Lisa Larsson in the dairy on Mackmyra estate, Gävleborg. Taken by an unknown photographer in the early 1920s. Länsmuseet Gävleborg, Gävle.
The expansion and mechanization of the dairy industry transformed the labor process for women, who continued to be responsible for milking and making butter and cheese. In Sweden, in contrast to other countries in Western Europe and North America, the centralization and industrialization of milk processing did not mean that skilled women were immediately replaced by men. Instead, women with experience in farm dairying who were interested in pursuing this occupation were formally trained and certified as dairymaids who could manage dairies by themselves, sometimes supervising male laborers and female assistants.
Dairies that processed milk into butter and cheese for sale or export were often photographed by professionals hired by large companies to publicize their modern manufacturing plants. Their sparkling, tiled interiors and personnel uniformly clad in white signaled the purity and high quality of their products to prospective consumers. Many images show the close interaction between skilled dairymaids and the large-scale machinery they controlled, which were not automatic; the biochemical processes involved required continuous monitoring and adjustments of time and temperature. The industry, which was one of the largest and most ubiquitous in Sweden, employed trained women as well as men for positions that required a fusion of mental and manual labor.
Lisa Larsson was in charge of the dairy at Mackmyra estate near Gävle. This attractive young woman, who is identified by the masculine form as a dairyman (mejerist) instead of the feminine dairymaid (mejerska), stands in an authoritative pose next to the array of belt-powered machinery and boiler-fired steam pipes she controls. Mackmyra was an old estate whose agricultural operations were always accompanied by industry: first a forge and iron works, next a dairy, then a lumbermill and factory where a famous strike took place in 1906, and now a whiskey distillery.
Although we know nothing more about this woman or the person who took her photograph in the 1920s, this image bears a striking resemblance to Gunnar Lundh’s depiction of the older farm woman straining milk outside the cowshed. Significantly, Lisa stands alone, clad in a dairymaid’s signature white cap and apron, dark skirt, black stockings, and wooden clogs, which kept her from slipping on the wet floor. The sleeves of her light-colored, print blouse are rolled up past the elbow, revealing her muscular arms, and the ensemble is cut generously enough to allow her to bend, reach, and move freely. Lisa gazes directly at the camera without any self-consciousness about being portrayed in her workplace. She is presented as dignified and womanly, physically strong, and capable of carrying out complex tasks without supervision. The sale of dairy products brought considerable income to the estate that employed her, assuring her of an independent livelihood and place to live.
Miss Anna Rasbo, cowshed foreman at Fogelstad. Julita estate, Södermanland. Taken by Axel Fredriksson around 1933. Nordiska museet, Stockholm.
Women students came to Julita Manor, a large and profitable estate on the fertile plains south of Stockholm, to learn to manage cowsheds and dairies. Julita had established a mechanized dairy in 1884 and trained young women like Lisa Larsson to become skilled dairymaids. They took command of new and rapidly changing technologies in whose development they themselves had a hand. At Julita, the landowner’s unmarried daughter, Emma Tamm, learned to manage the estate and advocated women’s rights to vote, hold elective office, and enter professions. In the 1920s, she expanded the estate’s program to include training women as cowshed mangers and laboratory technicians in dairies.
The most striking feature of the portraits taken at Julita is that several students chose to wear high boots and trousers. Anna Rasbo, who instructed them and supervised the cowshed, presented herself in an even more gender-bending manner. Wearing trousers tucked into high boots, an ill-fitting, military-style raincoat, and a round hat with a band and brim, she posed outdoors with a dog sitting at her feet and her left hand holding a horse by its bridle. This unmarried woman who exercised authority not only assumed a manly mode dress but also controlled animals that were more often associated with men, suggesting that she occupied an unusual position between conventional modes of femininity and masculinity.
The photographer, Axel Fredriksson (1893–1971), grew up on Julita, where both of his parents were employed. When he taught himself photography, the women teachers and students there were comfortable with his portraying them in the clothing they preferred.
