Performing Herself
Everyday Practices and the Making of Gender
in Early Modern Sweden
MIKAEL ALM
(
ED.)
__________________________________________________________ Distribution eddy.se ab Box 1310, 621 24 Visby 0498-253900; order@bokorder.se http://opuscula.bokorder.seCover illustration: Pehr Hilleström: The Wool Winder (Nysterska). Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Nationalmuseum.
This publication has been funded by the Faculty of Arts, Uppsala University.
© The authors 2017
Production: Graphic Services, Uppsala University Printed by DanagårdLiTHO AB, Ödeshög, 2017 ISSN 0284-8783
Contents
List of Plates 5
Contributors 7
The Count’s Tabourette, Gender Ideals, Household
Chores, and Knitting Handbooks: Introduction 9
Mikael Alm
Gendering Household: Norms and Ideals of Gender and
Work in Sweden during the Gustavian Era, 1770–1790 13
Hedvig Widmalm
‘God! Let Me Not Waste a Moment of This Year’: An Intersectional Perspective on the Practices of Time-Use in Gentry Women’s Households in
Sweden, 1793–1839 45
Jessica Karlsson
‘An Amusing and Useful Pastime’: Knitting as
a Performance of Femininity 89
Hanna Bäckström
5
List of Plates
1. Knitted sampler, dated 1842 (NM.0136497). Letters ‘C W’ and ‘1842’ knitted in red cotton yarn, the rest of the sampler
in white. Foto: (Karolina Kristensson), © Nordiska museet. 97
2. Illustration of pattern for a heavily decorated
children’s sock in Emma Hennings’s Charlotte
Leanders Stickbok (1848). 106
3. Knitted lace (NM. 273556). Foto: (Nina Heins),
© Nordiska museet. 109
4. Example of a lace knitting instruction and illustration from Maria Magdalena Charlotta Olivecrona’s
Mönster till spets-stickning och hålsöm (1843). 113
5. Copper etching from 1778 by Elias Martin, ‘A little each day. Who is happy if not the industrious?’
7
Contributors
MIKAEL ALM is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Uppsala
University, and Director of research of the node Early Modern Cultural
His-tory at the Faculty of Arts, Uppsala University. His research is focused on
the political and social culture of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-cen-tury Europe, spanning from the struggles for legitimacy of late Swedish ab-solutism through art, rhetoric and ceremonial display, via the ritual and symbolic making of the Bernadotte dynasty in Sweden during and after the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, to — presently — sartorial practices and visualization of social order in early modern Europe.
HANNA BÄCKSTRÖM is a doctoral student in Textile Studies at the
Depart-ment of Art History, Uppsala University. Continuing on the themes ana-lysed in her master’s thesis, her research focuses on the early publication and dissemination of printed patterns and instructions for knitting and cro-chet, as well as changes in how these handicrafts have been valued in differ-ent social contexts over time.
JESSICA KARLSSON has a master’s degree in early modern studies at the
De-partment of History, Uppsala University. In her master’s thesis she focused on the creation of social hierarchies through the practices of time-use in gentry women’s households in Sweden in the late eighteenth and early nine-teenth century. She also has a master’s degree in archival studies (ALM) at Uppsala University and is currently working as an archivist at Chalmer’s University of Technology.
HEDVIG WIDMALM is a doctoral student at the Department of Economic
History, Uppsala University. She is currently researching the household economy in the Swedish mining town of Falun in the early eighteenth cen-tury. Her master’s thesis and doctoral thesis both focus on the social hierar-chies of eighteenth-century Sweden, and the ways hierarhierar-chies affected how the household economy functioned as an ideal and in practice.
9
The Count’s Tabourette, Gender
Ideals, Household Chores, and
Knitting Handbooks
Introduction
Mikael Alm
On the evening of the 1st of November 1796, a startling drama played out at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, by Gustav Adolf’s Square, just across the bridge from the royal palace. Inside, the gala dressed echelons of court and the political ranks took to their seats, to be entertained with an opera in celebration of the young king’s — Gustav IV Adolf — coming to maturity and instalment on the throne earlier that day. As the most promi-nent guests arrived at the royal podium, raised in front of the stage, every-thing came to a halt. The Russian ambassador — who held highest rank among the foreign emissaries following the revolutionary turmoil in France — had marched straight up to the first tabourette on the right side of the royal family’s armchairs, with the apparent intention to take his seat there. This seat belonged to His Excellence Count Carl Axel Wachtmeister, President of the royal courts of law and the single highest ranking civil servant of the entire state machinery, in dignity and social standing second only to royal-ties. The latter immediately turned to the Master of Ceremonies, Leonhard von Hauswolff, who in turn sent a runner to the king, who was upstairs in his Opera House apartments. After some deliberation a decision was made. The Russian ambassador kept his seat, while servants were sent to the po-dium to — discretely — re-arrange the tabourettes, so that Count Wachmeis-ter, with his honour and rank intact, took his seat on the left side of the royal seats, instead of the right.1
10
In the midst of drama, a pungent example of the performative nature of practices — a prominent theme among historians in the last decade or so — unfolds.2 In the most hands-on sense of the word, a performance was about
to take place on stage — the orchestra in the pit and the artists back stage were about to start off the opéra-comique ‘Le caravan du Caire’ by French composer André Grétry in celebration of the day’s festive event.3 In a deeper
sense, the whole spectacle — with raised thrones, illuminated halls, and the sumptuous display of sartorial splendour — staged a performance of royal power and Gustavian kingship.
But deeper still — and more to the point — the ceremonial turns at the Opera House that evening were performative in the sense that they shaped and transformed the world and the experiences of those present. Things came about, came into being — became. True, the intricate web of ranks and privileges in court society was painstakingly described and regulated in for-mal protocols and instructions, but it was through everyday practices such as these — the seating in the Opera House — that this world of ranks and its hierarchies came into being. Through those practices, distinction was made, and the court became an ordered entity. Equally clear, the contingency of performative practices — as often emphasised in research — stands out. The order of seating may have been drawn up in close detail in court protocols, and the intended ranks may have been performed over and over through the decades — centuries, even — but as the events on November 1st 1796 illustrate, practices were challenged and they were the object of change every time they were performed. Something was irreversibly changed as the Rus-sian ambassador took to his seat. By taking that seat (and he was undoubt-edly aware of what he was doing), it became his, and as the Master of Cere-mony failed to prevent it from happening (which was his job at ceremonial events such as this) everything else had to be adapted to and re-ordered around that fact. From now on, Count Wachtmeister had his seat to the left of the royal family.
