Fantastiska fröknar. Studier av lärarinnegestalter i svensk skönlitteratur

This dissertation deals with women teachers in Swedish fiction by both male and female authors in the period from 1830 to 2003. It presents and discusses life narratives of individual fictional teachers in 127 texts. The study is organised chronologically and thematically and includes the historical and cultural framework. It should be seen as a contribution to the debate about the value of using ficiton as a historical and sociological source. The chapters are:

"Educating girls in the home" is about governesses, often fatherless and unmarried daughters of the middle class. Socially precariously balanced between the master family upstairs and the servant downstairs, a stranger who lives with the family and observes its doings, the governess is well suited to be the narrator of a literary text.

"Educating girls for their husbands’ needs" deals with headmistresses of 19th century girls’ boarding schools. These women were often presented negatively in fiction – for disparate reasons, as the study finds. On the one hand they offered a superficial and fragmentary education; on the other they were targets of polemics against a class of women who were economically independent of men and had considerable influence in shaping the views of their pupils.

"Educating girls for their own needs" studies education aimed at liberating young women, especially through natural sciences and through reading and discussing literature.

"Educating girls for the home and the profession" looks at teachers in girls’ schools. Some of these fight for female suffrage; others are confronted with social isolation or financial and romantic plights.

"Educating the children of the people" deals with teachers in the ”paupers’ schools” and the public schools after 1842. They are often portrayed as dutiful, self-sacrificing and terrifyingly exposed. Many of them live under miserable conditions in remote, isolated schoolhouses, often with low pay under the jurisdiction of the local pastor. Those who are not attacked and raped still live in constant fear of what might happen.

"The woman teacher as lover, mother and wife" focuses on the emotional life of women teachers. Male authors tend to present them with a strong unsatisfied sexuality, while female authors talk about them as longing for close relationships and a family of their own.

"Women teachers and their pupils" deals with attraction and aggression between teacher and pupiland talks about pedagogic ideas and teaching methods including corporal punishment. In fiction women teachers and pupils who are sexually attracted to one another is a subject at the turn of the century 2000.