Our Purpose Is Not to Become Cannon-Firing Women

Although the Federation of Women Social Democrats joined the protest “Women's revolt against war” and took the most antimilitaristic stand in the Social Democratic Party, its members, on the whole, did not identify themselves as radical pacifists.

The issue was not a simple one, but it was also not unprecedented. During the First World War and again in connection with a shooting in Adalen in 1931, Swedish women of antimilitarist and pacifist principles had been forced to reexamine their position on civil defense and their refusal to support the bearing of arms. In 1915, when two members of the party from Malmberget in the north of Sweden had joined the women's association of the Red Cross, the affected local branch placed the matter before the central committee in Stockholm, who discussed whether membership in the Red Cross constituted grounds for exclusion. The Red Cross was seen as an organization that worked to reduce the effects of war, and its activities were not interpreted as peace work. The committee decided that it was each individual woman's pri­vate concern to determine whether she had the “time and energy” to give to two organizations and that the conditions of war that prevailed “demanded such latitude towards groups such as the Red Cross.”²³

In 1931 in Adalen, five unarmed unemployed men were killed in a demonstration when soldiers were commandeered to keep order among unarmed demonstrators.²⁴ Arguments raged among party members as to what right-wing interests were being served in controlling the workers by using the army.

Given the Federation of Women Social Democrats’ openly antimilitary stance throughout the 1920s and 1930s, when the issue of civil defense against air raids and chemical warfare became topical in the late 1930s, different branches across the country called upon the central committee to establish a coherent policy. The Swedish government, of course, argued that everyone should be involved in air-raid precautions, because everyone could be a target. But Federation members were concerned with reconciling the stand taken by them during the “Women’s unarmed revolt against war” in 1935 with the strong possibility that their nation could be under attack and their own lives could be at stake. It seemed counterintuitive for them to refuse to support civil defense when that might be the one thing that could alleviate the suffering of a possible war situation. In other words, many Social Democratic women in local branches were revisiting their stand on war and wished to become guardians of neutrality in line with their Social Democratic government’s requests.

After the air-raid precaution law was passed in 1938, the central com­mittee sent out a circular to the rest of the Federation in which it acknowl­edged the need to alter its previously passive attitude toward air-raid precautions. In the face of possible aggression by fascist nations, so the committee argued, the burden for democratic and nonaggressive countries was the adoption of civil defense measures. This could be construed as being contrary to the pacifist ideals of the Federation.

The air-raid precaution activities that our members should participate in can be compared with fire-fighting and first aid duties and should not be associ­ated or confused with militia duties or defense propaganda as other parties pursue it. Tasks that can be allocated to women during air-raid precautions scenarios are primarily fire-watching and fire-fighting duties, care of the sick, transport of the injured, helping with the evacuation of children and the elderly, and their care in other places.²⁷

On the other hand, the Federation emphasized the fact that it was also of great importance that women, with their “predisposition to peace,” ensured “that these new air-raid precaution organizations did not come solely under non—Social Democratic leadership and influence, but that a genuine popu­lar spirit prevailed.” On a purely pragmatic level, it was believed that Social Democratic women could utilize their participation in civil defense organizations to meet “the unenlightened class of people in society,” which would provide new opportunities to spread “enlightenment” and the indis­putable facts of the dangers of possible future war with Germany.²⁸ In other words, Social Democratic women were encouraged to combine an involve­ment in air-raid precaution activities with their political work.

That air-raid precautions work should not be allowed to come under the control of non—Social Democrats was taken up again by the committee of the Federation of Women Social Democrats in 1939, when individual members were encouraged to take an active part in civil defense.

Our purpose is not to become cannon-firing women or anything of that sort, on the contrary, anarchy, the threat of violence, armament, etc. in the world, emphasize more strongly than ever the need for work for arbitration, co­operation, disarmament and peace; however, before we attain this, we must protect our neutrality and freedom from the powers of violence.³⁰

Allowing its members to volunteer for air-raid precaution work in 1938 opened the floodgates for other forms of active participation in civil defense, and by late 1939, the Federation encouraged its women to get involved in all manner of essential civil defense work. The Federation also joined the Women's Emergency Committee, a comprehensive coalition of women's organizations that had been established the previous year. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the Federation made it clear that emer­gency work among women was essential on humanitarian grounds, for example, in replacing mobilized men as agricultural laborers to safeguard the nation's food stocks or in preparing for the evacuation of cities. The Federation trod a fine line in finding and maintaining the difference between work for the civilians as humanitarian work and work as prepara­tions for war. They were forced in this way to straddle their activities between the civilian sphere and the military sphere, which involved finding a balance between what they urged the women to do as members of the Federation and what they thought the women could do as individuals.

