Transgressing and Restoring Gender in Swedish Woodworking programs in Healthcare and Education, 1890-1950

From about 1890 into the 1920s, there arose a great interest among Swedish women to become woodwork teachers in the elementary school system. This female interest is fascinating, as is its eventual disappearance as a preferred option in teacher training. My project examines changing organizational forms for woodwork in education, where such “manual training” had moral and developmental overtones and objectives. I argue that the decline in female woodwork teachers coincides with rise of a new female occupation in the health care system: occupational therapy. This new health profession’s credo was, and still is, to adapt their treatments after the patient's own experiences and skills, which meant  female practitioners had to achieve necessary competence in traditional male spheres of labour and handicraft, including woodwork.

When woodworking reasserted a male identity in the school system, the woodwork teacher turned into parallel counterpart to the female handicraft teacher (who usually worked in textiles).  But the growing Swedish welfare state created opportunities for a new gender-specific professional category in OT.  Examining the de-feminization of the woodwork teacher and the gendered professionalization of OT in relation to the development of both the school system and the welfare state reveals how gender roles are created and challenged on the labor market for public service professions across education and health care.