Recently the Swedish Institute, that nation’s propaganda arm on social and cultural matters, published a paper entitled “Gender Equality—A Key to Our Future?”  The author, Lena Sommestad, is professor of economic history at Uppsala University and director of the Swedish Institute for Future Studies.  This short document ably outlines the modern Swedish family policy model.  Professor Sommestad claims that Europe’s challenges of declining birthrates, population aging, tumbling marriage rates, and rising out-of-wedlock births have two sources: female emancipation and “a crisis of the traditional European male breadwinner family.”  She says that nations such as Germany, Italy, and Spain which have tried to protect or shore up the breadwinning husband and his homemaking wife have failed to understand the contemporary failure of these roles, and have paid the price with extremely low fertility.[1] 

Sweden, in contrast, has recognized women’s full emancipation and complete gender equality as so-called “social facts” and as the keys to a sustainable future.  Professor Sommestad summons up the theories of Alva Myrdal from the 1930’s; the latter had also argued that under modern conditions the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage, premised on a family wage for fathers, could no longer produce a sufficient number of children.  Myrdal had instead insisted that “declining fertility rates should be fought with increased gender equality.”  This idea, Professor Sommestad admits, went dormant in Sweden during the 1940’s and 1950’s when, during a time of affluence, male-breadwinner families became common.   However, “[f]rom the 1960’s and onwards, a growing number of Swedish women returned to gainful employment, and by the early 1970’s, the two-breadwinner norm had been firmly established.”[2]  Today, Sommestad continues:

Swedish gender equality policies build on a strong tradition of pro-natalist and supportive social policies....No entitlements are targeted at women in their capacity as wives.  The state uses separate taxation, generous public day-care provision for pre-school children, and extensive programmes of parental leave to encourage married women/mothers to remain at gainful employment.

Revealingly, Professor Sommestad argues that “[p]opulation ageing, problematic as it is, may prove to be a window of opportunity for radical gender-equality reform.”  Feminists, she says, “must overcome their traditional suspicion of demographic arguments and develop [instead] a new, progressive population discourse.”  During the 1930’s, Alva Myrdal proposed using the birth rate crisis as “a battering ram” for radical social reform.  Dr. Sommestad now does so again, although this time on a larger European canvas.   She adds “that countries that do not stigmatize non-marital cohabitation or extra-marital births have a better chance of maintaining higher fertility levels.”  Moreover, the Swedish model shows that to raise the birthrate, men must also take on “a greater responsibility” for childcare.[3]

In sum, using a different sort of language, the Swedish model of family policy sees the full equity feminist agenda as the answer to the fertility crisis spawned by modernity.  If European peoples want to survive in the 21st century, the argument goes, they should eliminate the full-time mother and homemaker, banish the family wage concept, end the married-couple home as an economic institution, welcome out-of-wedlock births and non-marital cohabitation, push all women—especially actual or potential mothers—into the labor force, enforce strict gender equality in all areas of life, engineer men into childcare-givers, and embrace expensive state child allowances, parental leave, and public day-care programs.  The result, Sommestad claims, will be more babies.

These are not just the ideas of academics.  In its official statement of policy toward the European Union, the Swedish government summarizes its overall goal in one sentence: “We want to see a Union that is open, effective and gender equal.”  This statement from April 2004 elaborates:

Sweden has a particular responsibility for increasing the pace of gender equality efforts in Europe.  Decisions have already been taken to the effect that an equal opportunity perspective shall permeate all aspects of the EU’s employment strategy.  Gender equality aspects should be integrated into all areas of policy.  Modern family policies that promote the supply of labour regarding both women and men and which enable family life to be combined with a professional life are needed in order to meet the demographic challenges Europe faces.[4]

Moreover, official documents pouring out of the European Commission emphasize ever greater attention to gender equality and the “harmonization” of European family policy around the Swedish model, stressing a de-emphasis of marriage, “an individualization of rights,” and a “new gender balance in working life” involving basic “changes in family structure.”[5]

Ideology and Law Making  

One could take issue with substantial aspects of Sommestad’s — and the Government of Sweden’s — argument.  Most notably, they gloss over the fact that the Swedish model has not successfully resolved the birth dearth in that land.  In 2003, Sweden’s Total Fertility Rate was 1.54, only slightly above the European Union average and well below the replacement level of 2.1.  While somewhat better off than Italy, Spain, and Germany on this social measure (and while the number may have risen somewhat in 2004), the celebration is premature.

