Expanding Political Capital: Why Social Democratic Women Participated in Middle-Class Feminist Educational Organisations in Sweden c.1890–1910

ABSTRACT This article seeks to introduce a new historical explanation as to why left-wing working-class women engaged in liberal, middle-class organisations during the first wave of feminism. The article specifically deals with middle-class associations and clubs that had educational purposes. Instead of focusing on the larger explanatory scheme of the power of patriarchal societal structures or bourgeois feminisms as a hegemonic force, the account revolves around the political educational functions of liberal feminist engagement for some politically active social democratic women in Sweden. The case of social democratic women who entered the liberal middle class educational organisation Tolfterna (the Dozen) is the point of departure for a micro-historical analysis of the political capital accumulation practices that class collaboration entailed. Finally, the article explores how working-class women’s choices and actions can be considered a group-specific strategy to expand their political resources to attain what is called feminist liberal political capital.


Introduction
The first wave of feminism in Sweden, as in many other countries, saw the creation of informal spaces of political and cultural learning for women.The first wave was as much a matter of political suffragette activism in the streets as a matter of political education in clubs and societies.In 1892, Elin Engström, a Swedish, working-class mother of seven, became a member of such a gendered space: the middle-class-run Tolfterna (the Dozen) in Stockholm.Tolfterna was a liberal feminist club that focused on arranging educational meetings and conversations between women from different social classes.Organised politics was not new to Engström, who was politically active in the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Sweden and the trade unions.
Engström was in many respects an energetic feminist.She was one of the initiators of a women's club in the Workers' Party, and she often collaborated with prominent, liberal, middle-class women when their and female workers' political interests aligned.She was also one of the women from the left who initiated the national association for the female vote in Sweden.Yet, she never abandoned her political left-wing convictions.In fact, she dedicated her life to working for the Social Democratic Party and the improvement of the conditions of the working class. 1 Engström's dynamic political activities shed light on the fact that the first wave of feminism was a force made up of different classes.In some countries, for instance in Germany, the feminist movement split into opposing class factions, in others, such as Norway, Denmark or Sweden, class collaboration was more common.In these cases, the larger national suffrage organisations as well as the various women's organisations typically had liberal-universalist programmes and middle-class leaders.Still, women coming from the working class formed an essential part of the movements. 2Late nineteenth-century proletarian women were in a way caught between parties and trade unions -they were connected to the Second International that did not acknowledge or prioritise their political democratic interests, as well as a middle-class-led feminist movement that paid no attention to their interests as factory workers or domestic servants. 3lin Engström could obviously balance these interests.Strikingly, many who entered middle-class or liberal organisations were like her: of working-class descent and politically active on the left.They were dedicated socialists most days of the week and discussed women's issues in middle-class educational and suffrage associations on others.How can this be understood, if not explained?
The actions and choices of women like Engström, the working-class presence in middle-class Bildung environments, is a captivating part of the first wave of feminism in need of further discussion and deciphering, not least because the literature on the working-class presence in the broader feminist movement tells different stories.It is impossible to do justice to the rich amount of research available on the intersection of social class and gender in nineteenth-century suffrage movements, so just a few patterns will be mentioned briefly. 4n interpretation put forward regarding the participation of working-class women in the liberal feminist women's movement has its roots in Marxism. 5The nineteenthcentury movement has been interpreted either as a bourgeois, class collaboration, or it has been seen as the middle class reaching out as a sort of class manipulation to support the political interests of the dominant classes. 6There is some truth in this statement.Middle-class leadership was common, and the universalist liberal feminist programmes seldom included reforms on the economic or work-related problems experienced by women working for wages. 7Yet, this explanation tends to paint a picture of labouring women not as strategic political activists but as objects of political philanthropy or cultural hegemony.
The concept of bourgeois feminism is also problematic, as Marylin J. Boxer has taught us.Bourgeois feminism was a socialist image -crafted by politicians such as Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai -and used for political purposes.Later in the twentieth century, the image was adopted by some parts of the academic field. 8However, the history of the relationship between class and feminism was more complex, as decades of scholarly work have shown.
