ESTER VIKTORINA - MY GRANDMOTHER
VIKTORINA MEANS THE LITTLE VICTORY
A work by Malin Olofsdotter Bondeson in the Introduction to Visual and material cultural studies and visual arts educationat Konstfack.
The work is about Ester Viktorina Persson born Lindberg (1894-1982) grew up in the countryside in Brandbo - Västmanland.
She lived in a time of hard work, duties and strict upbringing. She saw her mother's life with many children and little freedom of her own and did not want a life similar to her mother's.
Ester wanted to earn her own money and be independent within the framework of what was possible for an ordinary woman. During Ester's lifetime, Sweden underwent major social and structural changes which made it possible for Ester's negotiation space to increase and she was able to increase her independence compared to previous generations.
She negotiated and renegotiated and stretched her leeway also to adapt to the wishes of the family and not to fall outside the narrow norm. Ester shows how women began to resist the patriarchal society and try to raise themselves economically and socially. The resistance to the patriarchal structures existed in all social classes it could be more or less clear.
Ester was not part of any movement and did not work according to any manifesto, but it is simply about a person's desire to be better off than previous generations and a person's attempt to be in control of their own life.
In this work, I want to show you some excerpts from my grandmother's patriarchal resistance.
The narrative and the photographs will be at the center. They will clarify Ester's attempts to negotiate and renegotiate her position within the usual norm. The narratives and photographs will hopefully give an expanded understanding of what it could be like to live as a woman with a desire for freedom in Sweden during the early 20th century.
The photographs have been colored from being black and white images, the transformation has brought us closer to Ester. The colors of the images make us connote photos from the present.
We think we understand Ester better because she and her world are presented with an image we are more used to.
Click on the image to make it larger.
My grandmother Ester came to us every Christmas in Stockholm from Dalarna with a suitcase full of knitted mittens and home-made jam. She came and started working because work was what she did, she couldn't sit still. Systematically, she began to prepare for Christmas, cleaning everywhere, making sausages and jams. When the work was done for the day, she would sit and play solitaire or roll her thumbs. Who's twiddling their thumbs now? Grandma twiddled her thumbs in protest that there was nothing more to do this day. Once she scrubbed the wall in the closet where our rabbit Muchlan lived. She thought having a rabbit running free in the apartment and living in a wardrobe was disgusting and she scrubbed the wall because she thought she saw dirt.
The more she scrubbed, the more dirt, until she realized it was the concrete she was scrubbing. She got so angry that she started crying.
Inside grandma's room it was a different world than in the rest of the apartment. It smelled different. It was calm. She taught us to knit, crochet and we got to jump in her bed as much as we wanted. I've been thinking about how much we jumped around in her bed, she didn't seem to mind, which in retrospect I think is weird. She had such strong opinions about so many other things.
One time when I was inside her room, I was going to make a joke, so I moved the chair away when she was about to sit down. How could I? I thought it was a funny joke and grandma fell on the floor. She went in to my mor (Yes, I call my mother mor) and told me what had happened. I remember that when I heard Grandma tell me what I had done, I suddenly thought that maybe it wasn't such a funny joke and when my mother scolded me and explained that Grandma could have died, well, Grandma was over eighty years old anyway, then I understood and was ashamed.
I thought of her last yesterday and I remember how she recycled everything before the word even existed. Flora butter, the packaging was reused for different food storage, the plastic bags were saved although there were free ones in the shops with every purchase, the dishcloths were boiled to extend their life. Nothing was thrown.
Grandma made patchwork quilts for the whole family, then she used, among other things, fabrics from her dresses. It made her presence visible in the patches.
When I was expecting Agnes, my first child, I received a package from my grandmother, in an overhead cupboard at my mother's, grandmother had put presents for us that we were allowed to open when we were expecting her great-grandchild. The package contained a patchwork quilt for a child, a knitted blanket and a pillow. She had been dead for thirty years, but her patchwork and needlework live on.
Who was she then, Ester my grandmother?
My grandmother was born in a village called Brandbo, Wästanfors parish in Västmanland. Brandbo is located on a peninsula between the big and small Aspen lakes. She was born in the 1800s, more precisely July 30, 1894. She had eight siblings but one of them died when he was very small, I think his name was Verner. All her siblings had names beginning with the letter V. the boys' names were: Villgott, Valter, Wilhelm and the girls had their v-name as second names: Augusta Vilhelmina, Ester Viktorina, Helga Viktoria and Signe Valentina.
