Reforming Women: Lilli Zickerman, Ottilia Adelborg, and Swedish Folklife Studie

Abstract

In Sweden and elsewhere, the years around 1900 vibrated with reform ideas that deeply engaged women in the cultural and economic elite. In this presentation I will concentrate on one of the movements that aimed to preserve folk arts and at the same time to bring about economic and social reform: the homecraft movement (hemslöjdsrörelsen). I will portray two of its founders, Lilli Zickerman and Ottilia Adelborg, who both had links to the feminist movement, and who both saw their work to save rural textiles as a way to effectuate change, particularly in the lives of women. How did the two depict their relationship to the people whose lives they wished to improve and whose arts they wanted to preserve? What rural arts did they prefer as esthetically and morally superior (i.e. bobbin lace and rölakan weaving) and what did they discard as ugly and unworthy (i.e. patchwork quilts and rag rugs)? What was their relationship to museum founder Artur Hazelius and to the Nordic Museum, where a discipline of folklife studies was introduced in 1909? I will argue that far from being peripheral to the academic field, as is often taken for granted, the work of these women must be seen as quite central to it, not least because their esthetic evaluations remained dominant for decades. Furthermore, through them the Swedish discipline of folklife studies is connected to the social concerns of late 19th-century feminism and also to comparable reform and gender configurations in early folklore studies in other countries.