However, I actually find myself in agreement with the primary thrusts of Dr. Sommestad’s analysis: namely, I admire her open embrace of “pro-natalism”; and I appreciate her honest acknowledgement of the “radical” ideological component behind the crafting of the Swedish family model, which rests on the deinstitutionalization of marriage.  I now want to offer a more thorough history of this interplay between ideology, law making, and coercion in the deconstruction of the conjugal state.  I do this, in part, because Sweden still stands as a remarkable public laboratory of modern social policy.  Moreover, compared to other nations, there is a directness, a kind of purity, to the Swedish story.  

The changing status of marriage in Sweden over the past 100 years can be summarized through five transitions:

From a regime where marriage was an open expression of Christian values with claims of its own to a regime that is intentionally secular and designed to protect the interests of the individual;

From a legal order that granted legal marriage special status to one granting nearly equivalent rights and obligations to non-marital cohabitation;

From a regime that assumed a breadwinning husband/father and a homemaking wife/mother to a regime giving priority to gender equality, universal adult employment, and self-support;

From a legal order that encouraged marriage as an economic partnership resting on a vital home economy to a regime dedicated to what one analyst calls “statisation,”[6] where the state deliberately takes over family functions, moves women into state employment and children into state care, encourages the economic independence of married adults, and crafts universal dependence on the welfare state;

And from a regime that presumed marriage to be exclusively heterosexual and monogamous to one that grants nearly equal status, benefits, and obligations to same-sex couples and—soon—to polygamous and other polyamorous arrangements, as well.

The Marriage Code of 1920  

The foundation of Swedish law remains a vast statute called Sveriges rikes lag, enacted in 1734, but now with innumerable amendments.[7]  Under the assumption of a “common estate,” this measure long codified the subordinate status of women relative to men in matters of income and property.  Despite some liberalization in the late 19th century, the Swedish husband until 1920 still held the right to control and administer the common estate during marriage.  However, reflecting the priority of land and lineage in the old regime, the law excluded from the common estate real property acquired before marriage or by inheritance during marriage.  In the then-rare cases of divorce, the marital estate would be divided equally, although marital misconduct such as adultery could result in penalties imposed on the offender.[8]

In 1918-19, The Kingdom of Sweden experienced a bloodless democratic revolution.  Following mass protests in the streets, the King surrendered virtually all of his power to Parliament.  The adoption of universal adult suffrage in 1920 extended the vote to women.  And Parliament also adopted that year a new marriage code. 

This 1920 code built on the idea of the marital home as an economic partnership, with husband and wife equal in rights, but different in function.  In many respects, it strengthened the institutional nature of marriage in the context of an emerging post-agrarian, urban-industrial society.  Relative to property, the 1920 code adopted the concept of “deferred community.”  The prescribed marital property system rested on the idea of “separate administration but equal division for one and all.”  The measure abolished the automatic co-ownership of property during marriage, as well as the position of the husband as the dominant administrator.  Rather, each spouse would control and administer the property that he or she owned at the time of marriage or gained later.  Notably, the 1920 code also embraced the idea of independent liability; spouses were not held responsible for each other’s debts (except for educational expenses for their children and certain direct household expenditures).  The code expanded the definition of marital property to include property acquired before marriage or by inheritance during marriage.  On the dissolution of the marriage through death or divorce or by mutual petition, all marital property would be divided equally, although the courts retained the power to punish one or the other spouse for marital misconduct.  Importantly, the code did lay upon the husband a special responsibility for economic support of his wife and children.  Overall, the 1920 code aimed at creating a relatively simple marital property system that minimized disputes and the use of lawyers and encouraged gender specialization within the home.  It was ideally suited to a people committed to nearly universal marriage and the avoidance of divorce.[9]

