Kvinnorna i det offentliga samtalet. Om hur pennskaften blev reportrar

Abstract

This artide deals with women journalists in Swedish daily newspapers from the late eighteen hundreds to the 1950s, when professional education started in Sweden and brought women into the mainstream of the business. In our project about those early women reporters, myself (Margareta Stål), Birgitta Ney and Kristina Lundgren have had three purposes; first to give a contribution to the history of Swedish journalism and make a feminist revision of that history; secondly to show how the emerging process of professionalization at the modern editorial offices with its concomitant gender segregation of assignments also offered opportunities to transform journalism; and thirdly to show, through textual analysis, how women could achieve a career within the male dominated journalistic profession. The project focuses five women reporters: Lotten Ekman from the turn of the century, Ester Blenda Nordström from the early decades, and Barbro Alving, Maud Adlercreutz and Astrid Ljungström from the 1930s to the 50s. By focusing those individual journalists we also describe and produce a body of knowledge about other contemporary women journalists. We especially analyse connections between the texts and the concept of modernity. The project shows how this connection is dynamic and transformative - modernity is a prerequisite of the journalistic texts, at the same time as it is articulated, from within its particular conditions, in the texts.