In this volume, three Uppsala researchers engage with questions like these. However, the cast, the setting, and the social categories at play are different. From the aristocratic echelons of court, and the practices of ranks,
2 See e.g. Burke 2004, pp. 90–94; Gillgren & Snickare 2012, pp. 4–5. 3 Personne 1914, p. 74.
11
distinguishing the high from the low, we move on to the wider circles of gentry men and women in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Swe-den, and the practices of gender — and questions of who was to do what, rather than who was to sit where — making a difference between men and women, between the feminine and the masculine.
First out, economic historian Hedvig Widmalm focuses on marital life in the late eighteenth century, and the intricate relationship between gender ideals as they were phrased in conduct books of the period and the per-formative realities of every-day-life as they appear in the correspondences between husbands and wives, the founding pillars of early modern house-holds. How did the lived lives of eighteenth-century Swedish gentry spouses — with the plethora of daily experiences and choices involved in running a household — correspond with the normative narratives and structured or-ders presented in the manual-like conduct books?
Moving on, historian Jessica Karlsson approaches work and the per-formative practices of time-use in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-cen-tury gentry households. Focusing on the diaries kept by four gentry women, the intersectional realities of daily chores and division of labour, and the household hierarchies that these practices of work created, present them-selves. Textile work in terms of producing and mending, social obligations in terms of making and receiving visits; gardening in terms of planting and trimming; farming in terms of sowing and harvesting; managing animals in terms of feeding and milking; cleaning in terms of washing and polishing — who did what? Women or men? Young or old? High or low? Married or unmarried?
Finally, textile historian Hanna Bäckström takes yet another step to-wards concretion, entering the world of handiwork among mid-nineteenth century Swedish gentry women, specifically knitting and knitting hand-books. This was an advancing literary genre at the time — with translations of foreign works making their appearance alongside domestic works in the Swedish public sphere — which in itself reflects on elite tastes and behav-iours. But more specifically, the handbooks and their instructions to their female readers, reflects on the performative nature of knitting, shaping ide-als of social status as well as notions of feminine virtues.
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The three masters’ theses upon which the three chapters presented in this volume are based, were all written within the Faculty funded masters’ re-search node Early Modern Cultural History at Uppsala university — a collabo-ration between the disciplines of History, Art History, Textile Studies, and Musicology which has been running since 2013.4 The generous Faculty
grants have also funded the publication of this book, which is the first in a hopefully long succession of volumes of its kind.
4 Apart from all the ’Noders’ and their constructive contributions throughout the
years, and the Masters’ seminars at the departments of History and Art History/Tex-tile Studies, the editor and the authors would like to thank professors Miri Rubin and Amanda Vickery at the School of History, Queen Mary, University of London, for organizing the two-days’ research workshop in London, back in spring 2013, during which the Node students — including the authors of this volume — were in-vited to present, discuss, and further improve their research projects in interaction with their peers at Queen Mary.
13
Gendering the Household
Norms and Ideals of Gender and Work in Sweden
during the Gustavian Era, 1770–1790
Hedvig Widmalm
When the wealthy Ulrica Grill1 (1744–1824) went to survey the fieldwork
of the tenant farmers who supplied her husband’s estate, she met a family of farmers walking down the road. She observed that the farmer’s wife was very young, perhaps only 18 years old, but that she looked well equipped to ‘grab her husband by the collar.’2
With those words, she might just as well have described herself. Ulrica Grill was a formidable woman, a competent administrator with a head for fiscal matters and a sharp tongue. Her letters are full of snide observations and humorous asides. Toil and grief also fill the pages, but there is no flow-ery language and vflow-ery little romance. Ulrica Grill was in a position of power as a kind of deputy for her husband Jean Abraham Grill (1736–1792), who owned the iron works known as Godegård where the couple made their home.
Adolph Murray (1751–1803) and Hedvig Charlotta Murray (1760–1788) were a rather different kind of married couple. Hedvig Charlotta Murray was the daughter of an esteemed orientalist professor at Uppsala University, Carl Aurivillius. Carl Aurivillius’s letters to his daughters have survived, showing that he encouraged his daughters to read.3 Adolph Murray was also
1 Ulrica Grill’s maiden name was Lüning, but Ulrica referred to herself as Grill in
her letters, so that is what she is called here. Hedvig Charlotta is called Aurivillius in her letters, perhaps because most of them are written during her engagement pe-riod. She is referred to as Hedvig Charlotta Murray in this text, since it was the name she eventually took.
2 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 — August 1 1781.
3See, for example, RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 13, the letters from Carl
14
an academic. He entered Uppsala University at the age of thirteen and he began teaching at seventeen. By the time he married, he was a professor in anatomy.4 What comes across in his letters is his enthusiasm, both for his
academic subject and for whatever else happened to catch his interest. When Hedvig Charlotta captured that interest, he filled his letters to her with descriptions of his romantic desires. She responded in kind. Their let-ters depict a marriage of romantic love.
These two couples seem to almost inhabit different worlds, but in fact they were both part of the same social group. They were the type of people that conduct books were written about, and geared towards. Conduct books was a genre that had its roots in etiquette manuals for young princes (specula
principum) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However,
con-duct books differed from princely books in that they reached a wider audi-ence.5 They also contained notions about gender roles. They described these
ideas in a way that made it seem as though they were applicable to all men and women, regardless of social standing, but the books were clearly about, and directed to, the privileged classes.6 They formed part of a discourse on
gender roles and privilege during the late eighteenth century.
The household is a key concept to understand as a setting for that gender discourse. The household was a concrete house, a work unit, and the model on which the whole society was based. When the Swedish economist Anders Berch described his notion of economy, or hushållning (literally, housekeep-ing), he began by describing how the Swedish nation was one great house-hold. This household had a hierarchical order where the housefather — in Sweden’s case, the king — was at the top.7 The great household of Sweden
consisted of smaller, private households, where the ruler was the husband
4 Documents about Adolph Murray’s living situation are available at the family’s
webpage, www.murrayska.se
5 See Runefelt 2001 regarding the older genre known as household books, which
contained advice about conduct. See the first part of Per Brahe’s oeconomia from 1580 for an example of this type of literature. Lars Laelius’s Een sköön och härligh
jungfrw speghel, translated from a German work, 1591, is an example directed at
young women.
6 For a short history of the genre and how it evolved during the late eighteenth
century and early nineteenth century, see Hasselberg 2011, pp. 355–365.
15
and father. His wife was a deputy ruler, subordinate but also ruling along-side him. Servants and children answered to them. This household order derived from the works of Aristotle, but the most direct influence was the Bible. The greatest housefather was God. The hustavla, a collection of Mar-tin Luther’s texts, provided a way of explaining household hierarchies to Swedes.8
These Lutheran texts could be seen as a doctrine for social hierarchy. However, by the eighteenth century, as the historian Karin Hassan Jansson has argued, the household was more a culture than a fixed ideology.9
Ac-cording to Hassan Jansson, the idea of the household permeated contem-porary public discourse. It was the context in which gender and other social hierarchies were understood during the eighteenth century.