Rival Worldviews  

During the early 1930’s, a declining marriage rate and a sharply falling fertility rate led to calls for radical changes in the Swedish home.  For example, the young socialist intellectual Alva Myrdal — referred to earlier — generated a furor by calling for “collectivized homes” for Swedish families, where young mothers would join fathers in the full-time labor force, with infants and toddlers cared for in common nurseries, and with meals prepared in collectivized kitchens (and she actually saw such a facility through to construction).  With husband Gunnar Myrdal, she co-authored in 1934 the book Kris i befolkningsfrågan (“Crisis in the Population Question”).  As noted earlier, they argued that raising the birthrate required radical changes in the natures of marriage and family.  Fathers should be freed from their distinctive “breadwinner” role; mothers freed from “homemaking.”  All adults should work, and massive new state welfare benefits funded by a “bachelor tax” — including clothing allowances, day-care subsidies, universal health care, low interest “marriage loans”, and so on — should pay the costs of parenthood.  The marital home, under their scheme, would largely cease to be a significant economic unit.  Early and universal sex education, freely available contraceptives, and liberalized abortion would insure that all children in the new order would be wanted children.  Working through The Royal Population Commission of 1935 and the Swedish Parliament’s Women’s Work Committee, the Myrdals enjoyed a remarkable influence for the balance of the decade.[10]

By 1940, however, their ideas were in retreat.  The onset of World War II and Sweden’s perilous position as a “neutral” nation surrounded by Nazi German conquests encouraged a conservative nationalism.  Relative to the family, an alternate worldview found in the labor unions—namely that “women were to be liberated from the labor market rather than liberated to participate in it” and that men deserved to earn a living “family wage”—gained popularity.  Sometimes called “maternalism,” this attitude saw Alva Myrdal’s egalitarian feminism as part of the problem, not the solution.  Capitalists, this socialist claim went, should not be allowed to control the mothers, wives, and daughters of the working class.  The labor unions, collectively organized as the LO [Lans organization], negotiated in 1938 with employers the historic Saltsjöbaden agreement, which crystallized job segregation by gender, reserving the better industrial jobs and the higher wages for the unions’ male members. 

Some feminist analysts label the consequent 1939-67 period as “the era of the Swedish housewife.”  Public policy encouraged the full-time care of small children at home.  The marriage rate climbed, while the average age at first marriage fell.  Fertility also rose: Sweden’s mini-Baby Boom.  As late as 1965, only three percent of all Swedish preschool children were in some form of non-parental day care.  The so-called “traditional Swedish family,” encouraged by the marriage code of 1920 and by popular values, seemed solid.[11]  Indeed, feminist historians quietly acknowledge that as late as the mid-1960’s there was no pressure for change from young Swedish housewives and mothers.[12]

“Red Sweden”  

Yet the late 1960’s experienced new waves of radicalism.  So-called “Eurocommunism” was on the march, while Red Brigades terrorized Italy and West Germany, and France was torn apart by the New Left riots.  Meanwhile, Christian values — summarized by one analyst as “responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and the sanctity of long-term commitments [such as marriage]” — began to give way rapidly across Western Europe to a militant “secular individualism” focused on the desires of the self.[13]

Sweden also entered into what a leading feminist historian, Yvonne Hirdman, calls its “Red Years,” 1967-1976.[14]  At their heart was a massive so-called “gender turn” that would radically alter the nature of marriage in Sweden.  In 1968, a joint report by the Social Democratic Party and the LO abandoned the “family wage” ideal and concluded that “there are...strong reasons for making the two breadwinner family the norm in planning long-term changes within the social insurance system.”[15]  The next year, Alva Myrdal chaired a major panel, “On Equality,” for the Social Democrats.  Its report concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,...the point of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support.  Benefits previously inherent in married status should be eliminated.”  The Myrdal Report insisted that true “natural” differences between women and men should pose no barrier to reform.  State action should make such innate distinctions insignificant.  The Report also called for a tax policy based on individual earnings, without preference for any “form of cohabitation,” Myrdal’s new and deflating term for marriage.[16]

Accordingly, in 1969 the Swedish government resolved to reform fundamentally its marriage law.  The Minister of Justice created a Committee of Experts and issued his directives.  The Committee was to consider whether there was still even a need for marriage law and, if so, how it should be reconfigured.  It was to assess the “clearly anachronistic” nature of community property, based as it was on the now-to-be-discarded Christian notion of “one flesh.”  The Committee should also consider the diminished importance of marital status in Sweden, the new imperative of “personal fulfillment,” the rising demand for divorce, declining public interest in material property in favor of pensions, annuities, and other claims on the welfare state, and the elevation of gender equality into the cornerstone of Swedish social policy.[17]

