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Enthusiastic Proselytisers: Translating the Swedish Gender Policy Model in Cold War United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2022

Byron Z. Rom-JensenOpen the ORCID record for Byron Z. Rom-Jensen[Opens in a new window]
Byron Z. Rom-Jensen*
Affiliation:
Centre for Nordic Studies, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 38, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
*
bzrj@cas.au.dk
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Abstract

In the early 1960s, the US President's Commission on the Status of Women analysed Swedish gender policies with an interest in securing social and economic justice for American women. This largely overlooked investigation ultimately led to the integration of Swedish policy goals and strategies into the commission's recommendations, extending the impact of a Swedish model beyond mere rhetorical functions. This case indicates how, in the context of Cold War bipolarisation, transnational labour networks facilitated ‘modellisation’ by bolstering the trendiness of Swedish examples and the receptivity of American actors. Crucial was Esther Peterson of the US Women's Bureau, who served as a proselytiser of Swedish ideas, thereby driving a spontaneous and highly contingent translation of these policies into US-compatible proposals. The role of Peterson suggests a need for a greater recognition of the agendas of specific interest groups when historicising the creation and international circulation of a Swedish model.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , August 2022, pp. 401 - 419
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

On 1 October 1962, a delegation of Swedish dignitaries arrived in the main assembly room of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building in Washington, DC to present information on Swedish wage policy before the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). It was the only foreign delegation to receive such an invitation, and it came at a time when the PCSW was finalising its recommendations to President John Kennedy. The meeting seemed to be fulfilling mid-century prophecies of an international structural convergence, which included American industrial systems overcoming their Darwinian tendencies and embracing a more mature, humanitarian capitalism.Footnote 1

The ultimate failure of this proposed convergence, as evidenced by the maintenance of distinct and occasionally antagonistic social systems in the United States and Sweden, seems to place the PCSW's investigations into a familiar pattern associated with the Swedish model: sustained international appeal and outsized reputation amongst foreign publics without lasting or meaningful impact abroad. It is notable that identifying cases of successful export of a Swedish model is made more difficult by the expansiveness of the term, which often denotes a broad typology of socio-economic organisation ultimately defying a ‘standard definition’. Generally, the model entails ‘progressive social-liberal’ values and nebulous, interlocking structures – an extensive welfare state, corporatist macroeconomic control and political customs of compromise and cooperation – that distinguishes Swedish society from other systems.Footnote 2 This elusiveness has lent the Swedish model a certain immutability, enshrining its political culture as a national Sonderweg with roots stretching back into the early modern era, or even beyond.Footnote 3 The timelessness exists in depictions of a ‘Nordic Nirvana’ that serves as an enduring, but largely unobtainable ‘reference point’, which includes matters of gender equality.Footnote 4

Partially in response to teleological applications of the concept, researchers over the last two decades have attempted to historicise the creation and dissemination of a Swedish or Nordic model by tracing how notions of progressivism and exceptionalism were constructed and evolved since the interwar years.Footnote 5 These historians demonstrate how Sweden gained status as a model nation through the interplay of domestic and foreign images, becoming a potential utopia (or dystopia) within the ‘self-affirming narratives’ of observers.Footnote 6 While such studies acknowledge the malleability of the underlying meanings of the model and its constituent concepts – including equality, democracy and progressiveness – the essential patterns of its role as a rhetorical device appear somewhat more static. Research into public diplomacy has convincingly demonstrated the agency of various Swedish actors in corralling the gravitational force of Sweden's international image, in the process shaping national and global perceptions of Sweden as a model.Footnote 7 Foreign actors, particularly those on the left, on the other hand have frequently played a more reactive role in histories of Swedish images abroad, drawing upon the attention ‘generated’ by Sweden to galvanise domestic audiences.Footnote 8 This dynamic can carry a sense of inevitability and futility. While the Swedish model is recognised as rhetorically charged and contested, there is an underlying sense that the model is politically impotent at generating social change outside of Scandinavia.Footnote 9 Indeed, according to historians Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius, there is a tension between rhetorical usage and meaningful policy transfer, since ‘informed observations about the traits peculiar to a region can be swamped by a flood of rhetoric that uses it as a model to inspire admiration on the left or incite alarm on the right’.Footnote 10

In linking past and present, such a paradigm has the potential to ascribe a certain predictability to the international fascination with Sweden, with the significance of a Swedish model confined to political debates and rhetorical exchanges between media figures and politicians. While histories of Swedish image construction and public diplomacy have been attentive to changing internal and international political contexts, a starting point in the rhetorical application of Sweden may risk potential disconnect from historical contexts, resulting in a ‘fetishisation’ of images as social constructs with trajectories and meanings wholly independent from other developments within and between nation-states.Footnote 11 This article moves beyond a simplified diametric pattern adjudicating responses to Swedish policy along a left-right political split, and in the process works to strip away any remaining sense of the inevitability of the Swedish model's rhetorical function by examining processes of ‘modellisation’.Footnote 12 Treating a case study of the PCSW's interest as a historical biopsy of the translation and transfer of the Swedish model at a specific moment encourages the introduction of new nuances into the study of Sweden's international reputation, including a focus on the mechanisms by which Swedish policy disseminated abroad.Footnote 13 Through closer attention to the periods, sites and methods by which Swedish ideas were constructed as a model, this article aims to critically examine the outcomes of the transfer of a Swedish model, placing it within the interplay of international and transnational influences.

The case of the PCSW's interest in Sweden highlights two important axes of the Swedish model, labour movements and gender issues, both of which are frequently placed as central to Sweden's ‘relatively egalitarian and democratic culture’,Footnote 14 but are rarely examined in the context of policy exchange from Sweden.Footnote 15 Rather than an unavoidable foreign fascination with a Nordic ‘passion for equality’,Footnote 16 there appears a spontaneous and contingent nature to transfer, which is as much shaped by larger structuring events – the weaponisation of women's rights during the Cold War, mid-century economic centralisation and the particularities of the nascent women's movement in the United States – and personal connections as by the centrifugal forces of a Swedish model. The latter condition, personal connections, has particularly been absent from much scholarship on images of the Nordic countries,Footnote 17 an important lacuna that helps explain not only why but when and how discussions of Nordic policy appear outside the region. The central role of Esther Peterson, the vice-chairman of the PCSW, in driving adaption from Sweden and determining its parameters reveals how transnational affiliations conditioned the form that dissemination took, inspiring the categorisation of actors beyond their nationality or political allegiance. For Peterson, Swedish policy was not simply important for defining what was and was not American,Footnote 18 it gave credence to a vision of how the state and labour movement could best support American women and their responsibilities in employment and caregiving. The Swedish model therefore appeared not as a stock character unencumbered by simultaneous developments, but as a construct formulated in conjunction with other geopolitical and national constructs.

In addition, to underscore how moments of modellisation could govern policy-making outcomes, this article focuses on a particular Swedish policy model rather than a vague social model. While social models focus on the relationship of a ‘constellation of institutions’ to broadly explain the status of various social conditions in a society and make normative arguments for prioritising specific political factors,Footnote 19 policy models are more limited cause-and-effect mappings aimed at achieving a distinct outcome through the implementation of a specific policy.Footnote 20 In distinguishing between the two, this paper applies social models when referring to the wider pillars upon which Swedish society has been organised since the 1930s, such as relatively equitable neo-corporatism, a capacity for coordinated policy adjustment and a universal welfare state.Footnote 21 Policy models, on the other hand, are taken to mean specific programmes, including income equalisation, as well as the ‘integrated whole’ of Swedish policies related to a specific policy-making issue, in this case concerning women's rights and women's labour.Footnote 22 An examination of policy models requires different tools to explain its transfer, such as the knowledge translation framework used herein, but also presents the opportunity to locate situations where a Swedish model went beyond rhetorical application to influence policy outcomes. While acknowledging political scientist John Logue's reminder that Swedish policies and social structures were intertwined within the same Swedish model,Footnote 23 this article will also show how actors were capable of separating or conjoining them as the situation demanded.

An initial exploration of the theories of knowledge translation – their premises, areas of focus and benefits for historical research – will provide the conceptual tools for analysing the PCSW's interest in Sweden as an act of translation. Thereafter, the article takes a closer look at the context for the PCSW's interest in Sweden, noting in particular the Cold War environment, the differences in mid-century Swedish and American labour policy, and the motivations of the commission's leadership. An exploration of the PCSW's connections to Sweden and their efforts at adapting Swedish ideas lends perspective to the subsequent results. Placing these actions within a knowledge translation framework leads to conclusions and reflections on studying a Swedish policy model.

A Knowledge Translation Framework

As discussed above, previous literature has tended to focus on the rhetorical application of a Swedish social model, while overlooking how policies were transferred and transformed transnationally. What is missing is a means of engaging with the dynamic networks and policy-making environments relevant to spreading Swedish policy models, thereby connecting foreign attention to Sweden with policy-making developments.