The agrarian ideal of the household was by its very nature static, ordered by God, but in reality the Swedish social order was in constant flux. The household culture, and the gender roles it entailed, had to adapt to the changing social and economic conditions of the eighteenth century. Though Sweden was still mostly an agrarian society, a small privileged class was able to read and travel, trade, practice science, and discuss new eco-nomic ideas. This class took part in the pan-European intellectual exchanges at that time, and played a part in connecting Sweden to the wider world.10
What did the traditional household mean to this group? What did its gendered hierarchy mean to the men and women of the late eighteenth cen-tury? I believe that in order to answer these questions, one must look beyond public discourse. In order to see how much a concept such as the household was accepted as a culture, it should be compared to so-called ‘ego docu-ments’ — diaries or, as in the case of this investigation, letters.
In this study, I examine the way the household and gender are described in conduct books, and I compare those books to the letters of two married couples to whom the conduct books might have applied. Together, these
8 Stadin 2004, pp. 35–36. See also Runefeldt 2001.
9 Karin Hassan Jansson presented how this culture can be seen in court cases in her
paper ‘Doing Household, Performing Power: Agency, Authority and Space in Early Modern Sweden’, Practices and Performances: Between Materiality and Morality in
Pre-Modernity, Sigtuna (Sweden), 21–23 August 2014.
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different forms of writing reveal how gender and the household can be un-derstood during the late eighteenth century. Since the household had many facets, I have chosen three subjects to examine: the depiction of the house-hold as a workplace, the depiction of servants and subordinates, and the social and emotional aspects of forming a household. These three topics will show how the household was defined simultaneously as an economic unit, a cementation of hierarchies, and as an emotional space. These topics are so broad that they cover life itself, but then again, so did the eighteenth-century definition of the household. The broadness in turn motivates the choice of particularly narrow sources, that are read against the grain in order to reveal different things. What the choice of topics and the choice of sources have in common is that they are related to gender and social status.
The Letters and the Conduct Books
The conduct books chosen for this study were both published in 1787, which means that they are both situated within the time-frame of the corre-spondence under consideration. The book, A Complete, True Wife’s Image,11
was a translation of the German author ‘E. F.’, while How Shall a Young
Woman Educate Herself with Dignity12 was apparently a translation by another
German writer named Andreas Meyer. It is difficult to know how much was changed in the translation to Swedish. Both books were published by a man named Samuel Norberg, who may have also translated them.
A Complete, True Wife’s Image provides an outline of the ideal gender
di-vision within a household at the end of the eighteenth century. The hus-band is supposed to be in charge of the ‘outer housekeeping’, while the wife looks after the ‘inner housekeeping.’13 In this context, the Swedish word
hushållning is used, and it means the married couple’s economic practices
within the household that they arranged together. They have separate eco-nomic tasks; he brings home the income and it is her job to administer this
11 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ in Swedish, my translation.
12 ’Huru skal et Ungt Fruntimer wärdigt bilda sig’ in Swedish, my translation. The
word ’bilda’ is related to the German word ’bildung’.
17
income for the household’s survival. His role is to work and be seen in the outside world, while she plays the part of the withdrawn caretaker at home.14
Ulrica Grill’s letter to her husband Jean Abraham — described in the introduction — depicts a couple working together outside: the young wife is described as having the ability to take her husband by his collar, to take charge.15 It is not a particularly informative description, but in an off-hand
way, Ulrica still depicts a wife who can walk along side and even sometimes lead her husband. In this way, Ulrica provides an image of a couple’s rela-tionship which stands in contrast with the conduct books. This couple is identified, however, as belonging to a farmer’s household. The intended readers of the conduct books possibly belonged to a different strata of soci-ety, even though the conduct books also drew on the idea of agrarian life-structure for its examples.16
There is often a connection made between the historical marginalization of women and the development of an individualist, capitalist society. Some historians have seen a connection between the development of capitalism in society at large and the strengthening of the so-called ‘separate spheres’ at home.17 They have observed print culture and found stronger tendencies
to create demarcations between the two sexes from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, in correlation with the development of industrialization, the development of capitalistic economic systems, and a society celebrating individual achievement.18 According to this historiography, the older,
household-oriented social model had a place for the wife that allowed her a certain amount of freedom and status; she could help and in some ways complement the husband.19 In the new capitalist society of the nineteenth
14 See Stadin 2004, ch. 2. See also Jacobsson & Ågren red. 2011; Harvey 2012; Pihl
2012.
15 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 — August 1 1781.
16 In this case they carried similarities to the household literature studied by Gray in
Gray 2000, and by Runefelt in Runefelt 2001, pp. 91–116.
17 See Alice Clark in Clark 1919, a pioneer in woman’s history and gender history
who made this theory popular.
18 See Davidoff & Hall 1987, regarding the creation of a middle-class identity in
England during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century and how this entailed a very genteel and respectable role for women. For an account of how heightened industrialization pushed working women away from industrial work in Sweden during the same time period, see Florén 1995, pp. 38–45, 90, 110.
18
century, the woman did not have any kind of economic role to play. Instead, she was allocated the private sphere, while the man took his place in the ‘outer’ world.20
This explanatory model for separate spheres is frequently observed in the United Kingdom, a land that became industrialized much earlier than the Scandinavian countries. There are problems with applying it to poorer, peripheral countries like Sweden. It is easy to underestimate the durability of household-based social order — indeed, there is research that shows it held influence over Swedish society well into the nineteenth century.21
Some historians have discussed whether these norms were generally ac-cepted and followed in practice. Amanda Vickery has written about the ne-cessity of comparing different types of sources in order to judge the extent of certain norms and whether these were predominant during any given period. It is a well-established fact that certain texts extolling the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ household were in circulation by the end of the eighteenth century, but in order to prove that these views were predominant, it is not enough to read these texts.22
Ulrica Grill’s observation of the farmer’s wife provides a simple illustra-tion of how a person’s point of view could deviate from the reality depicted in normative books. The texts in these normative books were not necessarily representative of the zeitgeist of the period. There might have been different ways to view marriage, gender, and the division of work, and different ways to speak about these topics. Rather than acting as rigid societal framework, the conduct books could have been a part of wider discussion. If this seems
20 Jansson 2011, pp. 235–254. This is brought up by Anders Florén in connection
with the social structures of iron-making communities in Florén 1995.
21 Göran Rydén has written about how the household economy remained functional
and relevant in a community centered on iron production in 1839–1850. The iron
bruk could be regarded as places in Sweden that developed a social stratification
sim-ilar to that of industrial towns in England, with a proletarianisation of the workers, at an earlier date than in the rest of Sweden’s mostly agrarian economic communi-ties. However, Rydén shows that the reproductive work of the women were vital to the economic survival of these communities. See Rydén 1990. See also Ulvros 1996, pp. 47–67; Hasselberg 1998, pp. 61–75, for discussions about how household-like structures retained their durability in Sweden during the first half of the nineteenth century.