In this spirit, Sweden’s Parliament approved in 1971 a fundamental reform of the income tax.  It abolished the taxation of households through the joint income tax return premised on “income splitting” by married couples.  Instead, all persons would henceforth be taxed as individuals, without attention to marital status, dependents, employment, or income of a spouse.  This gave Sweden the most “fully individualized taxation system” in the developed world.  In the context of high marginal tax rates, this change also greatly benefited the two-income household and penalized the traditional one-income breadwinner family.[18]  Analysts of modern Sweden are nearly unanimous in viewing this shift from “joint” to “individual” taxation as the most sweeping social change in Sweden over the last 40 years, for it “more or less eradicated” the traditional home.[19]  As the feminist analyst Annika Baude concludes: “If I were to choose one reform which has...done the most to promote equality between the sexes, I would point to the introduction of individual income taxation.”[20]

On the basis of the Family Law Reform Committee’s work, Parliament approved two years later (1973) a new measure governing marriage and divorce.  Access to marriage actually expanded.  Most legal impediments to heterosexual marriage disappeared: even half-brothers and half-sisters could marry, as could aunts and nephews, uncles and nieces.  Only siblings and persons related by blood in unilinear descent faced prohibition; bigamy and polygamy remained banned.  The minimum marriage age for both spouses became 18.   Premised on the idea of marriage as a voluntary union, it was — in one advocate’s words — “only natural that if one of the spouses is dissatisfied, he or she may demand a divorce.”  In effect, this 1973 law held that the community or state no longer had significant interests in the preservation of a marriage.  “Fault” would no longer be considered, nor would marital misconduct have any bearing on the division of property.  This latter change ripped both “adultery” and “fidelity” out of marriage’s institutional construct.  If both husband and wife agreed to the divorce, it would be immediately granted.  If one spouse objected or if there was at least one child under age 16 in the home, the new law fixed a mandatory reconsideration period of six months.  “Separation” no longer had legal status.  The measure assumed adult self-support and largely ended the concept of alimony (except in limited cases where “maintenance” payments for a set time might be required).[21]

The Palme Era  

In 1972 a new Social Democratic prime minister came to power, Olof Palme.  Alva Myrdal joined his cabinet as minister of disarmament and church affairs.  Under her open influence, Palme addressed the women of the party that year, declaring an end to the maternalist order.  “In this society,” he said, “it is only natural for both parents to work.  In this society it is evident that man and woman should take the same responsibility for the care of the home and the children.”  He added that “[i]n this society...the care of these future generations is just as naturally the responsibility of us all.”[22]

A true revolution began.  The party abolished its Women’s League, long the bastion of the homemakers.  Women would now be “real members” of the party, Palme said, dealing with “common issues” alone.  New policies made employment nearly mandatory for all women in their twenties and thirties.  Surviving homemakers would pay dearly through heightened marginal taxes on their husbands.  Small children now moved massively into day care: 460,000 held places in 1995, compared to only 23,000 three decades earlier.[23]

Yvonne Hirdman correctly gauges the sweep of change here.  She notes that women’s work in this new Swedish order took on a peculiar quality.  In the fields of agriculture and forestry, the number of working women actually declined, while in private industry it grew only modestly.  However, in the service sector (heavily governmental in nature), the number of working women rose from 269,000 in 1950 to 819,000 by 1990; in the education and health care sectors (exclusively governmental), the number of working women rose nearly three fold, from 282,000 in 1950 to slightly over 1 million by 1990.  In a nation of only 8 million people, these were large changes.  In short, “family policy” had been used as a lever to achieve something “truly revolutionary”: the shriveling of private homes resting on marriage and a massive expansion of the state sector as a means of securing “economic democracy.”  Pointing specifically to the experience of Alva Myrdal, Hirdman adds triumphantly:

New ideas of gender replaced old-fashioned ideas about the couple.  We witness [here] the birth of the androgynous individual (and I speak about the explicit ideal) and the death of the provider and his housewife.  We thus witness old ideas popping up, ideas that had been buried for decades — but ideas that very quickly found their advocates and became developed: people, men and women, eager to speak the new tongue of gender.[24]

The 1987 Laws  

Sweden’s Parliament largely codified this social revolution in two 1987 laws.  Focused on property and inheritance questions, the new marriage code weakened — but did not entirely eliminate — the concept of marriage as an economic partnership.  On the one hand (and despite pressure for a more individualistic formulation), the new law retained the concept of “deferred community property” found in the 1920 code.  In principle, a spouse remained entitled to a half share in marital property at the time of divorce or death.  The courts gained more power to set aside pre-nuptial contracts establishing separate property.  And surviving spouses won greater control over marital property relative to children and other heirs, representing the so-called “amputation of the blood line” in Sweden, the deliberate severing of children’s economic bonds to their parents.[25]

