“We have seen this competition, this race to build excessive arsenals without meaning. My message here today will have to be that I believe the world is sick. ”
That’s what Alva Myrdal said, with his typical frankness, in 1971, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
He was born at the dawn of that century, in a very different world, in which there were no nuclear weapons and his native Sweden was almost unrecognizable: a land of farmers, poor and patriarchal.
“At the beginning of that century, Sweden was almost the poorest country in Europe and Alva could not go to primary school because it was not allowed for girls to do so wherever she lived, in the countryside,” she told the BBC her daughter, Kaj Foelster.
Her father, Albert Reimer, had little formal education, but was widely read.
Young Alva devoured her full library of books by German and Swedish socialists and philosophers, which convinced the father “to support l so that could study , but you they saw that they pay teachers outside of school. ”
In addition to what she learned in those private lessons, Alva was instructed about politics and ideas of social justice from her father, who was one of the first members of the Social Democratic party that would dominate Swedish politics during the middle of the 20th century.
Reimer was interested in new ideas, ideas that his eldest daughter soon absorbed.
“Since he was three or four years old, he would sit under from the table during the meetings to listen to the debates of these men, ”his daughter told the BBC Witness History program.
Love on a bicycle
To the 17 years, Alva met to a student who changed his life.
While on vacation, Gunnar Myrdal went on a bike tour with friends and one day, by chance, stopped at the family farm in Alva.
“He thought he could boast of everything he knew, but when she asked him to read (the German philosopher Arthur) Schopenhauer, he was surprised it gave. Thus began that great love “.
They got married in 1924, when she had 22 years and imagined that this union was going to be a collaboration based in friendship, and that they would live, study, write and have adventures together.
Alva went to Stockholm to meet Gunnar at university. He studied law and later economics, a subject in which he would later win a Nobel Prize. She studied librarianship.
In 1929, when they were offered the opportunity to spend a year in the United States with a travel scholarship, they took advantage of it, although they had to leaving his son Jan, who was not even two years old, with the family in Sweden (something that, according to his other daughter Sissela Bok, Alva later considered one of the great mistakes of his life).
“That should not happen to Sweden”
For both Alva and Gunnar, that was a turning point.
They reached a US on the cusp of the Great Depression. And when they traveled around the country, what they saw surprised them.
“It was there and at that moment that they became really politically conscious. They were terrified that in the richest country in the world had so much poverty and they were convinced that this should not happen to Sweden ”, says Foelster.
A few years after their return to Sweden, Gunnar and Alva published a book that electrified to the country .
And it was a topic in biga: how to improve the country’s birth rate, then the lowest in Europe.
Published in 1934, in “The question of the crisis in the population” they argued that, to encourage people to have more children, it was necessary that there be state aid.
There should be free medical care, contraceptives and school lunches; universal social benefits and better, more affordable housing.
Women should have the freedom to work or study by creating places where their children can be cared for during the day.
Alva and Gunnar argued that once all Swedes felt that they were assured a decent basic standard of living , they would choose to have children.
And it worked.
“They put forward ideas that would allow all young families to get their place in society. That way, they would want to have children. It was the most widely read book and almost all of those reforms came true. That is what is called the Swedish welfare state ”, explains Foelster.
The Golden Couple
She and her sister grew up at a time when their parents became famous, a golden couple who defied old ways.
Foester remembers that “they were attacked… a lot, but my mom never got angry. It was a society mired in political change. ”
“ We had wonderful discussions. Gunnar investigated the questions deeply and Alva was always looking for solutions; He said that there always had to be something that could be done ”. Alva was described as the most modern woman of her time. Like many today, she juggled work, children, and a successful husband who wanted her help. But in the decades of 1930 Y 1940 there were not so many working outside the home. How did you manage?
“ Being very strict with time . Since 6: 00 on the dot it was our moment: for two hours we could have it just to ourselves “.
At 8: 00, count your daughter, Gunnar’s voice could be heard demanding her attention.
“He managed a kind of time economy.”
The odd couple
Alva continued to campaign during those years: she founded the first school in Sweden to train preschool teachers. And she saw how, one after another, the ideas that she and Gunnar had articulated were adopted by Sweden’s new welfare state.
But it also became clear that this collaboration on which it was supposedly based the union with her husband was unidirectional .