19
self-evident, it is still worth stating, since it raises the further question of the rationale behind these books — if conduct needed to be taught, were women and men not behaving or thinking the way they should? It is helpful to com-pare conduct books of the late eighteenth century to private correspondence from the same time period, to see if the norms the books promote appeared in private writing, and in that case, how they were addressed.
Reading Against the Grain — Letters as a Source
When approaching centuries old texts, there is a danger of looking for things that seem recognizable. Were these concepts, events, or activities the same or similar, or does our modern cultural baggage make us prejudiced readers? There are many pitfalls when trying to interpret the deeper mean-ings of a letter that was perhaps not even intended to be read closely in the first place.
The type of letters under consideration were mainly aimed at conveying news and expressing devotion. The latter is more apparent in the Murrays’ letters. They were newly-weds during the time that most of their correspond-ence took place. There is little room for news in their romantic missives. Adolph Murray mainly wrote to his wife lamenting that he had to be parted from her and she responded in kind. The question becomes in what way household norms can be gleaned from these emotional texts.
One way is to take a step back and look at the context in which the letters were written. There has recently been a slew of scholarship concerning the tendentiousness of letters. Some scholars have highlighted that there were fashions in letter-writing as in everything else: many different letters have a similar style, prompting the question of how personal they really were.23
There were manuals for writing letters, and popular epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and Rousseau’s Heloise in-structed men and women how it should be done.24
23 See, for example, Hansson 2003; Löwendahl 2007; Goodman 2009.
24 The formal manuals for writing letters are discussed in the Swedish anthology
Brevkonst 2003, in which Stina Hansson compares the strict rules men were supposed
to follow when writing letters with the greater stylistic freedom allowed to women. The historian Dena Goodman has found in her study Becoming a Woman in the Age
20
Another thing to take into account when studying letters as a genre is that they were not necessarily meant to be private. Though they might be addressed to one person, they could also be read by others, and that would not be considered strange.25 If you want to know how private a letter might
have been, you have to consider the space in which it was read: for instance, did the reader even have access to a private room? In his letters, Adolph Murray writes about the spaces that were available to him and Hedvig Char-lotta Murray during their courtship, revealing how little privacy there was actually available. The couples’ parents are present everywhere: the proposal happened in ‘your parents’ garden’ and a few moments alone are stolen in ‘my mother’s chamber’, about which at least the mother must have known.26
The fact that the letters were preserved also tells us that someone wanted them to be preserved, possibly to be studied by later generations. There are letters missing — why are they missing? It is impossible to know. What we do know about the selective process with which the Murray letters were pre-served, is that the whole collection was entrusted to Pehr Aurivillius, Hedvig Charlotta’s brother and Adolph’s close friend. Thus the courtship between Adolph Murray and Pehr Aurivillius’s sister has been preserved, but there are no extant letters between Adolph and his second wife Maria Lamberg. It is possible that Pehr Aurivillius made this selection.
The Godegård collection, containing the correspondence between Ul-rica and Jean Abraham Grill, is vast. For UlUl-rica’s part, there has survived a letter from almost every other day. These are from the times when Jean Abraham went on journeys. There is the impression that everything was simply preserved as it was, though it is impossible to be sure.
Ulrica and Jean Abraham Grill’s correspondence is of a different char-acter than the Murrays’. In particular, Ulrica writes longer letters full of practical concerns. She also comes across as far more confident than Hedvig
form was a norm for men. During the eighteenth century, there was a strong expec-tation for women to write in an unfettered, emotional style, while men stood for reason and logic. Ideed, Ulrica Grill alludes to this stereotype in one letter to her husband, when she writes that she added several P. S.’s because women’s letters were supposed to include them. See, NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG July 21 1779.
25 See Ulvros 1996, pp. 23–31; Steinrud 2008.
21
Charlotta Murray. Neither Ulrica nor Jean Abraham filled their letters with romance.
One reason for the difference is of course that they were simply very different people. Some accounts of Ulrica depict a clever, formidable woman, described as being as competent as a man.27 She was in charge of a
large estate and an iron works, in effect working as a deputy to her husband. Hedvig Charlotta Murray, on the other hand, never had that kind of re-sponsibility. She did not oversee what amounted to a company while her husband was away, nor did she live long enough to gain the confidence Ul-rica Grill acquired after years of experience.
While Adolph Murray was a scientist who was enthusiastic about his studies in anatomy, Jean Abraham Grill was primarily a trader on the board of the Swedish East India Trade Company. He had built his fortune in part on an illegal trade in opium in Canton.28 That might account for the more
pragmatic tone in the Grill letters, but most importantly, their letters cover a longer period of time, showing how the couple grew used to one another. Perhaps the Murrays never got over the honeymoon-phase of their marriage since Hedvig Charlotta died young.
The Grill correspondence demonstrates that letters between husbands and wives could have a different purpose during this period. In a clearer way than the Murrays’ correspondence, they reveal a married couple working together as partners, combining their emotional investment in each other with the economic investments they shared. The Grills occasionally allowed practical economic matters to take precedence in their correspondence, while the Murrays made more of an effort to keep the romantic aspects alive. Both couples may have had practical as well as emotional motives for their different writing styles.
As previously noted, when trying to read these letters ‘against the grain’ in order to understand more about the context in which they were written, the norms they existed within, and the type of relationships they helped to create, it is important to remember that there are certain things we cannot know. For example, though it can be shown that the Murrays’ romantic style was befitting a certain popular ideal of marriage, it cannot be said that this
27 See the family history written by Claes Lorentz Grill in Grill 1866, and the
bio-graphical page at the family’s website, www.grilliana.se
22
makes their love any less genuine than it would have been had they written like the Grills, or vice versa. Sentiments are not necessarily false because they are described in the accepted romantic language of the time.
Whose House? The Household as a Workplace,
Inside and Outside
When discussing the household as a workplace, it will at first be necessary to define the concept of ‘work’. An able-bodied person was expected to work in order to make him or herself useful. Those who were poor but deemed physically fit could readily be blamed for their own misfortunes — they were the ‘undeserving poor’, irrespective of the outside circumstances that pre-vented them from earning a living. Poor-relief was granted more liberally to people who were unable to work because of age or infirmity, the so-called ‘deserving poor’.29
Women were also expected to work, although their work was vaguely defined. The woman’s role as keeper and caretaker of the house was consid-ered economically important. According to the conduct literature, tasks that pertained to taking care of the house, such as cooking, cleaning, and sewing, were considered work.30 However, women from different social classes were
required to perform different types of tasks. Higher-ranking women were not expected to do grueling labour — indeed, to do the same tasks as a piga would have meant a loss of status for these women, as will be described in a later section of this article. Still, the association between household chores and ‘work’ retained its symbolic importance, even for the wealthy women who would have read conduct books.
