The book Kvinnosaker (Women’s Things: A Century of Women’s History in 50 Objects) is published by Bonnier Fakta in partnership with The Stockholm Museum of Women’s History. It tells the history of Swedish women through fifty carefully selected objects from the turn of the century up until modern times, ranging from bicycles, bras and cigarettes to public toilets and the diaphragm. Through these objects, the historian Karin Carlsson shows how women’s lives and experiences, as well as their often limited space for movement and action, have changed over time. The book is illustrated by Amanda Berglund. Ph.D. Karin Carlsson is a historian and author whose research is primarily around social policies, urban studies and material culture. In 2021, Carlsson, in collaboration with the Stockholm City Museum, completed a major research project: “Gendered spaces: multidimensional walks in urban history.”

Women and sports

In 1967, Katherine Switzer was the first woman to run a marathon, in Boston. Even if women weren’t officially prohibited, it was taken for granted that the competition was exclusively open to men. Katherine signed up as K.V. Switzer to not reveal her gender. When one of the race managers realized that Switzer was a woman, he physically tried to pull her out of the event. But Switzer pursued and became the first woman to officially complete the Boston marathon. At this time there were no sports shoes of the right size available to women; Katherine had to order and have men’s shoes of a smaller size custom-made.

Women were excluded from competing in sports for a long time. In the 1930s, public health became more topical, and this opened for women to be more active. However, their form of exercise was often labelled as less strenuous and only for women, like for example “housewife gymnastics”. Women were not allowed to participate in the Olympics until 1900 in Paris, and then only for golf, sailing, tennis and croquet. The first time that women were allowed to run the marathon during the Olympics was in Los Angeles in 1984. Boxing for women was allowed in 2012 and ski jumping in 2014.

The campaign for women’s suffrage in the US began decades before the Civil War, but it took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win the right. Wyoming was the pioneering state introducing women’s right to vote, already in 1869.

On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, declaring for the first time that American women, like men, deserve all rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Ever since 1964, more women than men vote in the Presidential elections. Women now make up just over a quarter of all members of Congress – the highest percentage in US history. In the House of Representatives and the Senate combined, 27 percent of seats are held by women. That is a 50 percent increase from a decade ago.

The bra

Throughout history, women’s bodies have been covered up, shaped and “kept in place” by everything from stays, corsets, girdles and bras. In 1914, American publisher and peace activist Mary Phelps Jacobs (1892-1970) applied for a patent for a new bra that was comfortable and allowed women to wear dresses cut low in the back. It separated the breasts, unlike the corset, which was stiff and uncomfortable, pushing the breast into a single bosom effect.

She wrote that her invention was “so efficient that it may be worn by women engaged in violent exercise like tennis.” Mary founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company, but in her later years wrote, “I can’t say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”

The bra has alternated between being a symbol of control and a symbol of liberation. In the 1970s, an anti-bra movement started around the time of the Miss America Pageant. Bras, makeup, girdles and corsets among other “feminine items” were tossed into trash cans to protest against “enforced femininity.”

In the late 1970s, Lisa Lindahl teamed up with designer Polly Palmer Smith and her colleague Hinda Miller to solve the absence of a supportive jogging bra. They deconstructed two men’s athletic supporters and sewed the pieces into a prototype sports bra that developed into the “Jogbra.”

The pen

“The Pen is mightier than the sword” is a famous quote by the British author and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 1873), but women have not always had access to the pen. The British author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote her famous essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929, saying that as long as women do not have their own money or a room of their own, they will not be able to write.

This was especially true for working class women, who often lived in cramped spaces with their families, with little time, space or opportunity to write undisturbed.

A recent and collective sharing of “herstory” (history written from a feminist perspective) is the #metoo movement. It started with a tweet in 2017 from the American actress Alyssa Milano, although the expression “me too” was established already in 2006 by the American activist Tarana Burke. Alyssa Milano’s tweet encouraged women all over the world to tell their experience of sexual harassment with the hashtag #metoo. Within 48 hours, her tweet was shared 12 million times in 85 countries, and soon almost every country and professional category of women had joined the movement and shared their stories.