Feminist historians have analysed the combination of cultural, political and social factors which made up the context that stimulated working-class women's activity in the first wave.What has been highlighted is how the attractiveness of feminism was an effect of the patriarchal gender power order.Laura Schwartz has recently discussed "the servants' problem" and servants' engagement in middle-class suffrage organisations in Great Britain.Servants were a necessity in the households of the dominant classes and had the lowest status in the labour movement.Nevertheless, out of strategy and necessity, they chose to join in the feminist struggle for political citizenship. 9eminism was functional and attractive for women in service jobs, factories or household-bound production, as well as for the educated or the rich, due to their shared experiences of being women in a patriarchal system.The class experiences were different, but the gender experiences were similar.Sandra Stanley Holten has argued that the English suffragists managed to draw supporters and members from all occupations because the political issue of the right to vote had deep meaning for women at the time.Feminists often drew on their experiences of injustice in their daily private lives as daughters, mothers and wives.They wanted to reform the lives of women and the idea of woman, far beyond the narrow interpretation that the vote mirrored the liberal, middleclass leaders' interests.Here lay the broad attraction of the feminist movement. 10Given the knowledge we have regarding the male breadwinner regime that structured the social order in general and organised labour in particular, this explanation is probably the correct answer to the question of working-class commitment at large.
Still, some pages are missing in the larger story of working-class engagement in middle-class-led organisations of late nineteenth-century feminism.What is seldom considered is that labouring women were a heterogenic social class regarding education, spheres of employment, economic sustainability, experiences of engaging in social movements and political ambitions.For some women, such as the aforementioned Elin Engström, the act of collaboration was logical and strategic in accordance with their position not just as women but also as political activists and left-wing intellectuals.Not all proletarian women joined the suffrage movement, and not all women who joined had the desire to become politicians, opinion makers or representatives.Yet, some evidently did.And this particular group of women -politically organised, future party functionaries, programme makers and left-wing intellectuals -are the focus of this article.
This article seeks to add a new historical explanation as to why politically active, leftist, working-class women, at an early stage, engaged in the liberal and educational middleclass organisations of the first wave.Instead of approaching the subject from the explanatory scheme of class manipulation, the power of patriarchal hegemonic structures and a shared history of being the subordinate gender, we assert the political functions of collaborating with liberal feminists.In our reading, these women acted rationally based on their position and opportunity horizons.They were attracted to middle-class feminism for more than the single reason of common experiences of oppression based on gender; their collaboration was meaningful and interest-oriented.In contrast to previous approaches, we argue that politically active proletarian women's choices and actions concerning collaboration can be understood as a historically conditioned and groupspecific strategy to multiply their political knowledge, resources and networks.In short, a strategy to expand their political capital.
The idea of approaching the activities of politically organised women as strategic comes from an interest in Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory on how social groups, agents with similar dispositions in social space, tend to make similar meaningful choices and engage in similar practices to advance in various fields in a given historical context. 11trategy refers to the logic, on a group level, that consciously or unconsciously governs how individuals act in order to preserve or improve their political, social, cultural and economic positions. 12In this case, it is the improvement of positions in the Swedish national political field and the left-wing subfield from the 1890s to the late 1910s that is in focus. 13ourdieu's understanding of agency makes it possible to analyse political action as rational and interest-based, maintaining the view of the context as hierarchical and determining.It is an approach that combines subjectivist and objectivist approaches to agency.We believe this is a stance that acknowledges the power of patriarchal orders and the power of the dominating classes in society and still gives subordinate classes and genders a capacity for meaningful agency in historical contexts in which people have had a certain amount of autonomy.In theory, the dominating classes in liberal capitalist societies determine which knowledge and resources count as capital in the political field.Subordinate groups tend to strive to acquire and accumulate those resources to improve their positions and make their political demands a political reality.Subordinate groups thus develop strategies to gain the know-how and practical skills needed to play the game of politics.We believe that the leftist, working-class women's choice to collaborate with middle-class feminists can be understood in the light of this theory.
Also, our choice to explore actions as strategic stems from our reading of the literature on working-class politics at large.As a concept, strategy (according to Bourdieu or rational choice theory) has been used to explain male politicians and trade unionists' political activities.For example, the perspective has been used to shed light on why politically active male workers adopted respectable conduct in political collaborations with right-wing politicians or rhetorically used the male breadwinner idea in negotiations with employers. 14Yet nineteenth-century left-wing women's political collaborations have seldom been discussed as strategic in the same way and are therefore worthy of further exploration.
