Hertopia:Women’s Welfare Landscapes in Sweden, 1960s and 1970s

Modernist neighbourhoods constructed in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s were pillars of welfare state ideology, developed through government research for life, work, and play. Normative, standardized designs would promote a socially and economically equal society, centred on the nuclear family and hopes of liberating women by making domestic work more efficient. But even with an explicit focus on women across Swedish research, in industry, and in government design guidelines, these visions of collective living left modern women’s social roles ambiguous. While multifamily residential areas were meant to support women’s new professional roles in paid labour, community and domestic chores remained assigned to ‘mothers’ and ‘housewives’. In turn, women residents crafted a delicate balance between the promises of emancipation and the more limited realities they found on the ground. We argue that women’s efforts fostered a ‘hertopia’, a spatial practice within systematized welfare: they used their dual and ambivalent status as both breadwinners and caregivers to adapt and enact spatial and social change when faced with the shortcomings of their environments. Connecting government reports, building norms, and media accounts from the 1960s and 1970s with interviews with long-time women residents in the modernist landscapes of Sweden, we explore discrepancies between welfare-state design logics and women’s experiences of newly constructed neighborhoods. Through hertopia, women not only demanded the idealized spaces and services they had been promised — they co-opted and reproduced new social and spatial practices.