In addition to work on air-raid preparations, food production, and evacuation plans, in the New Year of 1940, the Federation sent out the following appeal: “Form groups to collect warm clothing for our guardians of neutrality.” In this project, it seems that women, both on an individual and on a branch basis, could participate in the country's neutral war effort without any conflicts of interests. Protecting neutrality was very much aimed at future peace rather than fuel for the military machine despite the fact that it was the army that would be the beneficiaries of such activities. Morgonbris filled an entire page with knitting instructions titled “Patterns from the Guardians of Neutrality” for kneecaps, gloves, scarves, wrist­warmers, and rifle mittens “with a thumb, a forefinger and broad covering for the other 3 fingers... [e]asy-to-knit pattern with seams along the sides. Knitted on 2 needles. Use needles no 2 and 3... Cast on 56 stitches.”³² Branches all across the country were quick to comply. The branch of the town Oxelosund reported that a circle that used to meet to sew and read had been transformed so that the members now knitted while reading. From Vadstena, the members reported that interest in providing for the “guardians of neutrality” was great and that they could acquire yarn them­selves.

Despite these clear moves to aid the efforts to protect and defend Sweden's neutrality, there remained unsatisfactory juxtapositions and ambiv­alences in the Federation's position on what was deemed a more “active” involvement by its members in defense activities, such as in the Red Cross and the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. In 1939, the local branches of the Federation once more applied pressure in order to get advice about what attitudes they were to adopt regarding “those women's organizations work­ing for our defense.” Knitting for Sweden's “neutral guardians” and their weaponry was one thing, personally undertaking war activities was quite another. As it had in 1938, the Federation reiterated that it was up to the individual woman.³⁴ Still, in 1939, Disa Vastberg, the president of the Federation, paved the way for a more wholesale reconciliation of all types of civil defense activity within the Federation's worldview when she thanked the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps for their personal contribution in Finland in the magazine Idun:

That which I have previously never been able to take in earnest has become a dire necessity. I wish to protect my country, I thank the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, and I value our co-operation across the battle lines.³⁵

Vastberg's honoring of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1940 marked a clear break from the past for the Federation of Women Social Democrats. Once Sweden was surrounded by warring and occupied coun­tries (by the spring of that year), defense work could no longer be viewed as an individual task; it concerned the Federation as a whole as it did the nation as a whole.³⁶ The transition in attitude from being a neutral in peace­time to a neutral in wartime and whether or not to take part in the civil defense of the nation was transformed from a rhetorical argument to a prac­tical necessity. The luxuries of arguing about not taking part in civil defense in a nonthreatening environment were not possible when the reality of war loomed large over Social Democratic women's lives. The transition was made blatantly clear to members when the Federation issued a circular in May 1940 supporting the decision by the Civil Defense Authority to recruit volunteers, both women and young people, for aircraft-warning duties.³⁷

Accepting that their members could volunteer for “military duty” (albeit in spotting aircraft and not shooting at them) marked a huge shift for an organization dedicated to the principles of antimilitarism and pacifism, but it was a shift whose implications, for women, gender roles, and the Federation's political beliefs, were left unspoken and unexplored. Aircraft­warning duties were part of the military system and those who volunteered were paid on the same basis as other members of the nation's military forces. That any women Social Democrats who volunteered for this duty would become part of the national defense force was never mentioned in the circular or subsequently.³⁸

As the war situation within and outside Sweden became more dire and the possibility of attack grew, the blurring of the Federation's pacifist ideals and policies deepened as well. In June 1940, for example, Morgonbris pub­lished an appeal encouraging women to sign defense loans in the following terms:

Many of us considered earlier military budgets and defense costs as some­thing rather unnecessary and negative. If we must appropriate something for military purposes, then we demand the means for social welfare work in similar proportions. Otherwise, we want peace and the establishment of good relations between peoples... Of course, we still desire this, we have no greater wish, but the recent appalling events, not the least in our neighboring countries, have made it clear to us that more important and more imperative than anything else is that we set our defense in order, that we have the means to protect our country, our freedom, our democracy.³⁹

During the autumn of 1940, it was again time to knit, but now the army delivered wool for this purpose in ten-kilogram lots. The socks were to be knitted according to a pattern provided and reinforcing yarn was to be knitted in at the heels and toes. The socks were to be sent within two months of the delivery of the wool.⁴⁰ The patterns to protect the guardians of neutrality required military precision over and above any aspirations to socialist zeal or pacifist ideals.