For middle and upper-class women, a tension clearly existed between what was in practice required of them and the notion of ‘work’. It was
29 See Sjögren 1997, pp. 86–118 regarding the history of the concept of the
‘deserv-ing’ and the ‘undeserv‘deserv-ing’ poor in Sweden. For discussions about the culture of util-ity in Swedish economic thought during the eighteenth century, see Frängsmyr 1971–72; Johannisson 1988; Legnér 2004, Runefelt 2005. Blom 1997, pp. 170– 195, discusses how this view was extended to children in orphanages that functioned as work houses.
23
portant to keep up appearances. In the conduct books, women are repeat-edly described as the ‘fairer sex’.31 Yet these same books criticize women who
spend too much time taking care of their appearance, whiling away the morning in front of their mirrors instead of working. Such a pursuit is con-sidered idle.32 The books paint an idealized picture of how even the most
high-born housewives were hard-working in the ancient past. ‘Homer tells of how princesses did not distain the most menial tasks. Today we would laugh at such things. What have we gained?’, writes the author of A
Com-plete, True Wife’s Image.33
In short, reproductive work within the household was the only respecta-ble task for women, whether they were rich or poor, even though many tasks were off-limits for wealthy mistresses. This reproductive work consisted of keeping accounts of the food in the pantry, of sewing and mending, cleaning and caring for children.34 While the husband brought in the income from
outside the household, the wife kept the household’s economy running from within.35 How did this arrangement work out for the wealthy Murrays
and the Grills?
We have the most information about the Murrays’ lives in the period between their engagement and their marriage. These letters reveal the con-struction and early stages of their common household. Adolph’s voice is the clearest. He discusses the furnishing of their new household at some length, and with a great deal of authority.36
Amanda Vickery has described the custom among the English gentry to let women furnish the rooms of the house. According to her study, among the English gentry, there existed a certain cultural value in a woman’s touch, the sense of style that only women could possess. When women were al-lowed to express this sense of style, they could symbolically mark the inner rooms of the house as a female domain, as an expression of feminine
31 See ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787, p. 5. 32 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787 pp. 20–21. 33 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787 pp. 14–15. 34 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787 p. 17.
35 See ‘Huru skal et Ungt Fruntimer wärdigt bilda sig’ 1787 p. 30, where a man who
takes charge of the pantry is scolded for trying to steal food, called a grytsnok which can be translated as ‘pot-snake’.
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power.37 Not so for the Murrays. Apparently the furnishings were entirely
the responsibility of the husband in this new family. Adolph writes to in-form Hedvig Charlotta about the practical packaging of his tables and chairs, and she effuses over the mirrors he has sent her for his room.38
Adolph also describes the house he has chosen for her, in a way that shows she clearly has not seen it.39 He also demonstrates extensive knowledge of
the type of cloth used for furniture and clothes — he knows exactly those materials that will fray and those that will not.40 His detailed descriptions of
fabrics are meant for one of his wife’s sisters. Apparently none of the Auriv-illius-girls possessed that knowledge. One can wonder what feminine home-making tasks were left for Hedvig Charlotta to perform.
The Murray’s correspondence does not provide a clear picture of Hedvig Charlotta. Those of her letters that survive are fairly simple and short. She writes about accepting furnishings that Adolph has sent, but makes no men-tion of deciding anything about these furnishings or making any orders of her own.41
The Grill correspondence provides a window into a more settled mar-riage, and Ulrica also reveals herself to be more in control of her household furnishings than Hedvig Charlotta. She makes orders, via her husband, for cloths that she intends to make into tapestries. She also plies her husband for wax figurines to decorate the table, and discusses the maps of Godegård that she intends to mount on the walls.42 The maps would have not only
been decorative, but functional, offering an overview of the estate that be-longed to the Grills. Ulrica might have been able to make the claim that it was hers as well as her husband’s. Her mounting the maps on the wall sug-gests that she saw the necessity of knowing the wealth and the borders of their vast estate, this is not surprising since she spent a lot of time alone on the estate while her husband was away. But the map would also have been on display for visitors, showing them the expanse of the Grills’ domain.
37 Vickery 2009, ch. 3.
38 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM November 3 1783. 39 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM November 3 1783.
40 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM November 3 1783. See also RA
Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM till 1786, the date missing.
41 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 10 HCM to AM July 2 1782.
42 See NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG February 18 1778, February
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Ulrica’s concerns seem to fit well with the idea that a woman should work exclusively with the ‘inner’ household, but her preoccupation with tapestries, wax figurines, and maps relate to decoration and taste rather than the household economy or the physical comfort of the home. Of course, it is possible that the Grills simply liked to surround themselves with pretty things. However, that does not rule out the possibility that they had a vested interest in displaying their wealth and taste to their social peers.43 Ulrica
mentions how visitors frequently dropped by without notice. This was an endless cause of frustration for her.44
Decorating was a particular form of household work that could open up the inner household to the outside world. Indeed, decorating dismantled the division between the inside and the outside. As historians such as Joa-chim Eibach have shown, the household was never a closed space during the early modern period, but rather something that needed to be performed to one’s neighbours. Marie Steinrud and David Sabean have also demon-strated how women’s sociability and networking, even in bourgeoisie draw-ing rooms, functioned as a way of preservdraw-ing and promotdraw-ing their house-holds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.45 However, I cannot
find evidence that the conduct literature ever acknowledged any blurring of the boundaries between the inner and outer spheres of the household. If normative texts served any purpose, it seemed to be to guard those bounda-ries, sometimes in contradiction with everyday practice.
This whole discussion is based on the presupposition that Ulrica Grill was mainly responsible for decorating and representing the house, which is not entirely accurate. Jean Abraham has partly made a name for himself by overseeing the building of a park at Godegård.46 It is not obvious whether
this should be seen as an example of ‘outer’ housekeeping. When it came to tasteful household display, he supposedly provided Godegård with a Chi-nese porcelain set that he had acquired through his connections with the
43 For a Swedish study of this, see Andersson 2009.
44 For Ulrica’s complaints about visitors, see NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG
to JAG May 18 1778, Ibid. May 24 1778, July 17 1779, July 21 1779.
45 See Joachim Eibach’s conference text regarding ‘the open house’, ‘Doing House
and Neighbourhood’, at the conference European Social Science History Conference, Vienna (Austria), 23–26 April 2014.