The concept of organisational learning through knowledge translation offers a promising tool for understanding how ideas move across political settings and influence decision making. In particular, organisational studies have successfully applied the concept to explain how and why organisations select and adopt certain ideas, and not others, to solve perceived problems.Footnote 24 Translation in such cases includes processes of learning and appropriation in which organisations resituate fashionable or trendy management techniques and models to fit with current institutional identities and corporate frameworks. External circumstances and institutions further encourage the voluntaryFootnote 25 or coerciveFootnote 26 movement of ideas in space, as well as those potential obstacles that inhibit its spread and implementation.

Organisational actors play a vital role for adapting external concepts to localised goals and identities. In this regard, political scientist Kjell Arne Røvik expands upon Bruno Latour's ‘model of translation’, in which artefacts, including ideas, are spread by the energy of the actors who carry and translate the ideas, rather than a central force.Footnote 27 Consequently, fully formed ideas are not simply implanted into an organisation but instead are ‘transferred and translated in a context of other ideas, actors, traditions and institutions’. Thus, ideas are subject to processes of alteration, mediation and innovation to fit with the existing societal institutions, such as the legal system, professional norms, technological capacities and societal theories of coordination and control.Footnote 28

Significantly, a key aspect of Røvik's theory is the way ‘authoritative’ actors, whether prolific organisations or individual actors such as leaders and external consultants, spearhead this transformation. These authoritative actors serve as carriers and translators of knowledge, allowing them to amplify certain features of an idea or concept while quietly filtering out others.Footnote 29 In turn, these decisions move along hierarchical, ‘multilevel translation chains’, where the ideas are further adapted and localised in accordance with institutional circumstances and translator agency.Footnote 30 Consequently, as ideas move further away from the original source of inspiration, adaptions lose resemblance to the norms and methods of the original, with memory of its influence likewise diminishing.

For the historian studying the transnational diffusion of the Swedish model, the focus on translation adds an additional emphasis on the individual and group relationships responsible for orienting external ideas to domestic situations, including understanding the networks through which ideas travel. At the same time, an institutionalist perspective emphasises the importance of organisational apparatuses and larger structuring systems that translators function within and their importance for policy outcomes. Knowledge translation thereby brings together the model's place of origin with its place of implementation into a transnational, circulatory chain, where foreign acts of translation influence the idea as much as the act of production. Moreover, a focus on translation opens up new spaces of active translation for investigating modellisation and encourages scrutiny of the final content of foreign policies adapted from a Swedish model, while also considering those elements that decision makers altered or excluded in order to fit the solution to the perceived problem. Finally, the translation perspective embeds a constructionist basis for studying policy transfer that supports examinations of the identities, interests, attitudes, skills, strategies and resources of translators, thereby challenging studies emphasising the isomorphism of the Swedish model idea and the passivity of foreign recipients.Footnote 31

Mid-Century Contexts and Connections

Employing a knowledge translation framework encourages more than establishing an awareness of a Swedish model to explain policy transfer; it also mandates a closer identification of the particularities of global context, institutional forms and constraints and the actors and organisations influential in translating policy. Hence, it is essential in moving forward to understand the background upon which Sweden came to the attention of the President's Commission on the Status of Women. This includes how the popularity of a Swedish model derived in part from a Cold War environment that supercharged the policy debate around women's rights, the similarities and difference in mid-century labour market structures and goals between the two countries, and the placement of Esther Peterson in transnational networks and her effect on the PCSW's composition and agenda.

Women's Rights in a Cold War Context

In their study of images of the Swedish model, Jenny Andersson and Mary Hilson argue that images of Sweden were ‘dependent on particular historical contexts’ for their meaning, leading to variable definitions attached to Sweden by foreign observers.Footnote 32 At the beginning of the 1960s, policy models disseminated within a Cold War ‘geopolitical imaginary’ that defined the relative alignment and connotations of nation-states.Footnote 33 Previous investigations of the Swedish image in the United States have been sensitive to the bipolarity of the Cold War and Sweden's neutrality, which made the country ‘difficult to pin down in the geopolitical contests of the Cold War years’,Footnote 34 in the process demonstrating how this unique placement could inspire admiration (or rejection) of a Swedish social model.Footnote 35 However, the Cold War context could also lead to the translation of policy models occurring in unexpected and complex ways. In a geopolitical paradigm wherein ‘virtually everything . . . assumed political significance’, the Cold War did not play out uniformly over its many cultural battlefields;Footnote 36 rather, a multitude of conflicts outside of traditional statecraft took on the character of cold wars within the Cold War.Footnote 37 Consequently, it is not enough to acknowledge the larger geopolitical divides during the 1960s; we must also identify the specific effects these divides had on the political environment in which the PCSW operated.

Part of the appeal of a Swedish social model came from its non-alignment with the ideological blocs that had been overlaid on the map of Europe. Given its explicit neutrality and ‘tacit’ alignment with NATO, Sweden could leverage its position of being simultaneously inside and outside of a Western European security arrangement.Footnote 38 However, the Cold War's ideological tensions also generated a great deal of scepticism in the United States amongst redbaiting Cold Warriors towards foreign social models, including those within a Western political bloc.Footnote 39 In this vein, H. Arnold Barton describes how ‘Sweden and America went separate ways in social and economic policy’ during the Cold War. As ‘America emerged as the bastion of free-market enterprise, Sweden moved increasingly toward comprehensive social welfare with high taxation and extensive economic controls’. As a result, the two states ‘came to represent two opposed concepts of democracy’, leading to ‘Sweden-bashing’ targeted at the country's supposed deviations from US market-based approaches.Footnote 40 According to Helen Laville, the binary rhetoric over opposing ways of life likewise influenced the acceptance of non-American alternatives amongst US women's organisations, who ‘quickly concluded that, in the face of encroaching communism, their way was the only way’.Footnote 41

Nonetheless, with the dispersed nature of the Cold War transforming the status of individuals and groups in comparative societies into ideological battlegrounds, foreign policy developments were monitored closely in the United States. In this context, communist depictions of ‘a veritable paradise for women’ provided a problematic counter-vision to the image the United States as a paragon of a democratic, capitalist world,Footnote 42 leading the Kennedy administration to worry about the lack of progress in ensuring women's productivity and rights in the United States compared to the Soviet Union. As Kristen Ghodsee explains, fear of falling behind ‘some other countries’, interpreted as Soviet Russia, in the opportunities for and utilisation of women in part motivated Kennedy's support for the PCSW.Footnote 43 In a similar vein, Secretary of State Dean Rusk contacted US embassies in Stockholm and elsewhere for information on women's activities, including in the labour market, as a counter for when ‘Soviet publications and Soviet visiting teams of women play up the prominent role of women in the USSR’.Footnote 44 Kennedy and Rusk's concern for the standing of the United States relative to the Soviet Union paved the way for the introduction of ‘models of social democracy’ from abroad.Footnote 45

However, the Cold War context also legitimised certain policy models by ingraining them within international networks entrenched in the dynamics of a bipolar system. This proved to be the case amongst networks of organised labour, in which bipolar dynamics strengthened Western consensus around gender-differential labour laws. As noted by labour historian Dorothy Sue Cobble, the intersections of gender and transnational labour movements are often underrepresented in global labour histories, including those between the United States and Sweden.Footnote 46 Recent research by Cobble and others on the ILO demonstrates the prominence of gender issues within international labour organisations during the Cold War, in particular regarding whether global norms should promote unique protection for women or more broad policies that would create equality between the sexes. The debate's ideological dimension pitted the US-led West, which favoured the former, against the Soviet-led East and its Third World allies, who argued the latter. US women within the labour movement, aligned with Western market economies and dominant in the ILO, fought to preserve and extend protective civil and political legislation while rejecting demands for more blanket reforms of legal equality that would expose women to discriminatory hardships.Footnote 47 They instead argued for a development of equality within the workplace, demanding women's labour be recognised as comparable to men's work and thus compensated with ‘equal remuneration . . . for work of equal value’.Footnote 48 This policy model, fashionable amongst Western labour feminists, aligned with Sweden's protective, gender-deferential goals (examined below). The active engagement of Swedish trade union officials within the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, an association intended to counter communist influence by promoting ‘free trade unionism’, further exposed internationally-oriented US labour officials to Swedish policy models.Footnote 49 In this regard, it was not as important whether Sweden originated unique approaches to women's rights, but that international observers viewed Sweden as a forerunner in this field.

The Cold War context thus helped motivate the American government's interest in women's rights while facilitating the international dissemination of Swedish solutions amongst Western labour activists. This set the foundation for transfer from Sweden, but it does not explain the reasons why the PCSW looked to Sweden at this particular moment. To understand this context, we need to compare American and Swedish labour markets and goals in 1960.

