{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028659611992945325, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004409171075837742, 'mean_word_length': 5.149051490514905, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Childcare and Gender in Sweden c. 1600–1800

Feeding, holding, lulling, delousing, cleaning, swaddling, comforting, carrying, cradling, rocking, clothing, singing to, tucking in, keeping warm, admonishing, looking after, searching for, nursing, curing, praying for, burying . . . Childcare was a time-consuming and constantly on-going feature of everyday life in early modern society. Like cooking, tending to the animals, carrying water and fetching firewood, childcare was work that needed to be done every day regardless of the season. The variety of this work is striking and different tasks called for different kinds of competence, involved different degrees of intensity and probably had different statuses. In this society, practically everyone, regardless of sex, was busy working for a living.1 How, then, was childcare managed and organised and how was it combined with other work? This article deals with childcare as work in seventeenthand eighteenthcentury Sweden, focusing on the carers and their strategies. Who performed childcare? How were chores and responsibilities of different status divided within a household? Under what conditions was childcare carried out, in particular concerning demands to combine childcare with other tasks? How did the childcare work change during the period? A central argument is that there were distinct gender patterns of childcare and that most of the work was done by mothers. Despite the fact that many fathers were deeply involved in the well-being and welfare of their children, mothers did most of the actual toil and were responsible for finding strategies to combine childcare with other duties. I argue that this was an important part of the gender division of work and its power relations. However, I also suggest that the gender patterns of childcare included paternal responsibility of significant importance, and in a way that has not been previously recognised. Parents were important carers, but far from the only ones. Gender patterns are apparent also when it comes to ‘shared parenting’ – childcare performed by others than the parents.2 However, gender was not the only factor at work here. Age and household position also played a significant part in the hierarchical division of childcare tasks.