Her family lived in a small house, kitchen and fine room on the first floor and two or three rooms upstairs. Carl Vilhelm had bought the house from grandmother Ester's grandfather, "Brandbo-Kalle", who sold it with the condition that he would be allowed to stay in the house until he died. Despite Augusta being the only daughter, the son-in-law had to buy the house and then take care of the old man , Brandbo-Kalle, for life.
In the kitchen sofa there lived an aunt who was Ester's grandmother's mother and Ester thought she was very old and mean and she thought the aunt was born in the 18th century. The aunt's name was Anna Spennare and was in fact born in 1810 and died in 1900. I am not sure that Brandbo Kalle and grandmother's mother lived in the house at the same time.
There were also apprentices in the house because Karl Vilhelm Lindberg was a shoemaker.
In the Brandbo house lived children, adults and apprentices who would have food, places to sleep, clothes, cleaning and washing for themselves.
It was very crowded. When Ester was little, she slept cross-legged with her sister Signe in a fold-down bench that was folded up and used as a seat during the day. All the housework was done by my grandmother's mother Augusta with the help of the girls. The girls should help with the housework. There was a lot to do and there was no electricity or running water.
When the Emil in Lönneberga films came out in the 1970s made from the books by Astrid Lindgren, grandma liked them so much they reminded her of how she had felt when she was a child. She had an eye for the details in the Emil films and she thought it was incredible that Emil's Mamma sat and pressed the sausage mass into the sausage with her fingers, it wasn't like that at all, she was supposed to use a sausage horn of course. That's how it happened when Ester was a child.
As a little girl, Ester wanted to surprise her mother and she knitted a pair of mittens.
She knitted them secretly when her mother wasn't looking, she had just learned to knit so she was so happy when they were finished.
When she handed over the gift, the mother just looked at it and said:
- Go to your room and start from the beggining! Ester had to remake the mittens and first unmake it and use the same yarn.
The mittens were not good enough. It was just a matter of starting from scratch. Ester went upstairs and cried. Not so kind, I think, and it's hard to understand how my great-grandmother thought. It must have been important to make things that could be used and not waste the yarn. The children were taught to be useful.
Carl-Wilhelm infront of the Brandbo main building and his workshop. Ester tells the stories written down below on the audio file.
Folk belief in Brandbo
In Brandbo, during Ester's childhood, there was a sorceress woman to whom people in the village could go if they needed help. She dealt with curing diseases and freeing people from curses through various ceremonies or séances. Ester told me about the witch in Brando and how she used a tree to cleanse sick children. The tree had grown so that the branches or trunk formed a cavity. The child was threaded through the tree while the woman said spells and the disease remained in the tree and the child hopefully recovered.
Augusta Lindberg, Ester's mother, experienced that child mortality was high, she gave birth to eight children and only seven survived to adulthood. Little Verner died early when he was just a little baby. During the 19th century, many more babies died than do today. According to the Central Statistical Office, one in four babies died in Sweden in 1820, but things slowly got better and a hundred years later only one in ten died. In the stories that have been preserved, it was children who participated in the secret rites, this may be because the child mortality was high, especially for infants.
Folk belief was present and important in everyday life in Brandbo around the turn of the century in 1900. New ideas began to spread, but the old society still remains and the old traditions change very slowly. In the tape recording from 1978, Ester tells about two occult events.
The first story describes an event in 1897.
It is Carl-Wilhelm, Ester's father who was a way and worked on one of the four farms in Djupnäs not far from Fagersta and Brandbo. It's Carl -Wilhelm and Kalle says Ester on the tape, maybe it was Brandbo Kalle, his father-in-law who was there.
A child was sick on the farm and the woman they worked for needed their help to make the child healthy. Here are grandma's own words:
In the evening, the housewife told them to get ready because they were going out and holding a horse harness.
They were so dumbfounded (surprised),
They had a small child who was a few months old who was sick. The farmer himself was in the forest driving, he drove home so fast that the horse would sweat and the harness would get wet. When he got home they had to go out and help him off the harness, then they had to fasten all the buckles and hooks and everything on the harness.
Then they had to hold the harness hook and she came out with the baby and threaded it from back to front then she lifted the baby over the harness and then she passed the baby three times through the harness.
The harness was then completely wet with sweat from the horse that ran from the forest where it had ridden all day.
Then she went home with the child and then it would be healthy.
Ester continues to tell Monika (Topsy) on the tape from 1978.
It was Sigrid, Olivia and I who played down by the lake. Olivia's mom said they couldn't go and fall into that one the spring down by the water because then you will “come for”.
I asked the girls what it was but they didn't know.
But as it was, Olivia fell into that well. She got so scared and Sigrid and I pulled away. She went home and she cried the whole way. I went home to my mother and said that Liva has come for.