The article also makes an important contribution to the history of education.First and foremost, we study education in the women's movement, which has not been given much attention in educational historical research.This is surprising, as social reform movements since the nineteenth century have almost always had educational purposes and institutions.Social movements like the workers' movement, the abolitionists, the temperance movement, the free church movement and the environmental movement have educated hundreds of thousands of people during the last two hundred years. 15Second, we make a specific contribution to the gendered history of education with our focus on the political functions of informal learning for women.In the history of European education, it is often in informal educational spaces that we find women as both teachers and students, as many were excluded from formal institutions.However, we do not merely describe the content of education and practices of learning in the feminist movement; we aspire to analyse critically how educational choices were, also for working-class women, strategic and served empowering functions.
The methodology of this article is micro-historical.The empirical case is the female forerunners of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, located in Stockholm, and their commitment to the above-mentioned educational association Tolfterna, which was created by middle-class women in the 1890s.We have focused our inquiries on what knowledge and networks the association offered the women and the meaning they gave in engaging in Tolfterna's activities.We have done a qualitative content analysis of the proletarian women's statements in the association's meeting minutes and in other published sources (articles in newspapers and journals).We have also used secondary sources, especially biographical accounts of the individual women, to enrich the analysis.In terms of time, the study covers the period from the 1880s to the 1910s -the period that saw the creation of gendered spaces of political learning and a large inter-class, national feminist mass movement.
In the following section, we introduce the historical context, the social democratic female pioneers and the educational association Tolfterna, which they entered.Next, we show how Tolfterna functioned as a place to acquire liberal feminist knowledge, cultural capital and a functional feminist political network.Finally, we argue that these studies suggest that the proletarian women politicians collaborated and joined in order to expand their political possibilities.

The Swedish Political Landscape and the Social Democratic Pioneers
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the first wave of feminism hit Sweden.By means of (a few) violent actions, public protests and reformist politics, national and local suffrage associations pushed for the introduction of democratic rule and for universal and equal voting rights between the sexes.Men of voting age were enfranchised in 1907, and women finally received the same right in 1918 (first practised in 1921).The history leading up to the 1918 parliamentary decision can be described as a history of liberal middle-class and social democratic working-class collaboration on a legislative level as well as a social movement level. 16he Swedish political landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be described as a political field, connected to the fields of power and the state but still autonomous. 17The political field consisted of liberal, rightwing and socialist parties, trade unions, mass movements and associations.The field was populated by agents who sought to exhort their influence on the larger arena as much as on their respective political subfield.The association Tolfterna was positioned on what we can call the liberal feminist subfield.The liberal feminist subfield consisted of societies and clubs and had a journal-based print culture.For example, there were societies for women's right to higher education, for women's property rights, for caring for poor women, and periodicals that formed opinions on women's political, social and economic emancipation.Furthermore, there were clubs that welcomed a variety of social classes and societies that primarily devoted themselves to education and training in women's issues and political debating techniques.Tolfterna was such a club.The founders of Tolfterna collaborated with larger liberal feminist movements, were members of social and philanthropic associations aimed at caring for the working class and thus were typical urban middle-class women with social liberal convictions.The leaders, especially the internationally known intellectual Ellen Key, embodied a high grouping of cultural and feminist political capital.Key was the author of Century of the Child, a book that argued against the dreadful living conditions and spiritual treatment of children in Sweden and abroad.For Key, education, especially the introduction of national public-school systems, would not only improve conditions for the individual child but also solve societal problems at large. 18Key's presence in Tolfterna gave the association a character of prestige, respectability and refinement. 19hat did the Swedish left look like during the period?Men dominated the Swedish left-wing political subfield, headed by the Social Democratic Party, the radical workers' press and the unions.The most important social democratic issues at this time were the right to regulated working hours and modern labour protection legislation, universal and equal suffrage, societal responsibility in the event of illness and making education accessible to all citizens.The literature on the party, covering the period stretching from the 1890s to the 1910s, shows that the so-called woman question was thoroughly debated.The questions regarding equality (economic as well as political) had ideological as well as practical dimensions. 20Christina Carlsson Wetterberg has shown that the question split the social democrats.Some argued that the woman question was an issue of its own, others argued that the abolishment of classed society in the end would lead to the emancipation of women; thus, these conversations mimicked the international debate on feminism versus socialism.The idea that male workers should be given franchise before women and that a push for universal franchise could hinder the male vote became the dominant view of trade unions and social democratic leadership.The fact that women were shut out of unions and marginalised by political parties led them to create unions and discussion clubs of their own.This was the context of the politically active women who wandered into the liberal feminist field in the 1890s. 21s mentioned earlier, the empirical focus in this article is on the active members of the Swedish Social Democratic Party who entered the liberal feminist association Tolfterna.Tolfterna was founded in 1892 in the Swedish capital Stockholm.Amongst the initiators was the aforementioned feminist Ellen Key and other radical liberals who, for instance, were involved in social policy projects, the Dress Reform Movement, the establishment of gender-inclusive secondary schools and the suffrage movement. 22Tolfterna was an organisation run by women from the urban middle class with the intended purpose of educating working-class women in cultural, social and political subjects.The project was inspired by predecessors from England where similar discussion clubs between workingclass and middle-class feminists had emerged.In a larger perspective, Tolfterna was a part of the middle-class sphere of clubs and associations for women, gendered spaces of informal learning, 23 that emerged during the nineteenth century.
