Demokrati100: Women and citizenship. Digitising the archive of Kvinnliga Medborgarskolan vid Fogelstad

This completed project, with funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, focused on digitising and making accessible the archive of Kvinnliga Medborgarskolan vid Fogelstad. The archive is of particular importance for how women understood and worked to enter the public discourse in Sweden in the years following the success of the suffrage movement in 1919. Kvinnliga Medborgarskolan vid Fogelstad was active during 1925-1954 and held spring, autumn and summer courses. The school also ran continuation courses.

The archive contains material from the establishment of the school and material from the courses, such as minutes from the association's meetings, lectures, photographs, and more. The school courses covered a wide range of traditional subjects such as history, social studies and psychology, practical civic education, choral singing, gymnastics and rhythmics. A number of well-known figures in Swedish women's history were closely associated with the school's development and governance, including the school's founders Elisabeth Tamm, Kerstin Hesselgren, Elin Wägner, Ada Nilsson and Honorine Hermelin. Guest speakers included Siri Derkert, Emilia Fogelklou and Alexandra Kollontay. 2025 marked the centenary of the school.

The project included digitisation of the material in the archive, application of metadata and selected transcriptions and creation of datasets. Selected materials from the Fogelstad Association (Fogelstadförbundet) archive were also digitized. Copyright-free material has been published in the Alvin platform and material that is not free to publish is available on a computer in the special reading room at the Humanities Library at the Gothenburg University Library for on-site study. The project also produced a visualisation of the Fogelstad archive's connections in the KvinnSam archives, given its impact on KvinnSam's archival holdings during its development in the 1960s and 1970s. Public and conference presentations drawing on knowledge generated from the digitization project were delivered at Bokmässan in Gothenburg in September 2025, Galleri Bellman in Stockholm in January 2026, and the conference of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries in Aarhus, Denmark in March 2026. 

In the future, we aim to use the digitized material to create modules for a selection of digitised material, framed with context and providing new entry points into the suffrage movement and its aftermath for how women understood full citizenship in Sweden in the first half of the 20th century.

Are you interested in the archival material that was digitised? Here you can find digitised archival material on the Alvin platform

Are you a researcher interested in contributing or using these digitised documents? Get in touch with us!

• Project period: 2024-2026
• Funding: The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation