Var trogen i allt - Doria

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conducting a free text search in the material.
In addition to the friendship albums, interviews with album users
have also been used as a foundation for the research, together with
questionnaires and notes on the tradition. In order to create a context,
mainly for the earlier material, research on women’s childhood backgrounds,
reading habits and ideals have been studied
The tradition of women keeping friendship albums developed during
the fi rst half of the 1800s and was at its peak just before and after the
turn of the century. Initially, in the early years of the 1800s, it was mainly
young girls from aristocratic families that kept friendship albums.
Then the tradition spread to the daughters of vicars and girls from the
higher middle classes. The earlier ideals for these women were that
they should be moderately educated, so that they could be expected to
raise their children in the right way.
The educational program for women was partly based on the 1700’s
philosopher Rousseau thoughts on the characteristics, upbringing and
social position of young women, in an era when girls needed to learn
early to subject themselves to constraints and to only have very limited
freedom. A girl was raised to the submission that was to follow her
throughout her whole life, submission to men.
The subordinate position of women was mainly justifi ed with ideological
arguments. The most important of these were the religious tradition
from the Old Testament, St Paul, the Fathers of the Church and
Luther, summarized in the Lutheran catechism. The calling that God
had given to women was to be a wife-mother-homemaker and her domain
was the home. This understanding was still refl ected, long into
the 1800s, in Swedish church literature, prayer books, sermons, wedding
speeches and funeral eulogies. This image was of a quiet, humble,
modest and devoutly deserving woman, who through submission to
men and in marriage and childbirth saw her life’s task, and almost the
only way to salvation.
The Romantic period’s ideal woman had a very pronounced and unambiguous
profi le. It permeated all types of written descriptions of the
middleclass woman and her accomplishments in the Western world:
offi cial documents, fi ctional literature, articles in newspapers and magazines,
books on how to raise children and books giving advice. The
same ideals can also be found in children’s books and magazines of this
period. This supports the use of investigations into similar sources in
order to create a context for the older tradition of friendship albums.
The up bringing and development towards being good Christian
people was described in the children’s books for girls in the middle
of the 1800s and the aim of the characters in the novel was to practice