Frida Stéenhof, Ellen Key och den samkönade kärleken

Abstract

After more than thirty years of gender research, the history of women’s passions for women is still to a large extent unwritten in Sweden. Gender research has been so uninterested in this topic that it has even been a part of marginalizing it. This article aims to counter this tendency by shedding light on the work of the pioneer Frida Stéenhoff (1865-1945). Love between women was an extremely controversial issue in the suffrage movement, where activist and playwright Stéenhoff had her platform. In the private sphere the female couples within the movement were accepted, but no one mentioned same-sex-love in public. No one but Stéenhoff who, according to many contemporary intellectuals both within and outside of the women’s movement, simply was too radical. My investigation into her work, and into her negotiations with prevailing conventions and competing discourses, includes three plays, one article and a short story with lesbian motifs, alongside with mail conversations between herself and Ellen Key. The first of these texts, The modern Lesbos (Det moderna Lesbos), was written in 1899, but was never approved for publishing. It was so radical that even Ellen Key, who otherwise would be seen as Sweden’s most daring writer in sexual political issues, was consternated. The next play, Love’s rival (Kärlekens rival, 1912), however, was both printed and staged. This time Stéenhoff handled the controversial topic in a way that the audience could agree with. Her last lesbian play, called Prey of the flames (Lågornas rov, 1928), was never completed. In many ways it tells the same story as the previous ones, but with some changes of perspective. Frida Stéenhoff broke with the norm of writing about openly same-sex love in a condescending way. To be depicted in a nuanced way, same-sex love in her days had to be disguised, so that the average reader could not see it.