The social democratic pioneers who joined were upcoming party and trade union politicians such as Amanda Horney, Agda Östlund, Anna Söderberg, Alina Jägerstedt, Anna Maria Widoff, Gertrud Månsson and of course Elin Engström.They were dedicated left-wing sympathisers, and besides being active members of the labour movement, they were active participants in (some were the creators of) the feminist association the Common Women's Club of Stockholm (Stockholms allmänna kvinnoklubb), which started in 1892 and was connected to the Social Democratic Party the same year.Many of these proletarian women came to act as intellectuals in the party at a later stage and even to hold positions in the municipal board in Stockholm after 1910 (when women of voting age became eligible political candidates at the municipal level).They were thus in the process of becoming esteemed Social Democratic politicians; they formulated ideological programmes for the party, held administrative positions in the movement and later even became representatives in political assemblies. 24he work in the women's sections of the left without a doubt opened a way into politics for labouring women. 25In our reading, the women studied here were in the process of establishing themselves in the left-wing political field and of accumulating leftwing organisational capital.They shared such traits as experiences of wage labour and factory work, having a primary education (they could read and write), and they had trust in the reformist role of social movements.When it comes to the aspect of marriage and family, we can see some differences.Some were married to men who were politically active, some were married to artisans, 26 and some were unmarried and had the legal right to own property (and later on in life ended up being small household-bound entrepreneurs). 27The political position of the female social democratic pioneers has been described in the following way: they were activists for the abolition of a class-based society and dedicated party members, yet they felt the scepticism coming from the maledominated workers' movement, and male party and trade union leaders and members continually opposed them.They were engaged in the question of universal suffrage (which was written into the Social Democratic Party programme in 1897) but were continually disappointed.The party did not prioritise the question and it was put on hold with the argument that men should be granted suffrage first, and women had to wait.These women were thus systematically treated as second-class citizens; second-class on a societal scale as well as in the left-wing political subfield. 28Logically they turned elsewhere.And in our reading, the social group made its way to the feminist liberal subfield to accumulate their political resources in order to advance in the political world.

Accumulating Cultural and Feminist Assets
In the following analysis, we suggest that the social democratic women's engagement in Tolfterna can be understood as a strategy to expand their already assembled political resources.Through collaboration and education, they attained what is explored as liberal feminist political capital, knowledge and behaviours that made them more influential in the political feminist sphere (and hypothetically made them seem worthier and respectable in the male-dominated left-wing subfield). 29The methodological approach is, as previously stated, micro-historical and focuses on a combination of information stemming from the handwritten minutes of Tolfterna and quotations from the women in the press and in memoirs.
