"Ständigt var man i farten med att grunda och stifta." Om fält, offentligheter och nätverk vid sekelskiftet 1900

Abstract

At the turn of the century 1900 many women contributed to the creation of modern discourses and institutions. They reshaped the conceptions of education, culture, philanthropy, medical care, women's rights. Their endeavours anticipated what was to become welfare state politics. Which strategies did they develop? How did they manage to gain access to the public sphere? How did they profit from their resources such as inherited cultural and economic capital, education, networks of social relations? To answer such questions Pierre Bourdieu's methods and concepts are helpful. However, additional research tools are needed. These women undertook their interventions in many spheres at one and the same time, and their personal relations and networks operated in a logic rather different from the logic of social fields in Bourdieu's sense. Thus the common course of research of social fields within the Bourdieu tradition is not fully applicable. A complementary notion that has proved useful is the concept of shadow field. A shadow field is a domain which is dependent of and symbiotically related to the established field, though the polarities and value hierarchies might be reversed. For example the private girls' schools and mixed schools might be analysed as a "shadow field" in relation to the secondary state grammar schools for boys.