Then mother said: - You shouldn't talk about that.
Then there lived an old woman in a cottage below where we had our courtyard late in the afternoon we saw Olivia and her mother go there. Then we understood that she was going to cast a spell over her so that nothing would go wrong with her. Then she first put a tin can on the stove, that would be so secret that she wasn't allowed to talk about it, but she told us about it anyway the next day. We would never get to tell.
Then she put a blue can on the stove, but Olivia didn't know what was in it.
Then she put one breadcake with the hole in over her ears and she was sitting on a stool, then she had a bucket in front of her with water in it.
When what was on the stove was hot, she took the bread cake from the ears and then put them above the bucket and then she hit what she had in the bowl, through the bread cake in the hole into the bucket, then she stood and read over it. Whatever it was.
Then Olivia would be fine and she wouldn't get any harm for falling into that spring which was enchanted.
(Mother) Monika: - Did she read spells?
Ester: - Yes, she did that, she read and looked in the bucket, there was lead in the bucket so she read the lead floating in the water, you understand.
When it solidified she would go home and then nothing would be wrong with her.
I think Ester's mother's reaction that Ester should not talk about them is interesting. There were things they didn't talk about and that they weren't supposed to talk about, that is, secret things.
At the same time, the Lindberg family does not seem to use this woman and it was perhaps that they did not believe in the superstition. The family wanted to move forward and Carl-Wilhelm, who was a cobbler, became, a traveling salesman and the family eventually moved to Skinnskatteberg where they opened a general store and café.
The school and Lydia Svan
The school was located in Sundbo on the other side of a water that today is called Sundbokanal and which is part of the Kolbäcksån that runs between the lakes Stora Aspen and Åmänningen. The school was an old red painted wooden building at one end was the school and at the other the teacher lived and in the attic they had rubbish that the children were allowed to go and look at sometimes. They had many subjects in school such as, geography, spelling, spelling and science. They also had gymnastics both inside and outside so there was no danger, says Ester on the tape recording from 1978.
The children left home at seven in the morning. They walked three kilometers to Strömbacken and there they waited for an old woman to come and pick them up from the other side. Sometimes there was ice so the children had to wait for half an hour and stand and freeze their feet off. Ester says that they ran around to keep from freezing and that it was no fun school route at all. When they arrived on the other side of Kolbäcksån, they walked a little bit more before reaching the school. When the children finally arrived, they were so frozen that they had to take off their shoes and sit in front of the stove. Once there was a child who froze his toes off. Even though they were wearing boots. Every day they had six lessons and the school day stretched from eight to half past four in the afternoon.
A teacher named Miss Lydia Svan worked at the school. She was only twenty-one years old when she came to the small farming village of Sundbo.
At first she didn't like it at all, says Ester on the tape, she longed to go back to the city.
She came from Stockholm and was born on Södermalm in Katarina parish in 1880.
Lydia Svan came from poor circumstances since she was clever and driven she got the opportunityto study to become a teacher without taking a matriculation exam. By training to be a teacher, she was better off than the rest of her family. She made good money in 1930, she earned 4,300 kroner a year and had a fortune of 4,000 kroner. She married the paper merchant in Västanfors in 1913. In 1916 they took in a two-year-old foster child who came from Katarina parish in Stockholm as Lydia herself. The child's name was Iris Justine Eriksson and she eventually acquired the same education as Lydia.
It went well for Lydia Svan. Poor Lydia, who had not enjoyed herself at all when she came to Sundbo, but with time and thanks to the children at school, she began to enjoy herself.
Ester says on the tape that Lydia Svan liked her school children so much. She was even out playing with them and Ester says that she was a nice teacher, Miss Svan.
In Tidning för lärarinnor( Newpaper for female teachers) 1899-04-07 it is written so beautifully that a teacher should love and respect her students, she was responsible for them, and loving and respecting them was part of her vocation.
It was the teacher's responsibility that love prevail in the classroom. Perhaps that was what Lydia Svan had read and which she also managed to convey in the small school in the middle of Bergslagen in Sweden.
The old woman who rowed them across the Kolbäcksån every morning when they were going to school. Click the images to see them bigger.
The photograph is from when Ester's siblings are visiting from America and they make an trip to visit the old woman and see there
childhood home nearby. Below, Ester tells Otto Bondeson 7 years, 1978 how she experienced the school.
Lakes
Brandbo is located on a peninsula between two lakes and Ester, was very close to water despite that she never learned to swim. Swimming was something only boys would do, her brothers could swim but not her. She resented that it was just so, that she and her sisters wouldn't be able to swim.
