Ingen far och ingen bror : Adelskvinnor i övergången mellan ståndssamhälle och modernitet

This master thesis examines the unmarried women of the Swedish nobility in connection with the modernization of Swedish society during the early 20th century. It does so by studying the lives and museum donations of the three noble sisters Rosensvärd from the perspective of Bourdieu's concept of habitus. The primary source material is museum objects from three museums, and one aim of this study is to increase knowledge about how material and written sources can complement each other. Previous research on the strategies of the nobility in connection with the dissolution of the estates after the representation reform has focused almost exclusively on men. To the extent that women have been part of previous research, it has been primarily in the capacity of marriage partners in demographic studies where marriage has been counted as one of the factors that signaled social upward or downward movement. Women often became part of the same strategy as men through their husbands or fathers and brothers. This study wants to examine the conditions for those women who could not or did not want to rely on a man. The thesis is divided into two parts based on the methods used. In one part, a biographical study of the Rosensvärd sisters' lives and family background is carried out, which is based mainly on church archives, newspapers and estate inventories. In the other, an object analysis is carried out on museum collections that the sisters donated in connection with the sale of their family estate. The study investigates what the content of the museum collections and donation context as well as the sisters' biographies can tell us about how they related to traditional noble habitus during the modernization processes of the 20th century. The study uses Anette Weiner's concept of inalienable possessions, which refers to physical objects that are strongly associated with a person or family and therefore cannot be disposed of in the same way as ordinary objects. A theoretical starting point is also Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field and capital, which are instrumentalized to fit the context of the study. From this, seven analytical categories have been identified and applied to the empirical material. The conclusion of the thesis is that unmarried noblewomen were able to maintain their noble identity long after the dissolution of the estate society. This is in line with what previous research has found about noble men. However, the results of this study show that the strategies of the unmarried women differed from those of the men. They had limited opportunities to compete within traditionally noble domains that were male-dominated, but found other ways to live in accordance with the values that constituted the noble habitus. The Rosensvärd sisters' donations to museum collections largely consisted of objects that could be considered inalienable possessions. Donating to museums was a way of safeguarding the integrity of family heirlooms, while at the same time contributing to the preservation of a noble cultural heritage.