Author Description

Throughout history, gender has been a central component of the Swedish armed forces division of labour. Its most striking expression is that soldiers have almost exclusively been, and expected to be, male. In Sweden, the last barrier to womens access to military work was removed in 1989. No other occupational area remained closed for women that long. The main objective of this thesis is to examine how women received full formal economic citizenship through the removal of the last formal barriers to womens paid labor. A secondary objective is to analyze the perceptions and importance of duty and obligations in womens economic citizenship. The author argues for the need of a historical perspective to understand the processes that led to gendered equal rights in access to paid military work. For this reason, the thesis explores continuity and change in womens military work and the gendered division of labor of the Swedish armed forces, from the year of 1865, when womens military work entered a new phase through the establishment of voluntary defense organizations. The study ends in 1989 when the last barrier to womens access to military work was removed and women thus received full formal economic citizenship in terms of equal formal rights to choose ones profession and compete in the labor market