All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Old duties and new demands. A study of property, gender and elder care in the Swedish agrarian society 1815-1939.
| This study focuses on the performance of elder care in two socio-economically very different areas. Both the public efforts for taking care of the old and poor and the family-based elder care are examined through the minutes of the local poverty board and the church records. The analysis is based on old people’s possession of property, but also on categories such as sex, age and civic status. I argue that there are connections between an area’s socio-economic structure and the way elder care, both public and family-based, were organized.
The performance of elder care did not differ between the areas until after 1920. Until then both areas were governed by the same values founded in a patriarchal tradition. In these values, there is a class dimension – those who had something to offer could more easily obtain support from the public authorities when a social network was absent. This meant that the very poor, without either resources or social network, had a really tough time. We can also see a gender dimension as a male applicant could more easily get support than a female one. The gender contract allowed reproductive support for men but not for women. A study of old people’s resources and incomes shows that women had to work because of their class position, not because of their sex.
In the middle of the 1930s a break is visible in one of the studied areas as a result of the community taking a greater responsibility for its inhabitants. Proletarianization, urbanization and democratization were processes that influenced the organization of elder care and also the strategies old people used to secure their living. The growing welfare state blurred the distinction between the private and the public sphere and made old strategies worthless. Security in old age went from being a duty in the family to something the old person him/herself could demand of the public authorities. Elder care as a civil right was gradually established.
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