Comparing Labour Market Structures and Strategies

Parallel economic and social structural changes underway in mid-century Sweden and the United States fuelled the interest in Swedish policies to promote the entrance and advancement of women in the labour market. In both countries, rising prosperity and active international trade led to largely stable labour markets, reflected in mostly peaceable ‘accords’ between management and labour unions.Footnote 50 This process encouraged and was encouraged by the formation of union oligarchies within the labour movement, where power was centralised at the top and demands pursued through bureaucratic measures and negotiations with employers.Footnote 51 The institutional resemblance to the centralised Swedish labour market helped Swedish policies appear viable for American labour officials compared to other European models, such as the UK system of decentralised shop floor activism.Footnote 52 Similarly, and in contrast to Barton's statement on diverging social and political priorities, the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and the US embrace of a corporatist ‘social Keynesian’ led to a realignment of priorities that resembled the Swedish counter-cyclical Rehn-Meidner model.Footnote 53 This included the Swedes’ emphasis on an active labour market approach that prioritised full employment.Footnote 54

Despite a general alignment in developments and visions between leaders of the American and Swedish labour movements, the incorporation of women within the goal of full employment had proved more extensive and comprehensive in Sweden. Key to this development was the ‘unique climate of cooperation’ and self-discipline in the labour market, known as the ‘spirit of Saltsjöbaden’ (Saltsjöbadsandan), which promoted a belief in the reformative power of centralised collective bargaining to resolve labour market disputes and problems.Footnote 55 This framework and the high degree of unionisation gave the Swedish labour movement, especially the blue-collar umbrella organisation LO (Landsorganisationen i Sverige), the ability to plan and implement a programme of wage equalisation for low-paid workers, including women.Footnote 56

The agreement in principle between the LO and the Swedish employers (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen; SAF) in 1960 eliminated ‘wage tariffs’ that kept women's wages below comparable men's wages.Footnote 57 Significantly, the elimination of female wage categories followed a strategy of pursuing equal pay for comparable work, an objective that LO and SAF negotiators planned to achieve by grouping all workers into seven strata of employment to raise redundant wages.Footnote 58 Only after equality of value was established at the end of five years would protective labour legislation for women be eliminated. Although this strategy emerged from a variety of internal and external pressures,Footnote 59 its placement within a cluster of incentives intended to bring women into the marketplace – individual taxation, growing white-collar and public sector jobs, the expansion of day-cares and other social services like domestic aid and an active labour market policy that provided retraining for married women – contributed to Sweden's rise as a policy model for increasing women's rights while maintaining strong labour unions.Footnote 60

It is vital to note that, by December 1961, when Kennedy officially sanctioned the PCSW, Swedish gender equality remained largely speculative. Implementation of the 1960 wage-levelling agreement had been postponed until 1962, at which time employers agreed to the LO's concrete contractual provisions for a gradual elimination of unequal wages by 1965.Footnote 61 Similar arrangements for white-collar workers, of which women made up a higher ratio, remained under discussion into 1962. The PCSW's interest in Sweden would stem from a belief that Swedish strategies would aid the accomplishment of shared goals, rather than from an attempt to replicate the gains of a best-practice model, since these gains were not yet conclusive in such a new programme.

Transnational Translators

As Røvik makes clear, knowledge translation, while encouraged by wider catalysts and structural similarities, requires active translators who shape information based on their own experiences, beliefs and goals. Thus, while Cold War bipolarisation and mid-century labour market convergences set the foundation for what the PCSW found attractive about Sweden, they do not explain how and why the commission became active in drawing lessons about women's rights nor what they did with the information upon receipt. This necessitates a closer look at the translators involved with transfer, particularly the de facto leader of the commission, Esther Peterson. Peterson's background reveals the twin influences of a transatlantic network of female labour activists and her placement within the major contemporary feminist debates of the mid-century.

Esther Eggertsen Peterson's (1906–97) extensive ties to Scandinavia began early. The daughter of Danish immigrants in Utah, Peterson travelled the region during her honeymoon with husband Oliver Peterson, the son of Norwegian migrants.Footnote 62 After developing ties with socialist labour leaders in the garment industry, Esther accompanied Oliver to Sweden where he served as Labour Attaché from 1948 to 1952, before filling a similar post in Belgium until 1956. The position took on added importance in the context of the Cold War with the Truman administration's delineation between Western trade unions and Eastern communist unions,Footnote 63 a division which Peterson supported when she helped establish the Women's Committee of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

Peterson appears particularly inspired by her time in Stockholm. Besides learning at least some Swedish and developing lasting ties with prominent Swedish female foreign labour and political officials like Sigrid Ekendahl, who helped introduce her to the Swedish labour movement, and Kerstin Hesselgren,Footnote 64 Peterson studied in detail the arrangements that promoted and protected women in Swedish society. In particular, Peterson became fascinated with the presence of and protections for Swedish household workers known as ‘mother's substitutes’, advocating for similar standards in a pamphlet for the US Women's Bureau entitled Toward Standards for the Household Worker that valorised Sweden's ability ‘to move ahead with social welfare at a pace not possible . . . in the United States’.Footnote 65 Indeed, in her memoirs, Peterson recalled herself identifying more with the social democratic Swedes than the conservative Americans of the Foreign Service.Footnote 66

In addition to this transnational network, Peterson's labour background made her a prominent ‘labour feminist’, the ‘dominant wing of U.S. feminism’ between the 1930s and 1960s, which aimed to use the labour movement and trade unions to ‘eliminate sex-based disadvantages’ and provide social and economic justice for (primarily) working-class women.Footnote 67 Besides those defending a patriarchal status quo, the major opponents of the labour feminists were equal-rights feminists, whose conservative, upper-middle class ethos led them to stump for a separate Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would ensure gender-neutral equality.Footnote 68 Labour feminists worried that an ERA would only benefit a certain group of women while doing little to protect and improve the lives and livelihoods of others. Instead, as in the ILO, they argued for a principle of comparable work, combining state protections for workers with federal legislation on equal wages and a higher minimum wage.

As a supporter of John Kennedy, Peterson became the head of the Women's Bureau under the Department of Labor, later adding undersecretary of labor to her job description.Footnote 69 In this position, Peterson successfully lobbied to establish the President's Commission on the Status of Women as a platform to make recommendations for assisting and protecting women as a unique and vulnerable class of citizens ‘without resorting to the ERA’.Footnote 70 Peterson's efforts ensured the commission would study a range of issues pertaining to women – including labour standards, social insurance and taxes and civil and political rights – and be hospitable to the labour feminist approach, selecting members ‘who would vote along the lines that I thought the Commission should go’.Footnote 71 In addition to its composition, Peterson tailored the PCSW's structure to direct the gravitas of the Kennedy administration towards buttressing the committee's policy recommendations, placing the commission directly under the executive rather than in the Labor Department and thereby mitigating charges by pro-ERA supporters that the commission was merely a mouthpiece of labour feminist protectionist strategies.Footnote 72 Two major influences on Peterson – labour feminism and transatlantic networks – would consequently dovetail in the PCSW as Peterson created a labour feminist platform that would subsequently draw upon Swedish labour market and social policies as a model for American policy making.

The President's Commission Investigates Sweden

The transmission of policy ideas from Scandinavia to the White House began even before the official authorisation of the President's Commission. Peterson visited Sweden in July 1961 as part of a high-ranking delegation sent by Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, which toured employment and training centres through the country and set the groundwork for an extended September tour by Goldberg.Footnote 73 Prior to Goldberg's tour, Peterson solicited Dorothy Goldberg, who was accompanying her husband, to investigate Swedish rehabilitative and retraining programmes, sending her a packet of Swedish labour figures and a Stockholm embassy report on the state's ‘efficiently organized and well-equipped’ vocational guidance and employment service programmes.Footnote 74

Instead of her original schedule of visiting arts museums in Stockholm, Dorothy Goldberg spent her first two days in Sweden touring institutions specialising in reintroducing married women into the labour market, a programme particularly aligned with labour feminist goals of encouraging women's progress in the labour market without challenging traditional domesticity.Footnote 75 This came through in Dorothy Goldberg's speeches, based on notes from Peterson, wherein she described the ability of women with older children to pursue ‘gainful employment’ in Sweden as an area that the United States could emulate.Footnote 76 Peterson's influence on Goldberg caused some consternation in Norway, where Goldberg's exclusively cultural itinerary led to the sardonic observation by an official in the Norwegian Ministry of Labour that ‘in Sweden, Mrs. Goldberg sees rehabilitation and re-training programmes but in Norway she sees art’.Footnote 77 The implication appears to be that the American modellisation of Swedish labour programmes pushed by Peterson conflicted with the minister's belief that a Norwegian model of political economy was a viable path to modernity and that the country was more than just a cultural attraction.

