Here in Sweden I try to melt into normal life routines, making my stay in Sweden as Swedish as possible, without being always the outsider interested in weird issues. That means that I got a bike to go through the city, I am practicing sport and mixing with people, visiting friends, doing yoga with local groups, connecting with the alternative movement here in Stockholm.
People are friendly and very eager to explain to me what Sweden is and what being Swedish looks like. They come in tune with my interest in politics and feminism, and, out of all these conversations, this post has come up. The amateur sociologist living within me warns me about generalizations, buying into the conventional wisdom or believing, against evidence, that people’s stories can come close to truth. But here we go.
Sweden being the country of equality has different readings for people living in Stockholm. They are mostly proud of the equality levels they gained and grant great value to the informal behaviour they show among ranks, hierarchies or clashing cultural systems. Both men and women think they are living in a very egalitarian environment and they like it. Where they seem to start finding problems is when it comes to their private lives.
On the one hand, they say Swedish gender equality is a bit of a myth, in that it is not true that real equality has been achieved yet. Women still take care of most of the housework and take responsibility of family issues, children’s needs and old people. There are many less women in positions of responsibility in the public system than in public companies. Actually, Sweden is one of the European countries with few women working as managers. Women’s jobs tend to be part-time to allow women to take care of family issues. Parental leave is mostly for women, with few fathers making something close to an equal use of it. As Margareta Winberg, former Minister for Gender Equality Affairs, put it
"...men need to understand that gender equality in a relationship improves the quality of both partners’ lives. For women, equality means not being burdened with a double workload and being able to develop both as parents and out at work. For men, it involves assuming half the responsibility for the home and the children and thereby paving the way for a good relationship both with the children and with their life partner…understanding this is essential if we are to give women and men the chance to combine a stimulating job with a fulfilling family life."
What happens now is that Swedish women adapt their careers to the needs of their children, and, then, they climb slowly upwards in their career or stand still at a career level. They are less attractive for employers also due to that long parental leave that men hardly share, keeping them away from the working place for eleven months, at least.
Women and Men in Sweden is an excellent publication from the Swedish Bureau of Statistics where you can find all the data to show you the extent of all these questions.
When it comes to private realms, some Swedish people say that men and women no longer melt together as much as they used to and that coming closer in the context of greater equality seems to be a problem. Is not here a suspicious argument undermining the importance of conquering greater spaces of independence for women? The number of people living alone has been skyrocketing in the last decade, paving the way for many sexist remarks assuring that this is the price women have to pay for so much gender equality. It seems that, as one woman in Gothemburg put it, we cannot meet in equality, we do not know how.
But to me it is easy to experience that while men never had to pay any price for their taken-for-granted independence, women find it constantly threatened by these suggestions warning us about loneliness, difficulties, less comfort, less attractive, more opposition…
Being a feminist sounds always like hard work. But, I think, it is work that pays off.
A non-Swedish woman told me that she found herself at a loss regarding sexual approach to Swedish men. She finds them passive and tame. Another Swedish colleague confirms that the female strategy of waiting for guys to come closer can take you forever or it can never happen at all. So, it seems that new ways to build up inter gender relationships are needed here. Whereas, at the same time, same gender relationship models seem to flourish in this paradise of equality.
What is the conclusion to make here?
What the lesson could be is that a new way of coming together is needed in this age of gender equality. Love has to be dimensioned out of a patriarchal thinking system, as Gudrun Schyman says in her wonderful letter Let_love_become_politics.pdf,
"I myself had chosen to live my own lifestyle and nobody else controls me. I was neither weak nor victimised." But then I started realising that I no longer need to defend that picture…There was this little secure space within me where I no longer felt threatened by the thoughts of change. Perhaps this was the reason why I unexpectedly met another person and discovered that love has neither age nor gender. For the first time in my life I do not love a man because he is a man; I love a human being because he is the person he is.
And she adds, "please, do not come up and say that politics has nothing to do with love! Those who say so then claim that the politics is not about life at all."
If feminism is about constructing a new world where much of the old proceedings cannot operate, we should pay attention to new ways to share lives together, in a human way, irrespective of our sexuality option, ethnicity, gender or social condition. It sounds to me as if now that the public realm is being transformed towards equality, we have to come back to ourselves and start building bridges from these new people we are now that are no longer comfortable with what we used to be.
Priya
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