On the other hand, other provisions gave spouses increased independence.  One abolished the obligation each had to manage and preserve matrimonial property.  Joint liability for debts acquired by household expenditures or children’s education disappeared.  In one commentator’s words, the new code reflected “the increasing focus in the law itself on termination of marriage, rather than on its preservation.”[26]  The 1987 code also ended the husband’s special responsibility to support the family.[27]

The Parliament also approved the Joint Homes Act in 1987.  This new measure governing “relationships similar to marriage” rested on “the principle of neutrality toward family form.”  As legal analyst Ulla Björnberg explains:

The principle states that individuals are free to develop their personal lives at their own will, to choose a living arrangement and ethical norms for their family life.  The role of family law is restricted to providing solutions to practical problems and to formulate rules of a kind that can be accepted by almost all individuals.[28]

Still, the Joint Homes Act did not quite equate “cohabitation” with “marriage.”  Specifically, cohabitators did not gain the equivalence of “marital property rights” in inheritance or a right to claim “maintenance” after separation.  Rather, the rules in this measure applied only to the equal splitting of a dwelling and household goods acquired for joint use. 

Still, the measure did affirm that parenthood in consensual unions would involve rights and responsibilities equal to those in marriage.  Unmarried fathers must register with the state.  Joint custody of children after separation would be the assumption for both cohabitating and married couples.  A novel development in the 1987 measure, though, was that it applied to both unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples.[29] I would underscore that this latter innovation came near the end of the de-institutionalizing project, not at its beginning.

In 1995, the Swedish Parliament expanded on this change and approved a law granting same-sex couples the right to form a “registered partnership.”  This represented a civil contract providing rights and responsibilities nearly identical to those of conventional marriage.  The few exceptions involved adoption, joint custody, and artificial insemination.  “Registered partners” gained rights to “deferred community property.”

In 2000, the government severed its official ties to the Lutheran Church of Sweden.  This brought a symbolic end to “Christian Sweden,” although the country had been effectively de-Christianized some decades earlier.  The same year, the Swedish government extended the “registered partnership” option to foreign nationals residing in Sweden for at least two years.  In 2002, gay and lesbian couples gained the right to adopt children (although during the first year of this law’s operation, none did so).  Recent Swedish Court decisions have also given legal recognition to polygamous marriages among immigrants from Muslim countries.  An association of informal Swedish polygamists predicts full recognition of plural marriages and other polyamorous relations in their land, perhaps by 2010.[30]

What Does This Mean?  

How shall we understand this deinstitutionalization of marriage in Sweden since 1968?  Some would say that marriage there has simply been modernized.  Others would see marriage in contemporary Sweden as liberated from antiquated functions and finally free to focus on love and companionship.  Still others would praise the extension of marriage or quasi-marriage to other forms of love as a step forward in social and cultural evolution.

I believe that the changes I have outlined actually represent the culmination of three revolutions:

First, they mark the full victory in Sweden of the industrial revolution and of its principles of economic centralization, efficiency, and extreme labor specialization over the autonomy of the home economy and its familial bonds of mutual care;

Second, these changes represent the legally imposed triumph of abstract gender equality over innate and natural differences between women and men;

And third, they mean the victory of the socialist collective over all mediating institutions, one finally achieved by transferring both female labor and children from the domestic and voluntary spheres to the state sector.

These changes highlight the profound importance of marriage to liberty and democracy, and the price paid by stripping this institution of meaning and function.  My analysis also underscores, I believe, how any restoration of marriage must rest on a prior and new revolution of ideas.

Endnotes:

1 Lena Sommestad, “Gender Equality—A Key to Our Future?” Published by The Swedish Institute, 1 September 2001.  Found at http:www.sweden.se/templates/ cs/Print_Article_2328.aspx  (11/8/2004).