Goldberg's assessment upon returning to the United States indicated that Peterson's enthusiasm for Swedish labour market policy was contagious. In a letter written the day after returning, Goldberg assured her correspondent that she was not a ‘militant feminist’, but ‘after the Scandinavian trip I am more aware than before how much ground still remains to be covered’.Footnote 78 Peterson received a similarly laudatory letter about the ‘rehabilitation and retraining for Mrs. Goldberg’, as well as a more personal note that, given Peterson's popularity abroad, ‘You sure could run for the Prime Ministress of Sweden’.Footnote 79 In turn, the Swedish press jubilantly printed Arthur Goldberg's declaration that Sweden could provide a ‘pattern’ for workers’ protections in the United States.Footnote 80

As an enthusiastic proselytiser of Swedish lessons, Peterson carried over to the PCSW this ability to orient interest towards Sweden. The majority of fact-finding on Sweden would take place in the commission's seven committees, designed to cover the broad range of topics within the PCSW's purview. When the Committee on Social Insurance and Taxes attempted to establish a ‘starting point’ for recommendations on maternity benefits and child-care provisions, senator and committee chairman Maurine Neuberger informed her colleagues, ‘I know our able Assistant Secretary of Labor, Mrs. Peterson, has visited in the Scandinavian countries where she has talked to me about some of their programs along that line. I think that is what we want to know, with the idea that we might model legislation upon it’.Footnote 81 Neuberger reinforced her belief that Scandinavia had been ‘successful’ in creating balance between work and family with a 1962 study tour of Sweden's ‘legislation affecting women, particularly in child care’.Footnote 82 Peterson backed Neuberger's plan, suggesting, ‘our Embassy give us a report on what the experience has been’.Footnote 83 The PCSW had already solicited one diplomatic dispatch on Sweden, a favourable survey of day-care facilities and maternity leave.Footnote 84 Neuberger likewise grouped Scandinavian healthcare legislation within her desire for ‘correlary [sic] laws’ in the US.Footnote 85

The broad range of Neuberger's interests in Sweden were indicative of the prominence of a Swedish gender policy model in the PCSW. The Committee on New and Expanded Services studied Swedish child-care legislation to aid mothers, both at home and in the workforce, including encouraging the importation of the mother's substitutes featured in Peterson's pamphlet.Footnote 86 Meanwhile, the Committee on Civil and Political Rights relied on the 1958 United Nations Report on the Legal Status of Married Women for its insights on property rights, deemed the subject ‘most worthy of concentrated consideration by the staff’.Footnote 87 The report proved especially complimentary of Sweden for having ‘attempted to remove the objectionable features of the separate property system’.Footnote 88 Whether this attention was also the repercussion of Peterson's leadership is unclear, but both instances fit with her stated eagerness for committee members to learn from Swedish precedents.

The PCSW's fascination with Swedish policy culminated on 1 October 1962 with the visit of two of Sweden's most important economic organisers. Arne Geijer, head of the LO,Footnote 89 and Bertil Kugelberg, director of the SAF,Footnote 90 were already in Washington, DC at the invitation of Arthur Goldberg to present at a different committee on labour-management policy.Footnote 91 Again demonstrating a willingness to draw upon her Swedish connections, Peterson, along with co-vice chairman and economist Richard Lester, spontaneously convinced the duo to attend the fourth general meeting of the PCSW.Footnote 92 Given the lack of preparation and the session's question and answer format, the minutes of the meeting reveal the nature of the committee's interests in and intentions for Swedish lessons.

From the beginning, the Swedes acknowledged that the principles and procedures for equalising wages was ‘the matter you [the committee] want to cover’. Regarding principles, Kugelberg framed Swedish strategy as ‘Equal remuneration for work of equivalent value’,Footnote 93 with the purpose of achieving a balance between ‘justice and production’. These affirmations vindicated labour feminist arguments for a more inclusive definition of wage policy in the United States or, as one member summarised upon hearing the Swedes’ testimony, ‘not equal pay, but pay of equal’.Footnote 94

While the Swedes’ formulation of goals overlapped with the agenda of the PCSW, the subsequent discussions addressing practical issues in instituting such reforms exposed gaps in both knowledge and institutional settings between the Swedish delegation and the American committee. On multiple occasions, both Swedes framed wage equalisation as an ongoing process, challenging the questions of PCSW members that treated Swedish policies as a fait accompli. Furthermore, nixing the idea of state involvement, the Swedes indicated that the government's role was to provide public programmes that allowed women to work while leaving regulation of wages to the employers and labour associations. This conflicted with the plans of the PCSW, which had already decided to seek a legislative approach to equalising wages.Footnote 95 Addressing the more fractured nature of unionisation that made solidarity problematic in the United States, Sam Morgenstein asked if Geijer and Kugelberg would still be in favour of keeping government out of wage equalisation if only 15–20 per cent of workers were organised.Footnote 96 The comment prompted Lester to tease, ‘He wants you to solve our problem’. In response, Kugelberg posited, ‘I think the answer to the last question is yes or no, if you are in or out of government’.Footnote 97 Perhaps unintentionally, Kugelberg's statement reflected the cleavage in social models between the two groups, as the more divisive nature of the American labour relations, the weaker position of labour unions and the position of the PCSW within the executive branch fuelled a commitment to legislative solutions. The ironic result, given Barton's statement about the United States as a ‘bastion of free-market enterprise’, was a Swedish delegation testifying before a president's commission about the need to keep government out of social and economic reform.

Yet divergent social models did not necessarily preclude the transfer of policy models, and, throughout the meeting, Peterson played an active role defending the relevance of Sweden for the commission. At one point, when the lower ratio of Swedish women in the labour force seemed to create surprise, Peterson reframed the numbers to focus on the much larger contingent of women employed in industrial areas. Likewise, recalling her and Goldberg's tours to Sweden, Peterson pressed the delegation to speak about their retraining programmes. In response to this prodding, Geijer, who, like Kugelberg, had been careful to temper expectations about Swedish programmes, gave into some atypical boasting, claiming that tripartite cooperation in retraining and mobility meant, ‘Sweden is more advanced than any other country’. On this note, Lester concluded, ‘In some respects you are making us envious’.Footnote 98

Following the conclusion of the meeting with the Swedes, Peterson quickly sought to embed Swedish policies into the PCSW's work. During an update on equal pay legislation in the Senate following Kugelberg and Geijer's departure, Peterson recommended, ‘we may take some ideas from some of the matters that they [the Swedes] brought up, and even see if some of these might be incorporated into new legislation’. Gradual wage increases specifically interested Peterson, who proposed the PCSW gather ‘the experience [sic] of other countries’.Footnote 99 Following the meeting, Peterson took these motions public during a dinner with the press, declaring her support for a ‘Five Year Plan’ modelled after the 1960 Swedish agreement. As reported by the Washington Post, Peterson predicted that a bill allowing a gradual reduction of inequality would likely pass through Congress, in effect combining the Swedish labour market focus with the labour feminists’ strategy of progressive federal legislation.Footnote 100 Peterson's knowledge of and advocacy for Swedish programmes was recognised on both sides of the Atlantic. The month after the session with the Swedish delegation, Peterson met the executive board of Sweden's white-collar workers federation, which, with its high female membership, was ‘anxious to meet’ with the head of the Women's Bureau in hopes of developing their reputation as ‘spokesman for Swedish labour abroad’.Footnote 101

In October 1963, the PCSW's report to Kennedy, subsequently published as American Women, advocated convergences with Swedish policies, albeit without mentioning the country by name: assistance in homemaking duties, including the care of children; tax deductions for child-care expenses and services on a sliding scale; subsidised educational and vocational training programmes; and protection of the right of workers, including women in low-paid jobs and in particular household workers, to unionise and bargain collectively.Footnote 102 In fighting for equal pay, the PCSW restated their desire for equal pay for work of equal value; however, departing from the strictly market-driven, corporatist arrangements of Sweden, the committee urged individual states to establish their own equal pay legislation.Footnote 103 In only one place did the PCSW explicitly draw upon Sweden to vindicate their recommendations: the report of the Civil and Political Rights committee, citing the 1958 UN report, praised Sweden's establishment of joint matrimonial property rights as justification of the need ‘for a full reappraisal of the legal framework governing matrimonial property’.Footnote 104

Events outside of the commission outpaced discussions within. In June 1963, Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act (EPA) into law. While the PCSW was a crucial element in the coalition driving the EPA, pushing notions of gender discrimination into a political context and legitimising its creation,Footnote 105 the final law differed drastically from the type of legislation that Peterson advocated, setting equal pay for equal work and giving employers a firm deadline of ‘one year from the date of enactment’.Footnote 106 Perhaps due to the EPA's establishment, a five-year plan was not mentioned in American Women.

