"Vi som gjorde det tuffaste jobbet för magraste kosan" : En studie av hur tjänstemän berättar om genussegregering och -hierarkisering i statens tjänst under 1900-talet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this essay is to examine in which ways employees of the civil services experienced that gender affected their working life during the mid-20th century, how they recount this several years later and how their stories can be interpreted. The source material is a collection called “Civil servants’ memories”, which can be found in the archives of Nordiska Museet and to which civil servants have contributed written stories of their lives for research purposes. In order to analyse these stories, theories of narrative analysis, presented by gender historian Emma Strollo in her 2013 doctoral thesis, and research on women's work are used. By reading the stories, a few common themes could be distinguished whereupon those that in some way pointed at differences between women and men's opportunities and social existences were singled out for further analysis. The study shows that gender to a large extent affected civil servants’ working life, for example, because women practically always had subordinate occupational positions in relation to men and thus more often suffered both poorer working conditions and lower pay. In addition, the fact that women were expected to be the ones to care for their children and households meant that their working life was negatively affected. The study also shows major differences in the way women and men tell the stories of their working lives. Among other things, the women of the collection tend to focus on the hierarchical relationship between the sexes to a greater extent than men. Furthermore, the fact that the stories were written a relatively long time afterwards may have affected the narrative of the texts because the stories are based on memories and could have been influenced by more recent reflections.