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Historisk tidskrift 126:1 • 2006

Innehåll (Contents) 2006:1

Uppsatser (Articles)

Hemligt eller offentligt? Om kön, egendom och offentlighet i 1700-talets Sverige

Maria Ågren

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

Secret or Public? Gender, Property, and the Public Sphere in Late Eighteenth-Century Sweden

This article discusses the publication of legal documents in eighteenth-century Sweden. From 1738, the publication of such documents was no longer illegal, leading to intense activity among printers, mainly in Stockholm, and peaking in the 1770s. In this way, a large number of legal cases were exposed to the reading public. Very often, the lawsuits dealt with questions of property giving rise to conflicts within or between families.

The Swedish legal documents were printed in their original form, i e they were not fundamentally revised. However, it is very clear that they were addressed to and adapted for the public. The article points to three distinctive characteristics of these texts. (i) The documents sometimes included dramatic dialogues and indecent details. (ii) The text was set so as to make it easy for the reader to locate the most spectacular parts. (iii) The publisher (who was the part who had lost the lawsuit) usually added commentaries in the form of preambles or footnotes, where he/she explicitly appealed to the public, urging it to side with the aggrieved party.

The publication of legal documents made family life extremely accessible to the public, precisely at the time when marriage and family matters were increasingly regarded as highly private. The article argues that it was exactly this tension between private and public that made these texts so tantalising to readers, and that they constituted ”a public sphere of scandals”. Since some of these legal cases involved, or alluded to, well-known and highly placed men, they also attained a political subtext. In addition to this, the texts could relate to the ongoing debate about the need to reform credit legislation and bankruptcy law. In this debate, a disorganised credit market was seen as the symbol of a badly governed country. The published legal documents provided many examples of how unscrupulous men took advantage of their creditors.

The increasing publicity surrounding lawsuits in general, and bankruptcies in particular, contributed to the construction of negative male stereotypes. The guilty debtor and the unreliable citizen (with whom these texts were preoccupied) were all conceived of as male. The article gives some examples of how aggrieved women could enter the stage and appeal to the public, through the print medium, by employing these negative male stereotypes when arguing their case.

Finally, the results of the investigation are compared to those presented by Sarah Maza in 1993, arguing that essentially, the Swedish legal documents functioned in the same way as the French mémoires judiciaires. The article also concurs with Maza’s view that this ”public sphere of scandals” should be regarded as the origin of the Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, as discussed by Jürgen Habermas.

Keywords

Sweden history 1718–1814, gender, freedom of print, private life, public life, scandal, credits