Preliminary Programme

My talk will focus on the told and untold, when writing university jubilee histories. It will show how the everyday and the doing of university was left out when the history of Aarhus University was established through a mix of private storytelling and commissioned jubilee histories and it demonstrates how institutional as well as personal ambitions were of importance to the staging of the past. The chapter takes it inspiration from feminist thinker Maria Tamboukou’s neo-materialist readings of the archives as laboratories, where silences and fragments engage the fantasy and imagination of the historian. The chapter turns around the concept of making in a dual and entangled sense. As a mattering, when writing jubilee histories and as a way of making the invisible visible through a micro historical approach to an academic landscape, where gender made an important difference, prestige, legacy and emotions were at stake, the expectations were high and men and women grabbled with these challenges. (Show less)

In the late 19th century began the transitional period in the Finnish higher education, and young women became a larger scale interested in university studies. From 1885 to 1900, the number of female students increased year by year, and the presence of female students at the university became quite ordinary. My starting point is that female students and female academics as a new social group need to negotiate and balance the contradictory aspects of their professional and gender identities during their studies and careers. My aim in this presentation is to analyse this changing process with the questions like: Which factors made the young women to interest in academic studies and what kind of goals they set for their occupations and careers? How they manage to solve the conflicts they encountered on professional identity perspective as newcomer in the academic field.
As research data, I utilize collective biography which contains the details of 624 female students beginning the university studies between 1889–1901. This includes information about exams, occupations and jobs. Additionally, I will use used memoirs; biographies; novels (fiction). Additionally, my paper will present a couple of cases how the female academics negotiate and solve the contradictory situations and conflicts concerning their gender and status at the academy and the working life during the early twentieth century until the 1930s and how it is possible to explains the lack of career advancement of women in male-dominated organizations like the university in this time period. (Show less)

In Europe, most countries introduced a compulsory primary schooling during the latter part of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century. A common challenge in this process was to recruit suitable and educated teachers. This study will contribute an increased understanding of how teacher recruitment (social background) and teacher life tracks developed in two peripherical parts of the northern countries – Iceland and northern Sweden. Compulsory schooling was introduced earlier in Sweden than in Iceland. In both countries however, the proportion of children who attended school on a regular basis school increased significantly from the 1880’s and onwards and to a large extent replaced the traditional home education in rural areas.

The teacher occupation became accessible for women during the latter part of 19th century in both countries, much earlier than was the case for most other (qualified) female occupations. This had an important bearing on professional careers of a large number young women and created new possibilities for them to lead an independent existence. Through a collective biography approach, we will follow different cohorts of women teachers focusing on how socio-economic background and possibly economic support affected the decision to migrate and enter teacher training. Furthermore, we will pay a special attention to spatial issues for example, how the location of teacher training impacted recruitment and where the teachers moved after graduation.

Both areas under study remained predominantly rural during the study period, during the beginning of the 20th century less than 10% of the population lived in towns. Still, both in Iceland and northern Sweden, the teacher education was placed in these small urban settings while a majority of the teacher students were recruited from rural areas. Which impact concerning mobility had this situation for young women who entered teacher training? What differences and similarities can be discerned when comparing Iceland and Sweden? (Show less)