Translating the Swedish Model

The PCSW's interest in Swedish gender equality policy was both intense and pervasive, and, to a great degree, inspired by Esther Peterson and her connections to Sweden. By applying a translation framework, multiple contributory factors for the PCSW's interest in Swedish ideas, both structural and personal, are highlighted. As explored above, the PCSW was in part an attempt to make good on the US's claims to being a ‘free democratic society’, a notion that anthropologist Margaret Mead's introduction to the 1964 version of American Women recalled: ‘the pressure of other people's opinion is being exerted on the United States. The great gains of American women in health, literacy, education, and opportunity have been compared with the relatively few positions held by American women in government and industry – a puzzling contrast between our claim to freedom of opportunity and our actual accomplishments’.Footnote 107 The initiative for transatlantic learning therefore appears to be not merely the product of the inherent appeal of a Swedish model but to have been rooted in the context of a Cold War environment and the need to strengthen US policies in order to fulfil its international image.

While global circumstances set the stage for translation, it was the knowledge translators within the PCSW who ultimately proved essential for establishing the significance of transatlantic learning to the commission, none more so than Esther Peterson. From her authoritative position within the PCSW and the wider labour movement, Peterson consistently defined policy alternatives by placing Swedish innovations on the agenda of a commission chosen to be sympathetic to protecting women workers. Peterson likewise brokered the flow of information into the commission, providing material and expert knowledge gathered from her existing network of Swedish contacts and filtering out others, as evident in Dorothy Goldberg's visits to Swedish and not Norwegian labour market institutions.Footnote 108

Under the leadership of Peterson, the PCSW negotiated between desired Swedish programmes and American structural constraints in hopes of achieving a similar outcome to the Swedes. Consequently, while the commission members recognised that aspects of the Swedish social model were radically different from American institutions, such as the more cooperative disposition of the Swedish labour market parties, the PCSW found workarounds to achieve desired solutions. Most notably, knowing their inability to coax unions or employers to accept a solidarity wage policy, the PCSW made use of their proximity to the state and the president by recommending wage legislation. While such a solution was anathema to a Swedish social model, it maintained the normative grounding and ultimate goals of a Swedish policy model.

These decisions signalled Peterson's and the PCSW's active role in defining a Swedish model of women's rights, not simply responding rhetorically to its existence. Peterson helped determine which policies and programmes were of interest, illustrated how they fit together, and placed them in a wider context. Given the background and affiliations of Peterson and the PCSW's mandate to determine alternatives to the ERA, the commission's utilisation of Swedish examples may have been motivated by the desire to demonstrate the feasibility of a labour feminist agenda. If true, a Swedish model would have been relevant for its ability to be cannibalised to support common policy goals, transforming Sweden into a model within a model, situated in the national (and global) fight between equal rights and gender protections.

While personal and political motivations are difficult to confirm, it is apparent that the technical and normative functioning of policies from Sweden in fact proved more important than the rhetorical mobilisation of a progressive image outside of the commission. When Marianne Neuberger admitted that ‘my Congress wouldn't buy a state-supported child day care, even if Sweden finds it successful’, but still urged the PCSW to use Swedish evidence to suggest reforms, another member pointed out that this would be considered ‘un-American’.Footnote 109 Even Peterson acknowledged the dangers of depending too much on examples from abroad, having ‘been accused of being pro-Swedish because I lived there’.Footnote 110 Ostensibly, by necessity, modellisation of Swedish policy could be divorced from the wider public debate about emulating Swedish social structures.Footnote 111

Conversely, Geijer and Kugelberg, serving as external consultants with information about the functioning and goals of Swedish programmes, worked to both limit the discussion to wage negotiation, temper expectations and deny possibilities of transfer. Despite (or perhaps due to) specifying requisite conditions for success such as centralised bargaining and government non-intervention, the Swedish delegation made little impact in overlaying their programmes onto American conditions. Røvik foresees this difficulty when he notes the criticisms levelled at external consultants for flawed recommendations grounded in a lack of knowledge about organisational (or in this case societal) conditions.Footnote 112 The Swedes, recognising their status as outsiders, proved reticent even to make recommendations, with Geijer announcing at one point, ‘We are not here to solve your problems’.Footnote 113

The marginal role of Swedish representatives relative to foreign actors as modellisers of Sweden's policies diverges from a focus on a sender-receiver relationship in public diplomacy studies, which generally takes a starting point in the agency of the Swedish government and its contracted professionals in deploying Swedish lessons and images abroad. Even as historians of public diplomacy note the various conflicts and inconsistencies in depictions of the state,Footnote 114 an elevation of actors claiming to represent Sweden can potentially result in a certain amount of intentionality and functionality to the spread of images of Sweden. On the other hand, the impromptu invitation of the Swedish delegation by Peterson along with Geijer's and Kugelberg's reticence to ‘sell’ their country, while perhaps demonstrating a certain kind of Swedish diplomatic behaviour,Footnote 115 depicts non-Swedish actors as at least as important in manufacturing the need for and nature of a Swedish model abroad.

The partial imitation of a Swedish model by Peterson and the PCSW, embracing a few elements from the model to fit with existing institutional structures and dispositions,Footnote 116 resulted in a more diffuse impact, but one that ultimately benefited from this manipulation. While the commission members recognised that maintaining a Swedish social model in its entirety would leave proposals brittle and subject to charges of being ‘un-American’, the integration of the Swedish policy model into the commission's work subtly introduced these ideas into the public policy stream. Indeed, the PCSW became a model for the rapid implementation of state commissions on the status of women in all fifty states, which took up the implementation of reforms in areas like child-care services and protection of domestic workers.Footnote 117 Swedish ideas integrated into American policy making in diverse ways, amongst them in the formation of the National Committee for Household Employment in 1964–5 to ‘improve the status and working conditions of private household workers’, which, in Peterson's recollection, had been directly inspired by her pamphlet on Swedish domestic workers.Footnote 118 From a wider perspective, the PCSW became memorialised as a foundational moment in American feminism, thus inserting a Swedish policy model within the story of women's rights, if only indirectly.Footnote 119 Moreover, this translation moment occurred within transnational feedback loops that encouraged a subsequent ‘double movement of going back and forth and coming back’.Footnote 120 Following international attention for the PCSW and calls by the United Nations for the formation of other national commissions on the status of women, Sweden released a famous 1968 report suggesting such issues concerned both sexes.Footnote 121 The report brought further notoriety to Sweden's standing at the forefront of gender equality,Footnote 122 coinciding with the magnification of gender equality in Swedish public diplomacy and setting the stage for future translation attempts.Footnote 123

Conclusion

The Swedish model's longstanding application in transnational political debates has inspired recent historical scholarship illuminating the origins and constructions of Swedish stereotypes. When tracking Swedish images abroad, these works tend to emphasise the Swedish social model's role as a rhetorical foil for non-Nordic politics, while downplaying the influence and prospects of Swedish policies on foreign decision making. But, as discussed above, rather than a static narrative of limited practical export, the transfer of a Swedish model was spontaneous and highly contingent on historical circumstances and the influence of proselytising agents. By focusing on a Swedish policy model, it is possible to move beyond a strictly rhetorical understanding of modellisation, acknowledging that, while characterisations of Sweden and a Swedish social model influenced the conditions for the transmission of a policy model, it did not solely define its existence or relevance. Focusing attention on a policy model provides a chance to add additional nuance to our understanding of how a Swedish model spread: nuance in the context, nuance in the methods and nuance in the results.

A focus on policy models necessitates moving beyond trusting that Swedish social justice and material gains would inevitably appeal to a ‘generally liberal bias’ abroad, and ideally helping alleviate the difficulty of pinpointing moments when an expansive Swedish social model could feasibly be exported.Footnote 124 Tracking modellisation encourages a greater effort to identify the needs and agendas of particular groups and the way transnational models were attuned to these demands. In this instance, the mid-century political struggle over women's rights proved a fertile moment for the spread of Swedish gender policy, with its emphasis on comparable wages and labour union precedence. Thus, while Esther Peterson was certainly on the left of the American political spectrum, she was also active in a transnational labour feminist network, which likely helped motivate her efforts to introduce a Swedish model to the United States. Moreover, by following policy-making channels, new arenas of translation open up beyond the public eye, requiring different considerations about the kind of model being exported. As an organisation, the PCSW possessed a clear mandate to determine alternatives to the ERA and to develop these ideas into concrete policy proposals for the president of the United States. Given these circumstances, alongside the scepticism in US Cold War discourse towards foreign models, the applied lessons of a Swedish policy model took on a greater importance compared to the rhetorical functions of a Swedish social model.

Beyond simply dismissing the effects of model export as rhetorically limited, attention to policy models introduces other rubrics for assessing the results of transfer. John Logue, despite acknowledging the existence of policy models within the Swedish model, admits ‘frustration’ that their use to the United States is limited without a wholesale transformation of American political culture.Footnote 125 However, in the case of the PCSW, similar political goals facilitated the spread of a model and resulted in its integration into American systems and legislative traditions, ultimately representing a significant instance of lesson drawing. We need not understand transfer in a zero-sum fashion to mean the complete resituating of a policy from abroad; instead, applying a translation lens, we can assert that export can include hybrid or partial imitations that shape policy strategies and expectations. Without such assertions, cases like the one explored in this article risk being discounted as inconsequential.