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East India trade company.47 Though Ulrica was specific in her demands, he
did most of the actual shopping. As previously mentioned, Adolph Murray was the one who decided how the Murray household should be furnished. There is evidence that Hedvig Charlotta provided some small items of dec-orative sewing.48
Who was responsible for the furnishing seems to have been decided ac-cording to who had the most opportunity to provide it, rather than by a ritualized gendered division; Jean Abraham Grill had connections with the East India trade company, so he provided porcelain. Ulrica could sew, so she made tapestries. Adolph Murray had lived as a bachelor for many years and therefore already owned furniture. The gendered division is apparent in the reason why Jean Abraham Grill did not sew, why Ulrica could not have a career within the East India trade company, or why Hedvig Charlotta Murray lived at home until her marriage. The women and men went into their marriages with different preconditions, preconditions that would con-tinue to delineate their abilities to act once they were married. The fact that Jean Abraham Grill and Adolph Murray were well-traveled and worldly when they got married, while neither Ulrica nor Hedvig Charlotta were, determined the different responsibilities they acquired within the house-hold. The addresses on their correspondences show that it was much more common for the husbands to travel than it was for their wives. It was possi-ble for the wives to act as deputies to their husbands when it came to over-seeing the management of estates and households, but they could not act as deputies for work that could take them away from the home, such as work within the field of politics or science.49
The conduct books mention the possibility of women receiving scientific education. Hedvig Charlotta Murray, the daughter and spouse of professors in Uppsala, would have had high education within her near reach. A
Com-plete, True Wife’s Image makes the claim that women like her are capable of
learning science, but that it is unnecessary for them to do so since their lot
47 Frängsmyr 1976, p. 106.
48 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM 1786, the date missing. 49 Marion Gray sees this, rather than the development of industries, as one of the
main causes of the creation of ‘separate spheres’ in household literature in Gray 2000.
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in life is to dedicate themselves to the household. This is held up as some-thing of equal importance to prestigious male work: ‘The science of which I speak is called the Household-science.’50
How Shall a Young Woman Educate Herself with Dignity describes the
men-tal capacities of women in less generous terms, claiming that they are inca-pable of understanding science and those who talk about it appear ridicu-lous:
When I speak of Young Ladies’ knowledges and insights, I only count among them such knowledges as are befitting of that sex. A Young Lady who as soon as she opens her mouth breathes pure learning, and wants to flaunt herself with Wolf, Newton or Leibnitz, seems to me even so silly, as if I should see a man sit and make bobbing lace, tambour-stitching or knitting stockings.51
Here the division is obvious and unproblematic: men educate themselves and women sew. Why? A Complete, True Wife’s Image gives a practical expla-nation that there is no economic incentive for women to become edu-cated.52 They could not use their knowledge for a career within a field of
science, and their housekeeping skills were needed elsewhere. Even as the housefathers’ horizons were widening beyond farms and estates, there was no economic incentive for women to obtain the education they would need to partake in those ventures. They were barred from the fields of politics and science by laws and customs. However, there might be other incentives. Since women were economically dependent on men to survive, they might feel the need to get male attention by engaging with men on their own terms. According to How Shall a Young Woman Educate Herself with Dignity, that venture would be doomed to fail, since women never could hope to earn respect that way.
50 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787 p. 18, my translation. It should be noted
that the Swedish word for science, vetenskap, is slightly more flexible than the English ‘science’. Vetenskap draws together the terms science and learning, encompassing natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. However, during the eigh-teenth century, vetenskap did not have the function of forwarding erudition for its own sake like it did later in the nineteenth century. Rather, it had a utilitarian pur-pose, to develop technical skills and tools. See Benner & Widmalm (red.) 2011, for a brief history of the concept of ‘knowledge’ in Sweden.
51 ‘Huru skal et Ungt Fruntimer wärdigt bilda sig’ 1787 p. 28. 52 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787 p. 18.
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The question why the genders held different positions is in fact funda-mental for gender history research. Gender historians like Yvonne Hirdman and Eva Helen Ulvros have described how gender relations in history are frequently are seen to be in stasis, when in fact they are always in a state of change.53 This study of norms and ideals concerning gender also shows that
change happened at a slow pace and that old norms could overlap with newer ones: it was not as neat as that one ideal replaced another. Old-fash-ioned notions of what was considered women’s work and men’s work co-existed with new practical realities, complicating the lives of real women and men as they tried to understand their own lives.
Servants and Subordinates: Borders and Hierarchies
in the Household
When discussing Swedish households during the eighteenth century it is crucial to remember the role played by servants. Maids were called pigor and male servants or farmhands were referred to as drängar. This servant class was an essential part of a moderately wealthy Swedish household during the early modern period: the question is, were they viewed as a part of the ex-tended family or simply as labourers, or both? The maids and servants could live under the same roof, and in some cases sleep in the same room as their employers. Their tasks could vary greatly from household to household, and their status as well: sometimes they were considered family and sometimes barely human.54 There is some discussion within the scholarship about how
the status of maids and servants changed during the early modern period.55
This segment will consider how the conduct books depicted servants, and how the Grills and the Murrays acted as employers. These sources reveal something about the discursive climate in which the servants existed. They do not reveal anything about the servants’ own views. The practices of serv-ants during this period do, however, show that they possessed a level of agency, though their movements were restricted by laws.56
53 See Hirdman 2001; Ulvros 1996.
54 See Harnesk 1990 for a discussion about how views on servants fluctuated during
the eighteenth century.
55 See Pleijel 1970; Harnesk 1990. 56 Harnesk 1990, pp. 88–89.
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Servants were very mobile. They could sometimes stay at one place for less than a year before moving on to the next. During the eighteenth century there was significant concern about the movements of this servant class, be-cause this be-caused instability in the households that employed them. There were laws that tied the servants to their employments for an extended period of time. These laws were enforced to varying degrees during the century. The 1750s were the most restrictive period, and the laws were relaxed some-what during the 1770s.57 At the same time, some historians have observed
a shift in social trends: preachers began to preach about the Lutheran
hus-tavla more vigorously than before.58 This could be interpreted as the return
of a more traditional discursive climate, with a focus on a household order where servants were regarded as members of the household who needed to be protected as well as disciplined. Within this household order they were expected to show familial loyalty towards their employers.59 If this change
in discourse happened in the 1770s, it would have happened concurrently with the granting of greater freedom of movement for servants as a result of changes in the law, and the gradual weakening of the aristocracy’s feudal rights during the reign of Gustav III. In other words, the ideological reigns were tightened at the same time as the practical ones were loosened. Laws could be perceived as tyrannical, but norms were more difficult to challenge. How were servants and servants’ work actually described during this pe-riod? During the 1770s there were debates within the Diet and within the press about the effectiveness of the laws. These debates were sometimes tied to normative discussions about the role of servants. In The Royal Patriotic Society’s periodical, Hushållningsjournal, authors argued against the laws by relating them to the idea of freedom.60 At the same time, the society awarded
medals to servants who had been in the service of one family for a long period of time.61 The same articles that argued for freedom also described
the ideal of the loving housefather and the familial loyalty a servant ought
57 Harnesk 1990, pp. 50–71. 58 Hansen, 2006, pp. 35–36.
59 Harnesk 1990, pp. 40–47. See also Hasselberg 1998, pp. 240–241 for a discussion
about how this continued into the early nineteenth century.