As mentioned, Tolfterna was an association that held discussion meetings between women of different social classes in Stockholm starting in 1892 and continuing for the next four decades.The goal of the association, in the minds of the middle-class leaders Amalia Fahlstedt, Elna Trenow and Ellen Key, was that professional and established women and labouring women should form closer bonds. 30Previous research has argued that Ellen Key had been inspired by articles from English cultural magazines describing similar encounters between the working class and the bourgeois women's movement. 31ccording to Ronny Ambjörnsson, women's right to education and the opportunity to earn their own living were two important driving forces in Ellen Key's work.Ambjörnsson further suggests that her intellectual commitment sprang from the bourgeois environment in which she lived and worked.Her commitment to the family, the home and women's issues was linked to the issue of education, especially Swedish reform pedagogy.Through education, women were to be made part of the future society.For liberal women, philanthropic and educational activities were a way to help their less fortunate sisters as much as forming a female community.The formation of Tolfterna as well as their agenda should be seen from this perspective. 32f course, their goals and intentions with cross-class collaboration were not the same as the proletarians who entered, and the relations of power painted a picture of a hierarchical sisterhood. 33One demonstration that the liberal women tried to make the power relations between groups and individuals less visible and more informal was the rule stating that titles should not be used and that the bourgeois women should not wear formal clothes. 34From the leaders' side, this was a way to make the working women feel more comfortable by levelling the playing field.
Meetings were held one evening each week and the meetings could, for example, be based on a lecture or readings of poems or short stories that were then discussed.The lecture could be about anything, from esteemed pieces of literature to women's position in society.Here the goal was to accomplish an educated conversation between women from different classes.The leaders (they called themselves "the inviters" and the working women "the invited") decided the curricula and the format of the meetings.The inviters were divided into 12 groups (hence the name Tolfterna, which translates as "the dozen").Each of these groups invited working-class women from the city of Stockholm.Some were politically active in the Social Democratic Party, some were unionised factory workers, many of whom worked in the tobacco or textile industries. 35hat political knowledge and skills could the social democratic women attain in Tolfterna?The association offered workers education in the forms of lectures, discussions, and socialising events.An analysis of the content suggests that the women could acquire liberal feminist knowledge, political practical skills and "bourgeois" culture.The women could attain the values and knowledge associated with the idea of Bildungelements of the contemporary cultural capital the bourgeoisie needed in order to appear respectable in the political field.
The educational content of the lectures, spanning subjects such as the culture and architecture of Europe to the Nordic literary canon, speaks to this conclusion. 36The women read poems and texts by, among others, Henrik Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen and Björnstjerne Björnson.Andersen's stories, as Lisbeth Stenberg has pointed out, were thought to function as "an education of a very specific nature that encouraged social and socialist involvement." 37n occasion, the working-class women did not think the evening's programme was sufficiently entertaining. 38The middle-class leaders were in theory the administrators of the educational content, but in practice the workers negotiated and took the initiative.In time, the invited workers began to participate in setting the programme for the meetings.Female workers read poems, played music or sang songs during the assemblies. 39 starting point for this was described at a meeting in 1893, the idea that "every man is tired of being amused by others." 40The statement was made by one of the inviters, Natalia Frölander, who was also involved in establishing reading corners in Stockholm workers' neighbourhoods, after a meeting where the differences between the more intellectual working women and those who were mostly there for pleasure were demonstrated. 41It is also noteworthy in the minutes that more intellectual workers expressed their desire to expand their knowledge in basic skills.Suggestions were made that the older working-class women could hold evening writing lessons for the younger ones. 42Thus, the discrepancy between the offered Bildung and the desire for basic knowledge was at times manifest.Yet this discontent usually came from the women who were not part of the group of active politicians.
Discussions and dialogues were part of the association's curriculum.The discussions on social and political issues that directly concerned women familiarised the workers with liberal feminist ideology, and the framing of issues and solutions.For example, in December 1896, the question "what can be done to improve the status of female manual workers" was deliberated on in a meeting.The session started with a short introduction by Hanna Andersson, who was the chairperson of the liberal Women's Club in Stockholm.The Women's Club was yet another association that aimed to create solidarity amongst women of all social classes. 43Andersson talked about the views and positions of Ellen Key as she had formulated them in her book Individualism and Socialism. 44urthermore, Andersson lectured on the position of women throughout history and argued that the struggle for a livelihood had always been a part of the female experience.The discussions that followed were "lively," as the records indicate.According to the minutes, no women had proposed a revolution or great upheaval, yet all agreed that something needed to be done about the injustices that had always haunted the female sex.A few participants proposed that women should not have to work at all but stay at home and take care of the household, which required men to stop throwing away their money on hard liquor. 45The solutions to the question were not found in programmes on income equalisation or welfare politics.Instead, a society with the freedom to choose, according to predisposition and character, was the answer.
