Selma Lagerlöf, Fredrika Bremer and Women as Nation Builders
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Departing from Selma Lagerlöf’s short story “Mamsell Fredrika”, this chapter presents Lagerlöf’s discussion of women’s tasks in the building of an equal and sustainable nation. She compares men’s creation of the State with women’s creation of the home, and makes this an absolute prerequisite for the good home in a societal and political sense. This discourse has often been compared to Ellen Key’s thoughts on motherhood as a vocation, but closer examination points to a different evaluation of women’s work, which is not, in Selma Lagerlöf’s view, strictly connected to motherhood in its biological sense, but rather detached from the conventional and instead closely related to writing as another kind of women’s work.