At the end of the 19th century, more than 1,000 people drowned a year, which corresponded to 2% of the population. It was the most common cause of people dying in accidents. Today, around 100 people drown each year, which corresponds to 0.02%.
Iceskating, on the other hand, everyone got to do that and Ester was very good at skating. It seems that it was a common way to get around in the winter on the lakes around Brandbo.
She also accompanied me and my siblings to the skating rink. She stood in the middle of the ice and instructed with fur and a fur cap on her head. She wasn't afraid to slip even though she was in her eighties.
Grandma's stories about ice skating include this nasty account from her childhood. When I heard Grandma tell this the first time, I shuddered. I even remember the place where I heard it. It was in grandma's apartment on Köpmansgatan, in her room facing the street in Ludvika.
This is how she told:
Grandmother's father, Carl Wilhelm, had been on the road and worked together with several men from the farms around Brandbo. On their way home, they skated across a lake. Carl Wilhelm knew the area better than the others and knew where there might be weak ice.
He warned the others when it came to an outflow from a stream and where there used to be weak ice. He said to them: Disperse yourselves! Disperse, you get too heavy together, you have to spread out! You pass!
He went ahead but the others didn't make it or didn't understand that it was serious and went through the ice, all together and disappeared into the water. No one survived and he could only stand and watch as they died. Then, grandmother said, he was given the sad job of going around the yards with the death messengers and telling them what had happened.
It was the hardest thing he had done, Carl Wilhelm.
Emigration to America
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the combination of decreasing mortality, among children, and high birth rates led to a rapid population increase. The result was that the population structure changed and an increasing proportion of the population consisted of children and young people.
It led to overpopulation in the countryside. This meant that not all children in the large sibling groups could inherit land to farm and there was little opportunity to save money to buy their own farm or other business. Instead, many were forced to remain servants on other people's farms or seek work in the growing cities. Many also chose to seek their fortune abroad and the great emigration to North America in particular began during this time.
In the picture above, Ester is standing with her brother Vilhelm, he was one of all the young people who emigrated to the USA. When he moved to America, that was the last Ester saw of him. He never came back to visit. He wanted to be a real American, stopped speaking Swedish and lived his life without seeming to miss his old homeland or family to much.
Signe goes to America.
Ester on the left in the picture and sister Signe on the far right in the middle stands their
friend Anna Lundholm in 1911.
Signe
When grandma's beloved sister Signe was going away with the America boat, they went to the photographer, the pictures are still there, there they are, saying Goodbye, it was so far away then, not like now with phones and Facetime. It looks so sad. They had slept in the same bed when they where smal.It was a bed which was a woodensofa during the days and a bed in the night. The bed was smal and to have more space Ester had her head in one direction and Signe had her feet in the same direction.The bed still stands iń my mothers hallway.
Ester also wanted to travel like the sisters, but her parents stopped her because Ester was the youngest girl and should take care of her parents when they got old and also work in Carl Wilhelms cafe.
Ester as maid
Ester had to settle for going to Stockholm and working as a maid. Ester was eighteen years old and 153 cm tall when she traveled to Stockholm. She was adventurous and wanted to go out into the world and see new things. In Stockholm, she had fun despite long working hours with a lot of work.
In 1912 there were the Olympics in Stockholm and Ester watched the competitions, then she and her friends went to Berns in Berzelii Park. Berns opened its doors in 1863.It’s legendary nightclub where they dined under crystal chandeliers and had fun. In the group of friends at Berns there was also Ester's admirer - a man who was also her brother Vilgot's friend.
In Stockholm, she had found a place as a maid with a family at Scheelegatan 17, 5 stairs up. It is the crossing Scheelegatan Fleminggatan on Kungsholmen.
She proudly told me many years later how much she worked. The duties included organizing the move to the family's summer house in the archipelago all by herselves. Ester had packed all the things and clothes needed for the whole summer.
She told me that it was common for the family to offer many dishes when they would have nice people for dinner, up to nineteen dishes, she said. Ester also knew her place and when she was going out on the town with the beautiful wife, she had to walk two steps behind and one to the side, such were the rules. She showed me and my siblings what it looked like when she walked two steps behind and one to the side.
Maids
The most common occupation for women at the beginning of the 20th century was probably domestic help. It was almost exclusively young women who worked in the profession during a transitional period, they lived at home with their employers and the salary was partly made up of board and lodging. The maid was not a worker in the sense that the labor movement considered work and workers.
For the labor movement, it was problematic that it was a professional category that consisted almost exclusively of women, that their work was unproductive considering that it did not lead to anything material being produced and that the work took place in the home. In addition, the maids worked in the homes of the middle and upper classes, which risked that they made an impression on the employers and made them unreliable in the class struggle.