The extensive interest of the PCSW in Swedish solutions serves as a reminder to look beyond the moments when foreign ideas are discussed into the particular methods by which social developments and polices are fitted out for transfer abroad, as well as the pathways that facilitate the spread of models. While the modellisation of Swedish gender policy in the mid-century offers one template of how political ideas were translated internationally, it is worth comparing how processes vary over time and space, as well as the parallel transmission of other kinds of social and policy models.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the generous support of Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (Project 8018-00023B), which allowed me to travel to the Third Nordic Challenges Conference in Copenhagen to present an earlier version of this paper. I also wish to thank Mary Hilson, Carl Marklund, Andreas Mørkved Hellenes, Dorothy Sue Cobble and the anonymous referees for comments on previous versions.

Footnotes

1 Myers, Charles A., Industrial Relations in Sweden: Some Comparisons with American Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1951); Myrdal, Gunnar, Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning in the Welfare States and Its International Implications (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1960); Kerr, Clark, Dunlop, John T. and Harbison, Frederick H., Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 11–20; Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967).

2 Marklund, Carl, ‘The Social Laboratory, the Middle Way and the Swedish Model: Three Frames for the Image of Sweden’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34, 3 (2009), 264; Lane, Jan-Erik, ‘Interpretations of the Swedish Model’, in Lane, Jan-Erik, ed., Understanding the Swedish Model (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 1–7.

3 Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth, ‘Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Norden’, in Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth, ed., The Cultural Construction of Norden (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), 1–24. The recent COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the continued prominence of the Sonderweg thesis in German media responses to Swedish public health policy. Kai Strittmatter, ‘Coronavirus in Schweden: Tödlicher Sonderweg’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 May 2020, available at https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/schweden-coronavirus-1.4904015 (last visited 15 June 2020).

4 Lister, Ruth, ‘A Nordic Nirvana? Gender, Citizenship, and Social Justice in the Nordic Welfare States’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 16, 2 (2009), 242–78.

5 For influential perspectives on the construction and dissemination of an image of Sweden and the Nordic countries, see Musiał, Kazimierz, Roots of the Scandinavian Model: Images of Progress in the Era of Modernisation (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002); Andersson, Jenny, ‘Nordic Nostalgia and Nordic Light: The Swedish Model as Utopia 1930–2007’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34, 3 (2009), 229–45; Marklund, Carl, ‘American Mirrors and Swedish Self-Portraits: US Images of Sweden and Swedish Public Diplomacy in the USA in the 1970s and 80s’, in Clerc, Louis, Glover, Nikolas and Jordan, Paul, eds., Histories of Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2015), 172–94; Kurunmäki, Jussi and Strang, Johan, ‘Introduction: “Nordic Democracy” in a World of Tensions’, in Kurunmäki, Jussi and Strang, Johan, eds., Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2010), 9–36; Petersen, Klaus, ‘National, Nordic and Trans-Nordic: Transnational Perspectives on the History of the Nordic Welfare States’, in Kettunen, Pauli and Petersen, Klaus, eds., Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), 41–64.

6 Glover, Nikolas and Marklund, Carl, ‘Arabian Nights in the Midnight Sun? Exploring the Temporal Structure of Sexual Geographies’, Historisk Tidskrift, 129, 3 (2009), 490; Andersson, Jenny and Hilson, Mary, ‘Images of Sweden and the Nordic Countries’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34, 3 (2009), 219–28.

7 Examples include Glover, Nikolas, National Relations: Public Diplomacy, National Identity and the Swedish Institute, 1945–1970 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2012); Åkerlund, Andreas, Public Diplomacy and Academic Mobility in Sweden: The Swedish Institute and Scholarship Programs for Foreign Academics, 1938–2010 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016).

8 Marklund, Carl and Petersen, Klaus, ‘Return to Sender – American Images of the Nordic Welfare States and Nordic Welfare State Branding’, European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 43, 2 (2013): 253–54; Nicholas Aylott, ‘A Nordic Model of Democracy?’, in Nicholas Aylott, ed., Models of Democracy in Nordic and Baltic Europe: Political Institutions and Discourse, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 2.

9 Musiał, Roots of the Scandinavian Model, 228–9; Andersson and Hilson, ‘Images of Sweden’, 221; Marklund, Carl, ‘From “False” Neutrality to “True” Socialism: US “Sweden-Bashing” during the Later Palme Years, 1973–1986’, Journal of Transnational American Studies, 7, 1 (2016), 1–2. However, recent research has started to uncover historical cases of policy export from a Swedish model. See Thomas Hoctor, ‘The Nordic Model and British Public Policy c. 1997–2015: Social Democratic Mythology or Free-Market Supermodel?’, PhD Thesis, University College London, 2017; Rom-Jensen, Byron, ‘A Model for Social Security? The Political Usage of Scandinavia in Roosevelt's New Deal’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 42, 4 (2017), 363–88.

10 Harvard, Jonas and Stadius, Peter, ‘A Communicative Perspective on the Formation of the North: Contexts, Channels and Concepts’, in Harvard, Jonas and Stadius, Peter, eds., Communicating the North: Media Structure and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 2.

11 Mitchell, Katharyne, ‘Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity: Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15, 5 (1997), 533–53.

12 The term ‘modellisation’ comes out of a current project on ‘Nordic model(s) in the global circulation of ideas, 1970–2020’. The modellisation phenomenon refers to the rhetorical invention, reproduction and circulation of models of a society, including national models, in different contexts. For more information on the project, visit https://projects.au.dk/nordicmodels/.

13 International discussion of a ‘Swedish model’ did not become commonplace until the late 1960s, thus making the term an anachronism. Nonetheless, the case displays aspects of modellisation, making it relevant to study as an example of the processes of the Swedish model's adoption abroad. On the spread of the ‘Swedish model’ term, see Hellenes, Andreas Mørkved, ‘Tracing the Nordic model: French Creations, Swedish Appropriations and Nordic Articulations’, in Byrkjeflot, Haldor, Mordhorst, Mads, Mjøset, Lars and Pedersen, Klaus, eds., The Making and Circulation of Nordic Models, Ideals and Images (London: Routledge, 2022); Bo Stråth, ‘Den nordiska modellen: historisk bakgrund och hur talet om en nordisk modell uppstod’, Nordisk Tidskrift för vetenskap, konst och inndustri 69 (1993), 56.

14 Eduards, Maud L., ‘The Swedish Gender Model: Productivity, Pragmatism and Paternalism’, in Lane, Jan-Erik, ed., Understanding the Swedish Model (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 168.

15 There have been some recent inroads into examining the export of labour and gender policy from Scandinavia. Blomberg, Eva, Gradskova, Yulia, Waldemarson, Ylva and Zvinkliene, Alina, Gender Equality on a Grand Tour: Politics and Institutions – the Nordic Council, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Byron Z. Rom-Jensen, ‘The Scandinavian Legacy: Nordic Policies as Images and Models in the United States’, PhD Thesis, Aarhus University, 2017.

16 Graubard, Stephen R., Norden – The Passion for Equality (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986), 9.

17 However, see Hellenes, Andreas Mørkved, ‘Pilgrims and Missionaries of Social Peace: Geneva and Pontigny as Sites of Scandinavian Internationalism in Late Interwar Europe’, Nordic Journal of Educational History, 7, 2 (2020), 3–29.

18 Clerc and Glover, ‘Representing the Small States’, 11.

19 Dølvik, Jon Erik and Martin, Andrew, ‘Introduction’, in Dølvik, Jon Erik and Martin, Andrew, eds., European Social Models from Crisis to Crisis: Employment and Inequality in the Era of Monetary Integration (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014), 3; Stråth, Bo, ‘Social Models? A Critical View on a Concept from a Historical and European Perspective’, European Review, 15, 3 (2007), 338.

20 Rose, Richard, Learning from Comparative Public Policy: A Practical Guide (London: Routledge, 2005), 79–80.

21 Jon Erik Dølvik, Jorgen Goul Andersen, and Juhana Vartiainen, ‘The Nordic Social Models in Turbulent Times: Consolidation and Flexible Adaptation’, in Dølvik and Martin, eds., European Social Models, 246–87.

22 Logue, John, ‘The Swedish Model: Visions of Sweden in American Politics and Political Science’, Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 50, 3 (1999), 165.

23 Logue, ‘The Swedish Model’, 167.

24 Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges, ‘Travel of Ideas’, Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón, eds., Translating Organizational Change (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1996), 14–48; Kjell Arne Røvik, ‘Knowledge Transfer as Translation: Review and Elements of an Instrumental Theory’, International Journal of Management Reviews, 18, 3 (2016), 290–310.

25 Mark Evans and Jonathan Davies, ‘Understanding Policy Transfer: A Multi-Level, Multi-Disciplinary Perspective’, Public Administration, 77, 2 (1999), 361–85.