2 Sommestad, “Gender Equality,” p. 2.

3 Ibid., pp. 2-3.

4 Government Offices of Sweden, “EU Policy” (29 April 2004), at: http://www.sweden.gov.se  (11/8/2004).  Emphasis added.

5 European Commission, “Modernizing and Improving Social Protection in the European Union: Communication from the Commission” (1997); and Herbert Krieger, “Family Life in Europe—Results of Recent Surveys on Quality of Life in Europe,” Family Paper #8, The European Commission.

6 A term used in D. Bradley, “Marriage, Family, Property and Inheritance in Swedish Law,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 39 (April 1990): 380.

7 Michael Bogdan and Eva Ryrstedt, “Marriage in Swedish Family Law and Swedish Conflicts of Law,” Family Law Quarterly 29 (Fall 1995): 675-76.

8 See: Bradley, “Marriage, Family, Property and Inheritance in Swedish Law,” pp. 373-74.

9 Ibid., pp. 373-78.

10 Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1934); and more broadly: Allan Carlson, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990): chapters 3-5.

11 Yvonne Hirdman, “The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor Movement, Or: A Swedish Dilemma.”   Paper prepared for the Swedish National Institute of Working Life, 2002: 3-5; and Ann-Katrin Hatje, Befolkningsfrågan och välfärden: debatten om familjepolitik och nativitetsökning under 1930-och 1940-talen (Stockholm: Allmänna förlaget, 1974).

12 Dorothy McBride Stetson and Amy Maxur, eds., Comparative State Feminisms (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995): 241.

13 Ron Lesthaeghe, “A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions,” Population and Development Review 9 (1983): 429.

14 Hirdman, “The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor Movement.”

15 From: Jane Lewis and Gertrude Åström, “Equality, Difference, and State Welfare: Labor Market and Family Politics in Sweden,” Feminist Studies 18 (Spring 1992): 67.

16 Alva Myrdal, et al., Toward Equality: The Alva Myrdal Report to the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Stockholm: Prisma, 1972 [1969]): 17, 38, 64, 82-84.

17 Fariborz Nozari, “The 1987 Swedish Family Law Reform,” International Journal of Legal Information 17 (1989): 219-20; and Bradley, “Marriage, Family, Property and Inheritance in Swedish Law,” pp. 378-81.

18 Irene Dingledey, “International Comparison of Tax Systems and Their Impact on the Work-Family Balancing,” at http://www.latge.de/ak tuellveroeff/am/ dinge100b.pdf (11/05/2003).

19 Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, “Dual Breadwinner Societies: Provider Models in the Scandinavian Welfare States,” Acta Sociologica 41 (#1, 1998): 66; Sven Steinmo, “Social Democracy vs. Socialism: Goal Adaptation in Social Democratic Sweden,” Politics & Society 16 (Dec. 1988): 430; and Maud L. Edwards, “Toward a Third Way: Women’s Politics and Welfare Policies in Sweden,” Social Research 58 (Fall 1991): 681-82.

20 Annika Baude, “Public Policy and Changing Family Patterns in Sweden, 1930-1977,” in Jean Lipman-Blumen and Jessie Bernard, eds., Sex Roles and Social Policy: A Complex Social Equation (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1979): 171.

21 Bogdan and Ryrstedt, “Marriage in Swedish Family Law,” pp. 678-79; Nozari, “The 1987 Swedish Family Law Reform,” pp. 220-23.

22 SAP Congress Minutes, 1972; p. 759; in Hirdman, “The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor Movement,” p. 6.

23 Anita Myberg, “From Foster Mothers to Child Care Center: A History of Working Mothers and Child Care in Sweden,” Feminist Economics 6 (No.1, 2000): 15-16.

24 Hirdman, “The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor Movement,” p. 10. 

25 Quotation in Bradley, “Marriage, Family, Property and Inheritance in Swedish Law,” p. 384.

26 Ibid., p. 383.

27 Nozari, “The 1987 Swedish Family Law Reform,” p. 223-26; and Ake Saldeen, “Sweden: Reforms of Marriage, Inheritance and Cohabitation Proposed,” Journal of Family Law 26 (1987-88): 197-205.

28 Ulla Björnberg, “Cohabitation and Marriage in Sweden—Does Family Form Matter?” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 15 (2001): 352-53.  Emphasis added.

29 Björnberg, “Cohabitation and Marriage in Sweden,” pp. 350-62.

30 See: Karl-Göran Bottwyk, “Polygamy in Sweden” at:  http://www.nccg.org/fecpp/ sweden.html (5/16/2005).