The maid was difficult to organize. There was no union counterpart to negotiate with, as the housewives refused to accept the organization or to negotiate with them. The housewives rather wanted to consider the maid as part of the household and therefore a private matter where neither the labor movement, politics or legislation had anything to do with.
Even for women's issues the profession was problematic, despite the fact that it was a female profession. Women's issues women were themselves housewives and employed maids. If they were to combine their political work with family, they depended on maids. Of course, the maids wanted the profession to be regulated like other labor professions and to have the same rights as other workers. They wanted limited working hours, the right to leave and, above all, not to be treated with contempt and be treated like children. Since Ester worked as a maid between the years 1912-1915, she did not have regulated working hours or holidays.
It was much later that the maids began to organize themselves.
The move to Skinskatteberg
In 1915, Ester's parents wrote to her in Stockholm. They told her that she had to come home to, Skinnskatteberg, where the family had moved.
The First World War had begun it was getting hard to come by groceries in Stockholm because of the war.
Carl Wilhelm wanted to open a coffeeshop and he had decided that Ester should run the business.
It was just a matter of going home to dad and opening a cafe, Ester was not yet of legal age and she did as she was told.
The pants
It seems Ester was a bit wild when she was young. One time she came home to mom and dad wearing pants. It was so shocking, only boys wore pants and her mother felt so humiliated.
What would the neighbors think? She cried and got into bed in protest, she wouldn't get out of bed until Ester took off her pants.
Ester in a black swimsuit in the middle of the picture. Spex and fun when the siblings come home in the 1920s
Authority
In 1863 there had been a change in the law and an unmarried woman automatically became of age at the age of 25.
However, a possibility to request a declaration of incapacity was introduced, surely with the good intention of protecting the poor women who could not take care of themselves. To the legislators' surprise, few requested to be declared incompetent. Conditions did not change for married women. After the marriage, the husband became the woman's guardian and guardian.
When Ester was young, her father was her guardian until she turned 25. He decided important things.
Things that we in the 21st century in Sweden think are self-evident to be able to decide for ourselves. Where we will live and how we will live our lives.
The 1920s meant big changes it started with women getting the right to vote in 1919. In 1920 women officially came of age when they turned 21 the same rules as for men, the same rules for both sexes.
The women no longer had to have their husbands or fathers as guardians.
Ester lived in the countryside in a small town and laws and regulations are one thing but the local norm is another.
There was certainly a real lag in how people thought about women's right to live as they wanted.
Ester chose to live alone and even when she met her future husband, she was in no hurry to get married.
The ideal of women changed drastically during the 1920s.
Short skirts and short hair. There is also a change in the way women behave. So suddenly women can show their legs, have sex for pleasure and have their own opinions.
The motorcycle
Ester wanted to drive and therefore needed to get a driver's license.
She was practicing driving but on the day she was supposed to show her skills to the traffic inspector, the car before her drove into the ditch, and then
the traffic inspector went home. After that, Ester never tried to get a driver's
license again.
In the 1920s, Ester therefore drove her motorcycle instead. With the help of the motorcycle, she gained more room for action and she had control over her life. She drove her motorcycle and decided where and when to go.
Surely she needed the motorcycle to pick up and drop off goods in the various companies she worked in. She also had the freedom to go and see
friends when it suited her. It definitely gave her control over her life and she didn't have to depend on anyone.
Modern society is emerging
In this picture we see Ester driving a horse and carriage.
It's the old time and the new at the same time because if you look closely you can see how Ester's motorcycle is reflected in some kind of glass. Or is it a double exposure?
We see what certainly characterized the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the countryside. It was horse and carriage that was the norm, and Ester's motorcycle may symbolize the new. It is the modern age with industrialization and all that it entails that emerges during Grandma's life.
Ester could drive a horse and cart, but she was also one of the first women to ride a motorcycle in Dalarna at this time.
She was a woman who dared to try the new.
The businesswoman
After Ester's father Carl Wilhelm died in 1924. Ester decided to move to Smedjebacken in 1926 and start a tobacco business. It was her very own tobacco shop after she worked with her father in his cafe for many years.
A change that characterized the 1920s was that the labor market was opened up more to women and a new figure appeared in the Swedish social debate, namely the self-supporting woman. Self-supporting as a concept simply referred to the women who were responsible for their own livelihood. Ester was such a woman.
A few years later, her brother Valter wanted her to move to Långshyttan in Dala-Husby and work in his manufacturing business together with sister-in-law Dagny.
She decided to do as he wanted and moved to Långshyttan.