From Women's Club to Group 8
The Separate Organization of Women within the Swedish communist Movement
Guide to the sources at the Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek (Labour Movement Archives and Library), Stockholm, Sweden.
Already in 1918, the first independent communist women’s organization, Sveriges Vänstersocialistiska Kvinnoklubbars Samorganisation (the Swedish Left-Socialist Women’s Clubs’ Joint Organization), was founded. The Swedish communist women have always seen themselves as internationalists. Amongst other things, they took part in establishing 8 March as International Women’s Day in order to export current communist policy, but also to serve as a reminder of international solidarity. Not only the substance of the policies, but also its form - its organizational structure - has been influenced by contacts with the International. The history of the organization of Swedish communist women shows how much room the internationalization allowed for a local formulation of the rules and structures which came from the international level. The history also shows how ideas were transformed from an international to a local context.
Membership of the Communist International (Comintern) entailed adjusting to its organizational structure. Under slogans, such as ‘communist first, woman second’ and ‘no difference between the sexes’, the separate organization of women would be eliminated. How was the women’s political work from now on to be organized? By surveying the history of the communist movement, one finds that, right from the beginning, the Swedish women objected in writing to the above decision and constantly sought, in various ways, to circumvent the decision of the International. In cases where women left the Comintern, they immediately resurrected the independent organization.
The relationship between the politically active women and the party leadership appears to have been tense throughout, and it seems as though the party rarely tried to live up to its slogans. Birgit Jansson, one of the leading communist women at the beginning of the 1960s, pointed out that this relationship stemmed from a backward un-Marxist understanding of the woman’s role.