60 See Hushållningsjournal vol. 1 September 1776.
61 See, for example, the piga who was awarded a medal for serving one family for
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to feel under his care.62 In essence, the writers of Hushållningsjournal, who
included prominent landowners, scientists, and economists in Sweden and abroad in some cases argued that servants’ movements should not be re-stricted by laws because that infringed on their right to freedom. But, it was argued, household norms ought to be strengthened — this would make every right-thinking servant want to stay.
The conduct books take a less conciliatory view of servants. In En
Fullkomlig, Ägta Hustrus Bild, the chapter about the care of children offers a
particularly sharp rebuke of the servant class, when it recommends that chil-dren are to be kept away from them because they will fill their heads with superstitions.63 Here the servants are not treated as beings worthy of respect:
it is very far from the pleadings for freedom in Hushållningsjournal. In agrar-ian households, working as a servant could be considered a right of passage for most young people before they settled down, and in that context, pigor and drängar could be considered to have been potential householders them-selves even if they were currently subordinated in someone else’s house-hold.64 However, with the descriptions of servants as a separate class, the
conduct books seem to be aimed at a group of women who would never have worked as pigor at any point in their lives.
At a specific point in one of the books, the housewife and the piga are brought together. The woman who is too hands-on with the housework risks becoming a piga herself. The author of How Shall a Young Woman Educate
Herself With Dignity, is accusatory of the parents who educate their daughters
in the intricacies of household chores. In that case, ‘The husband’s new wife will also be his first house-piga.’65 However, he had no time for women who
aspired to be more than housewives:
62 See Hushållningsjournal vol. 1 September 1776. 63 ’En Fulkomlig Ägta Hustrus Bild’ 1787 pp. 47–48.
64 This pattern in Western Europe is described in Berkner 1972, p. 411; Laslett
1977, p. 45; Hajnal 1983, p. 96. Börje Harnesk criticizes this depiction of Western European servant-culture in Harnesk 1990, ch. 3. According to Harnesk, this prac-tice was not common in Sweden during the early modern period. However, there is still a possibility that there was a cultural expectation that working as dräng or a piga was a transitory phase.
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Others make themselves merry over such a simple education; they want to place themselves above such lowly habits, and let their young girls get them-selves mixed up in the menfolk’s affairs; they teach them all manner of sci-ences, or rather, cheat. If the former becomes her husband’s first house-piga, the later becomes a fool, who wants to rule over him with her supposed wisdom and knowledge.66
This is a light-hearted passage, but it implied that the differences between the mistresses of the house and the servants needed to be upheld, lest the lines were blurred. At the same time the wife’s subordination with regards to her husband had to be maintained. It is as though the book, after assuring the female readers that they are superior to servants, must remind them of their inferiority at once to prevent them from taking it too far.
As for the correspondence, the Murray letters barely mention the pres-ence of live-in servants. A survey of the Murray household during the period when Adolph and Hedvig Charlotta lived there shows that they did have one dräng who lived with them, a man named Olof Engström.67 However,
the times when a servant is mentioned in the surviving Murray letters, he is simply named as drängen, ‘the servant’ — with no clue about whether the man in question is Olof Engström or another day labourer.68 Servants could
also change employment frequently, and this survey only shows one mo-ment in the Murray’s lives. Other types of labourers are mo-mentioned in pass-ing — for example, there are mentions of sendpass-ing an åkare, a horse-drawn cart, to ship furniture.69 The only subordinate who is present in the
house-hold and who is named is Mamsell Sommer, the hairstylist, but she is just a temporary presence.70 The lack of servants in these letters might be
mislead-ing, since some of the Murray correspondence appears to be lost, but most of the surviving letters are from the time when the young couple is setting
66 ‘Huru skal et Ungt Fruntimer wärdigt bilda sig’ 1787 p. 29.
67 For basic biographical information about Adolph Murray, see Adolph Murray,
http://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/artikel/8576, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (art by Wilhelm Odel-berg), 2015-12-09.
68 Adolph Murray mentions ‘my dräng’ in one letter. RA, Murrayska släktsamlingen
vol. 9 AM till HCM July 5 1782.
69 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 10 HCM to AM July 2 1782. 70 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM February 20 1783.
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up a household together. Servants are not a main topic of discussion be-tween them in this instance, though they would have been an essential com-ponent of the new home.
Perhaps this particular couple preferred to discuss such matters face to face, or perhaps it was yet another instance of Adolph taking care of some-thing without consulting his young wife. The lack of mention of servants could also point to a labour situation where day labourers were easy to find, flexible and anonymous. The Murrays lived in a town after all. The situation was very different for Ulrica Grill.
Ulrica Grill’s letters mention servants and other subordinates fre-quently. Sometimes they are casually mentioned as an aside, as part of the setting for some other event, and sometimes she describes to her husband her interactions with them. Though it is not specified how close their quar-ters were to Ulrica’s, the drängar and pigor move in and out of her house and she pays attention to their movements.
Ulrica Grill also oversaw a large iron works at Godegård, co-operated with its overseers, and socialized with their families. She reports to Jean Abraham the work conducted by the iron works’ inspector, and she de-scribes his health and social situation.71 Work and social life is intermingled
in a natural way for the woman whose home is her work. In the letters, sometimes she describes the people working at her husband’s metal works as being under her protection. She gossips about their lives and struggles, and also sees it as her role to give them help and advice. At one point Ulrica relates how a drunken clerk drove an acquaintance of hers, a Mrs Lagergren, temporarily hysterical.72 The purpose of this account was to tell Jean
Abra-ham that Mrs Lagergren took medicine she recommended, thanked her, and ‘cried for joy.’73
The illnesses of the local people are a common topic for her, and when she describes them she often explains how she will help them.74 In one
in-stance, when she is not allowed to help, she snidely refers to the doctor they
71 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG June 3 1781.
72 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG February 18 1778, my translation. 73 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG February 18 1778.
74 See examples of this in NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG, June 3
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have called as ‘doctor helpless.’75 Though she socialized with the people who
worked for her husband, this should not necessarily be read as the hierar-chies between them were dissolving. The hints that are present in the letters of how Ulrica acted as a benevolent patroness to these people show that her familiarity with them was a way for her to maintain her hierarchical stand-ing. Familial bonds were hierarchical. When Ulrica acted almost as a mother to the people in the village, she was reinforcing her hierarchical standing as the mistress of Godegård.