26 Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’, in Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 63–82.

27 Kjell Arne Røvik, Moderne organisasjoner: Trender i organisasjonstenkningen ved tusenårsskiftet (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 1998), 151–3.

28 Barbara Czarniawska, ‘Local Translations of Operational Risk’, in Robert P. Gephart Jr., C. Chet Miller, and Karin Svedberg Helgesson, eds., The Routledge Companion to Risk, Crisis and Emergency Management (New York: Routledge, 2019), 163; Kerstin Sahlin and Linda Wedlin, ‘Circulating Ideas: Imitation, Translation and Editing’, in Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Thomas B. Lawrence and Renate E. Meyer, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (London: SAGE, 2018), 219; Røvik, ‘Knowledge Transfer’, 293.

29 Røvik, Moderne organisasjoner, 156–8.

30 Author's translation. Ibid., 158–9.

31 Sahlin and Wedlin, ‘Circulating Ideas’, 221–5; Campbell, John L., Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 84.

32 Andersson and Hilson, ‘Images of Sweden’, 221.

33 Carl Marklund, ‘The Return of Geopolitics in the Era of Soft Power: Rereading Rudolf Kjellén on Geopolitical Imaginary and Competitive Identity’, Geopolitics 20, 2 (2015), 248–66.

34 Carl Marklund, ‘A Swedish Norden or a Nordic Sweden? Image Politics in the West during the Cold War’, in Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius, eds., Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 276.

35 Andersson and Hilson, ‘Images of Sweden’, 220; Petersen, ‘National, Nordic and Trans-Nordic’, 55; Carl Marklund, ‘The Nordic Model on the Global Market of Ideas: The Welfare State as Scandinavia's Best Brand’, Geopolitics, 22, 3 (2016), 5.

36 Tony Shaw, ‘The Politics of Cold War Culture’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 3, 3 (2001), 59–76; Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal, eds., Divided Dreamworlds?: The Cultural Cold War in East and West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 3–4.

37 Carew, Anthony, American Labour's Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945–1970 (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2018), 341.

38 Hilson, Mary, The Nordic Model: Scandinavia since 1945 (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 128; Nilsson, Mikael, The Battle for Hearts and Minds in the High North: The USIA and American Cold War Propaganda in Sweden, 1952–1969 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 9; Hellenes, ‘Fabricating Sweden’, 26–27.

39 Frederick Hale, ‘Challenging the Swedish Social Welfare State: The Case of Dwight David Eisenhower’, Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 54, 1 (2003), 58–9; Marklund and Petersen, ‘Return to Sender’, 252–4.

40 H. Arnold Barton, ‘Crossings and Recrossings: America and Sweden in the Twentieth Century’, The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, 50, 3 (1999), 139–40. For an exploration of the ‘Sweden-bashing’ phenomenon, see Marklund, ‘From “False” Neutrality’.

41 Laville, Helen, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organisations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 9. Daniel Rodgers takes a similar line more generally about the Cold War's stifling effects on progressive transatlantic transfer, while also making an allowance for the transnational connections of organised labour. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 502–7. However, others have tracked occurrences of cross-bloc transmissions in women's issues. Melanie Ilic, ‘Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women's International Democratic Federation’, in Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy, eds., Reassessing Cold War Europe (London: Routledge, 2011), 157–74.

42 Quoted in Ghodsee, Kristen, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity During the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 82.

43 Ghodsee, Second World, 85.

44 Dean Rusk, no. CW-529, 20 July 1961, National Archives of the United States II, College Park, Maryland (NARA), Record Group 84, UD2386.

45 Jonathan Bell, ‘Social Politics in a Transoceanic World in the Early Cold War Years’, The Historical Journal, 53, 2 (2010), 402.

46 Dorothy Sue Cobble, ‘The Promise and Peril of the New Global Labor History’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 82 (2012), 103.

47 Eileen Boris, ‘Equality's Cold War: The ILO and the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 1946–1970s’, in Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 97–120; Dorothy Sue Cobble, ‘The Other ILO Founders: 1919 and Its Legacies’, in Boris, Hoehtker and Zimmermann, eds., Women's ILO, 27–49; Daniel Maul, The International Labour Organization: 100 Years of Global Social Policy (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), 196.

48 International Labour Organization, ‘Convention C100 – Equal Remuneration Convention’, International Labour Organization, 29 June 1951, available at https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C100 (last visited 15 June 2020).

49 Carew, American Labour's Cold War Abroad, 341. For more on the relationship of national representatives in the ICFTU during Arne Geijer's presidency, see Åke Wedin, International Trade Union Solidarity: ICFTU 1957–1965 (Stockholm: Prisma, 1974).

50 Lichtenstein, Nelson, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 98–9.

51 Scott Stephenson, ‘How to Build a Trade Union Oligarchy: Guidance from the United States and Australia, 1886–1970’, in Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, eds., Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 227–45.

52 Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, ‘Shop Floor Bargaining, Contract Unionism, and Job Control: An Anglo-American Comparison’, in Nelson Lichtenstein and Stephen Meyer, eds., On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 219–20. This is not to say that American employers were not unperturbed by Swedish employer solidarity. Swenson, Peter A., Capitalists against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003), 142–4.

53 Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, ‘State Structures and the Possibilities for “Keynesian” Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 108; Jim F. Heath, John F. Kennedy and the Business Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

54 Lennart Erixon, ‘The Rehn-Meidner Model in Sweden: Its Rise, Challenges and Survival’, Journal of Economic Issues, 44, 3 (2010), 679–81.

55 Lars Magnusson, An Economic History of Sweden (London: Routledge, 2000), 232–40.

56 Ramana Ramaswamy, ‘Wage Bargaining Institutions, Adaptability, and Structural Change: The Swedish Experience’, Journal of Economic Issues, 26, 4 (1992), 1042; Douglas A. Hibbs, Wage Compression Under Solidarity Bargaining in Sweden, Economic Research Report 30 (Stockholm: Fackföreningsröelsens Institut för Ekonomisk Forskning, 1990), 19.

57 Lars Svensson, Closing the Gender Gap: Determinants of Change in the Female-to-Male Blue Collar Wage Ratio in Swedish Manufacturing, 1913–1990, Skrifter Utgivna av ekonomisk-historiska föreningen 71 (Lund: Ekonomisk-Historiska Föreningen, 1995), 127.

58 Swenson, Peter, Fair Shares: Unions, Pay, and Politics in Sweden and West Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 86.

59 Amongst LO leaders’ motivations for decreasing wage differentials was complying with the ILO ‘Convention 100’, meeting labour demands under existing wage levels, ensuring the support of marginal groups, and fulfilling social democratic visions of equality. T.L. Johnston, Collective Bargaining in Sweden: A Study of the Labour Market and Its Institutions (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 324; Klas Åmark, ‘Den Svenska Modellen: Arbetarnas Fackföreningsrörelse Och Samverkan På Svensk Arbetsmarknad’, in Klaus Misgeld and Klas Åmark, eds., Arbetsliv och arbetarrörelse: Modern historisk forskning i Sverige (Stockholm: Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek, 1991), 34; Ramaswamy, ‘Wage Bargaining’, 1044; Hilson, The Nordic Model, 70.

60 Lena Andersson-Skog, ‘In the Shadow of the Swedish Welfare State: Women and the Service Sector’, The Business History Review, 81, 3 (2007), 451–70; Kjell Östberg and Jenny Andersson, Sveriges Historia, 1965–2012, 2013, 31; Erixon, ‘The Rehn-Meidner Model’, 682; Hilson, The Nordic Model, 70, 78; Francis Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century, Madeline B. Adams, ed., Richard Daly, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 243–9, 411; Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala et al., ‘Why Are Social Care Services a Gender Issue?’, in Jorma Sipilä, ed., Social Care Services: The Key to the Scandinavian Welfare Model (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), 145.

61 Lars Svensson, ‘Explaining Equalization: Political Institutions, Market Forces, and Reduction of the Gender Wage Gap in Sweden, 1920–95’, Social Science History, 27, 3 (2003), 383; S. Winship to State, no. 883, 2 May 1962, NARA, RG84, UD3195.

62 Dorothy Sue Cobble, ‘Vänskap bortom Atlanten: Arbetarfeministernas internationella nätverk efter andra världskriget’, Arbetarhistoria, 129–30, 1–2 (2009), 14.

63 Peterson, Esther and Conkling, Winifred, Restless: The Memoirs of Labor and Consumer Activist Esther Peterson (Washington, DC: Caring Pub., 1995), 69.

64 Cobble, ‘Vänskap bortom Atlanten’, 14, fn. 26; Esther Peterson, ‘Interview with Esther Peterson’, interview by Jewel Fenzi and Hope MacBride Meyers, 16 Dec. 1992, Frontline Diplomacy, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, available at https://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000915/ (last visited 16 June 2020). While Peterson's command over Swedish seems limited, she at least had enough knowledge to prepare words of thanks from Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg during his 1961 visits to Sweden. David Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 263.