The social democrats and union members aired and discussed their experiences in relation to liberal theories on how "the woman question" should be solved.One year earlier, in a meeting in October 1895, a "Miss Hjelt" gave a lecture on the position of women in Finland. 46It was probably Vera Hjelt, an active suffragette in Finland, who was visiting Stockholm.Vera was both a teacher and a politician in Finland as well as a member of the Finnish Women's Association from the time of its establishment in 1884.During her lifetime, she also gave lectures at the International Woman Suffragette Alliance meetings.She passionately advocated for women not to be treated differently in the labour market and for women to have the right to educate and support themselves. 47owever, dismantling class differences or reforming the political economy was not part of the formulation of the problem or its solution.
Another example of Tolfterna's attempt to disseminate liberal programmes regarding women's issues took place at a meeting in November 1895. 48At that session, Gurli Lindér presented a feminist clothing line. 49Along with Ellen Key and Hanna Palme, Lindér was co-founder of the Dress Reform Society of Sweden that had started its business in the late 1880s.The association worked to make women's underwear healthier and more hygienic.Only by getting rid of tight corsets and long trains could women become independent individuals and be part of public life. 50The Swedish Dress Reform Society was part of the wider Victorian Dress Reform Movement and originated in liberal and middle-class milieux in England and the United States.
Not every discussion or event was enmeshed in liberal interpretations of the issues and solutions.Anna Lindhagen was one of the middle-class women who acted as a leader (inviter).Lindhagen was a known agitator for universal suffrage, and after the turn of the century she joined the Social Democratic Party.She was also one of the initiators behind the Swedish suffrage movement, Landsföreningen för kvinnans politiska rösträtt (LKPR).In 1903, she started an experiment within Tolfterna.She gathered all socialist-inclined participants into a special group. 51The question of women's rights was discussed here from a radical left-wing perspective, and it became clear that the women, both the middle-class and the working-class women at her sessions, agreed that all women should have the right to vote, regardless of civil or social status. 52At another meeting held by Lindhagen in 1905, the question of why so few workers had joined the feminist suffrage movement in Sweden was discussed.It turned out that the workers could make important contributions and straighten out certain misunderstandings about the labour movement that were important for the movement's continued work and to improve understanding between the middle-class women and female workers. 53

Gaining Political Knowledge
Although ideological exchange did take place in the association, the general outlook of the political education was in accordance with liberal feminist universalism and bourgeois culture.Tolfterna offered a space for debating and learning the philosophical and ideological backgrounds as well as the realpolitik concerning the female vote or the housing situations for working-class women. 54The women acquired certain knowledge of these issues, knowledge that one would have to have in order to seem capable of entering the field of politics.They had the opportunity to hear discussions and to practise how to reason according to a schema of cause and effect (such as the importance of history) when it came to the status of women.This was the kind of learning that basic primary education (the Folk school) had not offered them.The political field as such was a space that demanded a certain way of acting and reasoning, advocated by the ruling classes, and the women could learn those traits at the Tolfterna meetings and use them for their own political benefit.In sum, they learned a certain form of rational reasoning, although with a liberal feminist signature, which was needed in order to enter and have success in the political field as well as the subfield of the organised workers' movement.Thus, the possibility to learn the decorum, language and manners of the middle-class women of Tolfterna could be regarded as a reason, and a strategy, for the social democratic women to attend their meetings.