Gunnar was a brilliant economist, but also a petulant and demanding man. Everything was subordinate to his work, including his wife .
When the Carnegie Corporation chose him to lead its monumental study on “The Problem of black American ”, there was no doubt that his wife would leave the Social Pedagogy Seminar to attend him in the USA.
When, in 1940, it seemed likely that Gunnar was named Swedish Minister of Commerce, Alva withdrew her name from among those being considered for Minister of Education to avoid a conflict.
When Julian Huxley asked Alva the following year to be the director of the newly formed the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), she rejected him because her husband did not want to move to Paris, the headquarters of the agency.
However, he wanted to head the UN Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva and asked his wife to convey her interest and n your rejection letter . He got the job. True to his principles, however, it wasn’t until after World War II that Alva felt able to quit and move onto the international stage.
Free for … so much!
In 1949, was the first woman to be offered a senior position UN level : head of the Department of Social Affairs in the secretariat in New York.
The following year, she went to Paris to direct the Division of Social Sciences of Unesco .
On 1956 published, in collaboration with the Austrian sociologist Viola Klein, “The two roles of women” , an influential work that was published before the advent of the second wave of feminism but which anticipated many of s his arguments.
And he also predicted, inadvertently, a pain in his own future.
“Given that in the field of parenting there is the extraordinary situation that the product is in a position to judge both the producer and the production process, it is almost useless to aspire to perfection .
“A Once they are old enough to read psychological literature, many children will still blame their parents for committing one or the other sin or both. ”
But before those words were adjusted to his story, he still had a lot to do, among others …
- She was chosen as sent from Sweden to India , where she remained until 1960.
- Wrote “Our responsibility for the poor: a social foreground of development problems” .
- She was elected to the P Parliament as a Social Democrat.
- Planned and later chaired the International Peace Research Institute from Stockholm.
- She became the only minister of D esarme of the world.
- Founded Mujeres por la Peace.
- She was awarded the first Norwegian People’s Peace Prize.
But above all, for two decades he devoted his energy and passion to one of the great themes of the Cold War: nuclear disarmament .
And in 1962, the Swedish government appointed her as Sweden’s chief negotiator in the UN Eighteen Nations Disarmament Committee.
Army against madness
For her, l he growing arms race was irrational and dangerous.
“He was not a radical pacifist,” his daughter clarifies, “but he said that he did not understand how some people could be so crazy as to watch the arms race as a solution. ”
He insisted that disarmament would provide much greater security for both the superpowers and all the peoples of the world.
“He really liked the idea that there would be a whole opposition army against this militarization, ”says Foester.
With a powerful women’s movement backing her, Myrdal assembled a coalition of non-aligned voices to advocate concrete solutions for disarmament , as nuclear-weapon-free zones and a treaty for the total prohibition of nuclear tests supervised by seismic stations and satellites.
“He arrived optimistic because he believed that nobody could be that crazy, but after 10 years he wrote the book ‘The disarmament game’ to tell the world what he had seen: that the two great powers did not even have the I have no desire or the intention to stop, ”recalls Foelster.
“ I cannot give you good news about the good work in the disarmament negotiations. The truth is that what we have been seeing is a game, nothing more than a game “, declared, disappointed, Alva Myrdal.
Due that there was no real disarmament after the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1971, considered that his efforts were a failure.
However, he had demonstrated the leadership capacity of the women in a technically complex and crucial area of Cold War diplomacy, and her proposals later paid off.
But she didn’t see them
“In the other environments in which I had worked I had seen progress, but in this one, no and when she won the Nobel Peace Prize I was very tired; said that e ra a little too late “, her daughter told the BBC’s Louise Hidalgo.
The award was given to him for his work for nuclear disarmament when he was 80 years.
Days after the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection, had to endure the pain of seeing her son turn publicly against her and her husband.
Jan Myrdal, from 22 years, author of works of fiction and political literature, published a book whose title can be translated as “Childhood”, but also as “The verdict of the child.”
And that last one is what it really was.
The book led to a series, it was read on the radio on weekends and several reviews were published in Swedish newspapers with headlines such as “I hate my mother and father because they never gave me love ”.
Alva Myrdal died four years later, in 1986.
On 1991, the writer and moral philosopher Sissela Bok published in 1991 “Alva Myrdal: memories of a daughter”, a clear answer to the darkness of the shadow that her brother had hovered over her mother.
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