Ulrica refers to villagers and people at the iron works in a respectful way, but what about the pigor and drängar who work for her? In general, she finds them a source of frustration. As previously mentioned, it is in the nature of letters to convey news, and Ulrica might not have commented on everyday work running smoothly. As such, the letters may not represent her everyday opinions. However, it is worth noting that when she does mention servants, it is usually in a negative way. She complains about how difficult it is to find good servants and about their drinking habits.76 She describes how a piga
‘fell into the fire’ as if it is an inconvenience to her.77 The household staff is
moved around without regard to their own opinions.78
Such attitudes might not have been unusual. At the same time, house-hold-oriented ideals such as the ones expressed in Hushållningsjournal would have promoted the notion that servants were supposed to have familial bonds with their employers. However, both Ulrica Grill’s letters and the Murray correspondence reveal masters and mistresses having distant rela-tionships with the servants in their employ. The Murrays’ show this by omit-ting the servants while Ulrica expresses her distain for them. The most note-worthy thing is that Jean Abraham Grill barely discusses the servant situa-tion with Ulrica, though she brings it up in her letters to him. There could be many reasons for this, and letters are missing from Jean Abraham’s cor-respondence; but logically, Ulrica might have written more about the serv-ants because she spent time with them every day while Jean Abraham was away. According to the conduct books, taking charge of the household staff
75 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG February 251778, my translation. 76 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG 25 February 1778, July 17 1779,
July 28 1781, March 16 1788.
77 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG March 16, 1788. 78 NMA Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG March 16, 1788.
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would have been one of the main responsibilities of the woman, and Ulrica seems to have taken on that responsibility. In this way, her complaining about servants and his silence on the subject appears to be another example of a gendered divide between the couple.
There is the suggestion of another connection between Ulrica’s distain for her servants and the ideal female role as expressed in the conduct litera-ture. The conduct books talk about the fine line between being a mistress and being a servant. The mistress must justify herself by doing housework, as a good traditional wife should do, but at the same time not demean her-self by doing too much housework. This fine line is alluded to in the passage of Meyer’s conduct book where it is said that the wife should not be con-fused with the piga. Ulrica certainly had a hands-on approach to governing her estate, visiting the fields of the tenant farmers, and discussing bills and shipments with her husband. At the same time she was acutely aware of the fact that at any moment her home could be invaded by guests and that she had to live up to certain standards as a hostess. In the normative discourse of the time, this was the balance she had to strike, between being a practical worker and a mistress worthy of respect.
To conclude, Ulrica Grill’s letters show her distinguishing herself from both her servants and the other subordinates at the iron works by demon-strating how she either successfully lorded over them, or was disappointed and frustrated by them. Even though she needed them for housekeeping and company, this distinction had to be articulated to her husband.
Romance and Economy: The Emotional Aspects of
the Household
A letter from Ulrica Grill to Jean Abraham began like this:
My beloved best friend — it’s completely hopeless, Ehrenbills with the two eldest children are here, last Monday night 11 o’clock they came here, the same morning my dear mother and I had begun drinking at the well…79
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On the other hand, Adolph Murray began a letter by stating:
Today you get a letter from me which I begin writing early in the morning, since I do not know which hindrances could occur, and I for no part want you to, from an unexpected shortness in the letter, conclude that a distrac-tion could hinder my thoughts from You, from my Carl Adolph, from Up-sala. No, my heart is constantly with you, and my only joy is, that I so often have the opportunity to speak of you. Fate separates us from each other for a long time now, but at the same time it unites us all the more strongly, for wherever I turn, and wherever I am I always have my little Hedda with me and give her my tender embrace. Alas how wonderful this will be, when imagination is turned into reality.80
This is not an engagement letter. The couples had both been married to each other for a few years when the quoted passages were written. The mar-riages of the Murrays and the Grills were very different.
In a society where the family was supposed to be a working unit, the decision who to marry carried economic implications. Marriages created networks and movements of wealth in the form of dowries and inheritances. David Sabean has written about how family networks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both worked with trying to preserve wealth, and also generated and regenerated class divisions.81 It made a great deal of sense
to take a pragmatic approach to marriage. However, during the late eight-eenth century, the pragmatic approach found competition with the idea of romantic love. This section examines the kind of normative framework dis-cussed in the conduct books and letters, and romantic love.
The fine balance women were supposed to strike between being hard workers and aloof mistresses has already been discussed. In conduct litera-ture, this fine balance is even more pronounced when the books describe the personal qualities women are supposed to possess, qualities that make them ‘lovely’ to the writers. In both books, women are repeatedly described as being the fair sex. This does not keep the writers from caricaturing the type of women who spend hours getting ready in front of the mirror, and advising them to stay away from ‘fashions and women’s fripperies.’82
80 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM 1786. 81 See Sabean 1998.
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Women are advised to spend their time with more worthy pursuits, such as housework.
There are corresponding attitudes to female vanity in the letters, partic-ularly in Ulrica Grill’s as she grapples with wanting to or needing to look good and yet at the same time the need not to appear vain. She asks for clothes to ‘cover my horrible figure’, and excuses the purchases she wants to make with by stating that ‘It is no vanity, you know I despise such fripper-ies.’83 In the letters that have survived from Jean Abraham, he ignores the
issue altogether. In the Murray, letters the opposite applies: Hedvig Char-lotta does not reflect on her own appearance but is repeatedly described by Adolph as ‘fair’. Adolph is also amused by the travails his sister has to go through to get her hair done:
I laugh at her as I see her pretty face in the mirror while I am writing, but she threatens me, that the same grim and unmerciful Madame Somer will eventually pull my Hedda’s hair. Well well, my ladies! So you are punished for your intention to follow the violent laws of fashion.84
Another sign of the association between beauty and femininity could be seen in the mockeries of dandies and fops that began to appear in Sweden during the late eighteenth century. In Swedish they were referred to as ‘sprätthökar’, or the French term ‘petit-maitre’. The historians Jonas Liljequist and Karin Hassan Jansson have both written about how these car-icatures began to appear in Swedish publications after being previously vir-tually unknown. Foppishness in men was seen as something foreign, mainly French, and uneconomic since it signified a wasteful, idle way of life. Most damningly, it was seen as a sign of effeminacy.85 The stereotype does indeed
get mentioned in one of the conduct books, and Ulrica Grill also makes fun of the ‘petit-maitre’ at one point: she, at least, was aware that men could show excessive vanity.86 Whether this new stereotype created a quandary for
men who wanted to appear good looking is not a question this study will be able to answer. There is no mention of such a dilemma faced by either
83 NMA, Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG May 24 1778. 84 RA Murrayska släktsamlingen vol. 9 AM to HCM February 20 1783. 85 See Jonas Liliequist 2000; Runefelt 2005, p. 103; Jansson 2013. 86 NMA, Godegårdssamlingen vol. 16 UG to JAG February 25 1778.