What kinds of practical skills did the social democratic women learn in Tolfterna?Usually, workers' associations and unions were ruled according to a proto-democratic representative system of governance. 55Tolfterna was not.No representatives were elected to lead the meetings or the association.The board and the chairwoman Ellen Key had been self-appointed by the middle-class leaders and this system was in play during the association's lifespan.Due to this governmental structure, it is impossible to deduce whether the workers engaged in the association to learn the practical skills of voting or being elected.They did, however, learn the skills of talking, debating and deliberating with people of other social standing and status."Discussion training" was, as mentioned, one of the continual practical exercises in Tolfterna. 56manda Horney, a social democratic politician, once stated that they created the Social Democratic Women's club in order to learn how to talk, debate and prepare for taking up the fight with the social democratic men. 57And, as Horney later described it, "[w]ithout this, I would have been an ordinary slave, a polishing machine, now I also got to be a human being for a few moments a week.Yes, I have political work to thank for a lot." 58 Tolfterna was, in her words, "a training school" for such skills. 59t is reasonable to imagine that going to the meetings at Tolfterna, which arranged "conversations" between workers and the middle class, can be regarded as a training camp for such skills.Being able to converse on cultural as well as political or scientific issues can be regarded as a cultural resource that working women could acquire.Having conversations and debating political questions between members of different classes was also one of the goals of the Tolfterna meetings. 60Thus, by "conversing" and listening to lectures on art or music, it is likely that the working women achieved the same skills and respectability that men did who entered liberal associations at the same time.Being able to talk and discuss was no doubt an important skill to master to have a voice in politics. 61 collective political identity based on the subjectivity of women, as an unfairly and unjustly treated group, is the short answer to the question of which political interests Tolfterna fostered.As mentioned previously, the social democratic women were already politically invested feminists when they chose to enter Tolfterna, and it is reasonable to imagine that such interests were already present amongst them.The motivation of collaborating over class boundaries can, however, be understood as a kind of attitude and skill that was trained in the Tolfterna setting.That does not mean the social democratic pioneers learned how to comply with middle-class politics, to choose "bourgeois feminism" over class struggle.Instead, they practised collaboration in the sense that they learned how to fight for women's rights with women of other social backgrounds, and at the same time to fight for working-class women in the Social Democratic Party.They hypothetically learned an important balancing act that the political field demanded they master to have political influence.

A Functional Network
Closeness to power -in this case closeness to prestigious feminist intellectuals -was probably the most important resource that was attained.The Tolfterna association was an opportunity for social democratic female politicians to gain useful relations by nurturing a social network of prestigious feminists.These social connections would prove to have important functions, private as well as political, in the future.For example, Agda Östlund and Gertrud Månsson were later elected as representatives for the Social Democrats in the Swedish Parliament and Stockholm City Hall respectively.Why these two became political pioneers it is hard to say, but organisational experience in both the social democratic and liberal associations cannot be excluded as explanatory factors.To this we can add the fact that they could use both of their social networks for their political work.Gertrud Månsson and Kata Dalström (one of the middle-class inviters in Tolfterna) were both involved in the Committee on Female Agitation, a subdivision of the Common Women's Club of Stockholm. 62And Agda Östlund, together with another of the middle-class leaders, Anna Sterky, was involved in the working committees on organising the formation of the Swedish Social Democratic Women's Association. 63olfterna offered the proletarian women an opportunity to be in the circle of female liberal feminists and politicians such as Ellen Key, Signe Berman (later an intellectual in the liberal Swedish suffrage movement LKPR), Anna Lindhagen (elected as a representative of the Social Democratic Party on the Stockholm City Council in 1911), Emilia Broomé (a liberal politician who was a driving force in the campaign for women's suffrage), Anna Whitlock (a Swedish reform pedagogue and co-founder of LKPR), Kerstin Hesselgren (the first female member of the Swedish parliament in 1921), and feminist authors such as Amalia Fahlstedt and Elna Tenow. 64e mentioned earlier that Anna Lindhagen created a discussion group of her own, in which socialist-minded members were gathered.In this setting, Amanda Horney was particularly active and at one time held an address regarding women's right to vote. 65manda Horney would later actively engage in the large national Swedish suffrage movement alongside the liberal feminist intelligentsia. 66As a side note, Amanda Horney also received financial assistance from one of the middle-class leaders so that her son could go to school. 67In this case, through closeness to prestigious middle-class feminists, political and social capital could also be converted into economic resources.
Another example that illustrates the importance of accumulating political capital in the form of social networks is Elin Engström.As described in the introduction, Engström was highly engaged in the Social Democratic Party and was one of the initiators of the women's club.She eventually held a secretarial position at the Social Democratic Party offices, and she was a member of special agitation groups for women's rights as well as congresses.Furthermore, Engström was engaged in trade union politics as well as official politics at the municipal level.In 1902, she joined the ranks of liberal feminists and created the first national feminist suffrage movement in Sweden, which would later align itself with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.Even though Engström was engaged at the highest levels in the Social Democratic Party during her whole life, she still nurtured the networks she had cultivated in Tolfterna.For example, after Ellen Key's death, she became a member of the board that operated Key's house, Strand.Ellen Key had bequeathed the house as a retreat and sanatorium where the female workers in Tolfterna could spend time during the summer. 68From a cultural sociological perspective this can be understood as Engström (consciously or unconsciously) utilising Tolfterna to come close to the feminist holders of power in late nineteenth-century politics.She, and her co-pioneers in Tolfterna, expanded their already gathered political capital.By nurturing this social network, she could later go on to become an important figure in both the Social Democratic Party and the liberal suffrage movement, obviously making her relationships work for her.

