, this study highlights the social dimensions of rural governance and the ambivalence and resistance to the upheavals of high modernity experienced by social groups and classes in the Swedish countryside. The aim of the thesis is to widen and deepen our understanding of rural governance in the age of high modernity. This is done by merging theoretical perspectives from modern history and the history of education and applying them to four source pluralistic empirical investigations. These investigations cover the rationales, conditions, and actors involved in the governance of the Swedish countryside through rural domestic education between 1910 and 1960. Taken together the investigations show that the attempts to govern rural Sweden by fostering rural housewives were firmly based in the countryside. They were motivated by real and imagined threats related to women’s flight from the land and carried out through cooperation between the state and rural civil society, responsible for financing respectively organizing different forms of rural domestic education. Moreover, the rationales and conditions of rural domestic education were closely tied to a social and cultural formation that used it to further its own interests, characterized in the thesis as the rural bourgeoise. Through these results the thesis shows that rural governance in the age of high modernity can be understood as reactions of social groups responding to rapid transformations of society, rather than an outcome of state intervention and the need to render agriculture and rural life legible. This new understanding has implications for our perception of rural governance as a phenomenon in modern history and presents new perspectives on the history of agricultural and domestic education for women.