65 Towards Standards for the Household Worker, 1953, Esther Peterson Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Boston (SL), Folder 369; Peterson, ‘Interview with Esther Peterson’.

66 Peterson and Conkling, Restless, 75.

67 The term ‘labor feminist’ was coined by Dorothy Sue Cobble. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3, 17; Cobble, ‘Vänskap bortom Atlanten’, 13. Author's translation.

68 Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 60–1.

69 Footnote Ibid., 154; Dorothy Sue Cobble, ‘Labor Feminists and President Kennedy's Commission on Women’, in Nancy A Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 156. Peterson decorated her Labor Department offices with Swedish modern furniture, a ‘reminder’ of her time in Stockholm. Marie Smith, ‘Labor Goes Swedish Modern’, Washington Post, 22 Aug. 1962.

70 Peterson and Conkling, Restless, 105–6.

71 Zelman, Patricia G., Women, Work, and National Policy: The Kennedy-Johnson Years (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), 25; Laughlin, Kathleen, Women's Work and Public Policy: A History of the Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1945–1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 80.

72 Zelman, Women, Work, and National Policy, 27; Laughlin, Women's Work and Public Policy, 79.

73 ‘Svensk abretsmarknadspolitik mönster för Kennedy-regimen’, 6 July 1961, SL, Folder 1228; Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg, 263.

74 M. Leach to D. Goldberg, 25 Aug. 1961; V. Ulrikkson to State, 3 Oct. 1957, Arthur J. Goldberg Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LC), Folder I:193.

75 ‘Program for Mrs. Goldberg’, undated; D. Goldberg to P. Van Deldan, 3 Oct. 1961, LC, I:193.

76 D. Goldberg to E. Peterson, 3 Oct. 1961, LC, I:193; ‘Rörlig Svensk Arbetsmarknad Imponerar på USA-minister’, Undated, LC, I:193. Author's translation.

77 D. Goldberg to E. Peterson, 3 Oct. 1961, LC, I:193.

78 D. Goldberg to P. Van Deldan, 3 Oct. 1961, LC, I:193.

79 D. Goldberg to E. Peterson, 3 Oct. 1961, LC, I:193.

80 ‘Arthur J. Goldberg: Svensk socialpolitik mönster för USA-lag’, Dagens Nyheter, 22 Sep. 1961.

81 PCSW, ‘Proceedings’, 18 May 1962, President's Commission on the Status of Women, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston (JFK), Box 14.

82 Maurine Neuberger (1907–2000) served as Senator from Oregon from 1960 to 1967. A Democrat, Neuberger focused on protections for consumers and women workers, including authoring an amendment to the 1964 Revenue Act that would facilitate deducting expenses for child care from income taxes.

83 PCSW, ‘Proceedings’, 29 June 1962, Box 14, JFK; M. Murray to N. Miglionico, 12 Sep. 1962, SL, 888.

84 S. Winship to State, no. 883, 2 May 1962, NARA, RG84, UD3195.

85 PCSW, Proceedings, 16–17 June 1962, JFK, Box 4.

86 PCSW, New and Expanded Services in Other Countries, no. 1, May 1962, JFK, Box 8.

87 PCSW, Summary of Meeting, no. II-4, 28 May 1962, JFK, Box 9.

88 PCSW, Personal and Property Rights, no. II-26, JFK, Box 10.

89 Arne Geijer (1910–79) was trained as a metalworker, becoming the chairman of the Swedish Steelworkers Union from 1948 to 1956 and chairman of the LO from 1956 to 1973. Geijer also served as president of the ICFTU from 1957 to 1965, which necessitated frequent contact with American labour leaders.

90 Bertil Kugelberg (1900–91) originally acted as an assistant director of SAF in 1928, before being elevated to full director in 1946, a post which he held until his retirement in 1966. Kugelberg and Geijer were professionally and personally close.

91 Rom-Jensen, Byron Z., ‘Yellow-Blue Collars: American Labor and the Pursuit of Swedish Policy, 1961–1963’, American Studies in Scandinavia, 50, 2 (2018), 43–68.

92 PCSW, Proceedings, 1 Oct. 1962, JFK, Box 4, p. 13. Richard A. Lester (1908–97) was a Princeton labour economist and economic advisor to John Kennedy during the 1960 presidential election. While Lester had previously studied Scandinavian policies, he proved more sceptical than Peterson of its importance for the PCSW.

93 Kugelberg's formulation echoed the ILO's Convention 100.

94 PCSW, Proceedings, 1 Oct. 1962, JFK, Box 4, p. 31, 39.

95 Footnote Ibid., p. 13.

96 Sam A. Morgenstein (1913–2008) was the technical secretary of the PCSW's Committee on Private Employment, having come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

97 PCSW, Proceedings, 1 Oct. 1962, JFK, Box 4, p. 44.

98 Footnote Ibid., pp. 42–3, 46, 49.

99 Footnote Ibid., pp. 52, 54.

100 Maxine Cheshire, ‘Equal Pay Will Come Gradually: Free Speech Is Democratic’, Washington Post, 3 Oct. 1962.

101 J. Kaukonen to State, no. A-301, 9 Oct. 1962, NARA, RG84, UD3195.

102 Harrison, Cynthia Ellen, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 157; Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 170; President's Commission on the Status of Women, American Women: Report of President's Commission on the Status of Women (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 18–22; Kessler-Harris, Alice, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 220.

103 President's Commission on the Status of Women, American Women, 212.

104 Committee on Civil and Political Rights, Report of the Committee on Civil and Political Rights to the President's Commission on the Status of Women, October 1963 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964).

105 Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, 233; Zelman, Women, Work, and National Policy, 30.

106 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ‘The Equal Pay Act of 1963’, available at https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/history/35th/thelaw/epa.html (last accessed 1 May 2019). For reactions to the EPA in the labour movement, see Gabin, Nancy F., Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 190–1; Peterson and Conkling, Restless, 110.

107 President's Commission on the Status of Women, American Women: The Report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission, eds. Margaret Mead and Frances Balgley Kaplan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), 4, 11.

108 Perhaps connected to Peterson's influence, reports about Sweden's lack of significant female leadership in government do not seem to have been discussed to the same degree as the labour market positives. J. Kaukonen to State, no. A-634, 18 Jan. 1963, NARA, RG84, UD3195.

109 PCSW, Proceedings, 18 May 1962, JFK, Box 14.

110 PCSW, Proceedings, 29 June 1962, JFK, Box 14.

111 Notions of Swedish licentiousness, one of the great midcentury detractions of a Swedish social model, were notably absent from PCSW records, a contrast to the extensive research noting the image's prevalence in the United States. This absence serves as further evidence that a policy model was detachable from a social model. See Marklund, Carl, ‘Hot Love and Cold People: Sexual Liberalism as Political Escapism in Radical Sweden’, Nordeuropaforum, 19, 1 (2009), 83–101; Hale, Frederick, ‘Time for Sex in Sweden: Enhancing the Myth of the “Swedish Sin” during the 1950s’, Scandinavian Studies, 75, 3 (2003), 351–74; Glover and Marklund, ‘Arabian Nights’.

112 Røvik, Moderne organisasjoner, 159.

113 PCSW, Proceedings, 1 Oct. 1962, JFK, Box 4, p. 44.

114 Glover, National Relations, 229.

115 Jezierska, Katarzyna and Towns, Ann, ‘Taming Feminism? The Place of Gender Equality in the “Progressive Sweden” Brand’, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 14, 1 (2018), 55–63.

116 Røvik, Moderne organisasjoner, 160–8.

117 United States Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women, American Women 1963–1968: Report on Progress on the Status of Women (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 27–8.

118 Louise Sweeney, ‘Grandmotherly Esther Peterson: “The Most Dangerous Thing since Genghis Khan”’, The Christian Science Monitor, 17 July 1979; Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 174; United States Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women, American Women, 13.

119 As Nancy Woloch notes, part of the commission's lasting impact was to ‘lay the groundwork for both a feminist agenda and, before long, a new women's movement’. Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience: A Concise History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 332.

120 Quoted in Johan Östling et al., ‘The History of Knowledge and the Circulation of Knowledge’, in Johan Östling et al., eds., Circulation of Knowledge: Explorations in the History of Knowledge (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2018), 9–33.

121 Sandlund, Maj-Britt, The Status of Women in Sweden: Report to the United Nations, 1968 (Stockholm: The Swedish Institute, 1968).

122 Gruberg, Martin, ‘Official Commissions on the Status of Women: A Worldwide Movement’, International Review of Education, 19, 1 (1973), 140, 144–5; ‘Sweden Is “Experimental Laboratory” for Studying the Status of Women’, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 Mar. 1969.

123 Glover, National Relations, fn. 570.

124 Logue, ‘The Swedish Model’, 165.

125 Footnote Ibid., 167.

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