Conclusion
The literature on first-wave feminism and social class shows that there is no single story of the international social revolution that ended in female political emancipation.Sometimes, as in Germany, class divisions were prominent, yet frequently, as seen in the Nordic countries, bridges were built between women in organised labour and liberal middle-class associations. 69The Swedish women's movement of the 1880s had a liberal bent and worked actively to include proletarian women.Feminist liberal associations often had educational as well as political goals.The nineteenth-century women's movement established a series of clubs and societies that organised education.They offered training in feminist awareness, knowledge of art, literature and social issues, critical argumentation or discussion techniques.The middling sort wanted to foster and refine the working classes, spread their feminism and their culture, and teach the art of debating and socialising.Why did proletarian women engage in middle-class educational associations?In this article we have brought forth a new explanation as to why active left-wing politicians collaborated across class boundaries, joined middle-class-led movements and let themselves be educated.Our goal was to seek an explanation that considered women's agency as strategic and interest-based within the framework of certain determining power structures.We therefore started from Pierre Bourdieu's theory on how social groups tend to develop strategies to accumulate resources in political fields.We have argued that the actions of working-class women during this period could be analysed according to this logic.
Empirically this article has focused on why politically active social democratic women in Sweden -the so-called female pioneers of the labour party -choose to become members of a liberal middle-class feminist association in Stockholm from the 1890s to the late 1910s.The organisation, called Tolfterna, had educational goals and the work plan was to transfer certain political and cultural knowledge, and to create consensus and consent between the proletariat and middle-class women.Our analysis suggests that the proletarian women's choices and actions to enter and invest their time in Tolfterna can be understood as a certain kind of political strategy.On a group level their movement from the left-wing political subfield to the liberal feminist subfield was guided by a strategy to advance their position in the political field, by accumulating and expanding what has been discussed as political capital, and especially attaining a certain kind of liberal feminist political capital.The accumulation of feminist liberal political capital made the working women more secure in taking and attaining political positions.For the active social democratic women, the contacts with the leaders meant that they had the opportunity to gain a closeness to prestigious agents in the liberal political subfield.In short, the social democratic women expanded their political capital.Still, our analysis is not naive to the powers at play here; the power relationship between dominating and dominated classes was very noticeable but operated on another level.The pioneers, despite playing the game well, were captives of the political, cultural and economic structures of power.To gain positions in the political arena, they needed to accumulate a range of resources and knowledge whose values, in the end, were determined by the ruling classes in society.
First-wave feminism was a social movement that consisted of a variety of political interests and groups.What this microstudy on the case of Sweden adds to the state of the art is that some working-class women collaborated with middle-class feminists and participated in their educational programmes for strategic reasons.Thus, the reason some working-class women chose to join cannot solely be explained by theories of cultural hegemony or that they were somehow tricked into a liberal middle-class movement.The fact is that it is not possible to comment on the actions of working-class women as a homogeneous group.Politically active women -women with experience working on the political left -obviously had their own strategy in which collaboration was functional to acquire the political resources and knowledge they needed to advance in the political organisations on the left as well as on a national scale.We therefore suggest that one driving force of the first wave was this multitude of different political and class-based strategies.The acquisition of knowledge was deeply embedded in these political strategies.This article has dealt with an educational historical phenomenon that, strangely enough, has not received much attention in the field of the history of education.In a broader perspective, it concerns informal education in social movements and its political and social functions.Social movement education did not lead to degrees, diplomas or educational advancement; it was education in service to political reform, for empowering disenfranchised classes, and for shaping the identity and conduct of participants.Yet in certain contexts social movements have had consequences for members' future work, be it as professional politicians or employees in political administration.With this contribution, we hope that we have shown the interesting and important stories that such a social history of education can offer the field.