The photographs of dairymaids taken by dairymaids of each other or by people they knew well differed sharply from those taken by professionals at the behest of their employers.
Student dairymaids at Blomberg’s Dairy School in 1933, holding implements used in their work. From the collection of Asta Carlsson Andersson, Archive 143, Västergötlands Museum, Skara.
Commercial photographers arranged these women and men in a few conventional ways, regardless of the company involved. Young women studying to become dairymaids were typically posed on the dairy’s loading dock holding the tools of their trade. Depicting them away from their machines and with hand tools made them resemble domestic servants, but that illusion of cleanliness was punctured by the black clothing of the woman whose turn it was to tend the steam boiler.
In contrast to these group photographs taken by outsiders, women dairy students’ own photos gather everyone who worked with them, including the experienced women who managed the dairy and instructed them and the occasional young male laborer or older machinist.
Workers at Värsås cooperative dairy. From the collection of Linnéa Dahlin Olson, Archive 143, Västergötlands Museum, Skara.
This informal group photograph taken in 1932 or 1933 shows all the personnel in their work clothes: Märta Olsson, who graded the milk at the dairy where she had been a dairymaid before she married; Nanna Karlsson, a dairy student; Gerda Johansson, the manager; and Linnéa Dahlin Olson. In the middle stands Elsa Andersson Lindström, clad in street clothes, who had come back to visit her friends in her former workplace. Behind the women stands Pelle Andersson, the machinist.
Consider two contrasting photographs of Tora Gustavsson Kroon with her coworkers.
At the small butter churn in Örebro dairy. From the collection of Tora Gustavsson Kroon, Box 2, Folder 24, Archive 143, Västergötlands Museum, Skara.
This photograph, taken in 1927 by a commercial photographer for the large cooperative that owned this dairy, shows Tora Gustavsson Kroon as a 20-year-old student. Behind Tora stands a smith she identified on the back of the photo as “Brand.” To the right is Anna Jonsson, Tora’s friend and closest coworker, and an unnamed “helper from the smithy.”
The photographer has arranged them as if they were two couples, so the men seem to dominate the women visually and physically. This conventional composition is more pointedly gendered than those that are segregated by sex and occupation. While Brand’s left arm appears to be around Tora’s shoulder, she is leaning on the butter churn with her hands clasped demurely in front of her apron. Anna, too, clasps her hands in front, while the smith’s helper leans casually in her direction and rests his hand on her right shoulder. These men were the young women’s colleagues, not their supervisors or friends, and they did not work in this room. Yet this image poses the two women in a subordinate and suggestively intimate relation to these two men. It resembles many photographs from the period that show courting or married couples who worked together. These visual conventions make the situation appear to conform to hierarchical and heterosexual social norms. But Tora’s personal life revolved around her relationships with her older sister, who was also a dairymaid, and her female coworkers.
Dairymaids holding cheeses at Vretstorps dairy during the late 1920s. From the collection of Tora Gustavsson Kroon, Box 2, Folder 24, Archive 143, Västergötlands Museum, Skara.
This photograph was taken two years later, when Tora was working at a cheese dairy. She and her coworker, Ruth Bergdahl, posed outside the dairy so a friend could take their picture. They present themselves as attractive and feminine, and their attire resembles that in other portraits of young women taken in the late 1920s. Their summer clothes are light and comfortable, with short skirts and short sleeves that allow them to move freely and reveal the contours of their bodies.
What differentiates this photo from contemporaneous images of the slim and genteel young women of the urban middle classes is Tora and Ruth’s deliberate exhibition of their physical fitness and the products of their labor. Proudly and playfully, they display the muscular arms they have developed and two of the many heavy cheeses they made, wrapped, soaked in brine, lifted, rubbed with salt, and turned every day for months in the dairy’s cellar, where the shelves were so high that they often had to reach up over their heads. In this view, physical strength and feminine attractiveness are presented as compatible.
