Networks on Home Economics in Early 1900s’ Scandinavia and Their Discourses of Being a Good Woman

The first part of the twentieth century involved profound changes of the economic structures of society. New welfare regimes occurred that focused on public health and education and, in the Nordic countries, led to several initiatives aimed at widening knowledge and disseminating it to many and new groups of people. They included women who had not hitherto been offered much schooling and whose situations also varied much according to social class, space, and place of upbringing. Such gender and intersectional issues are usually not dealt with in welfare state theories but will be focal points of this chapter. In the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, these developments led to an increased focus on home economics as an educational and professional field. Accordingly, the focus is on Scandinavian networks on home economics education for women in the decades around 1900. We aim at understanding the backgrounds of the networks: whom they targeted, what tasks they comprised for the role of women, and how their ideas of ideal womanhood intersected with gender and social class, whether located in urban or rural areas in Scandinavia?