Amid the stream of speeches and ovations at the Social Democratic convention, Carlsson vanished without trace for a whole hour. He’d asked his private chauffeur to drop him off at Astrid Lindgren’s apartment in Dalagatan, where Margareta Strömstedt was visiting. In the 1999 edition of her biography, she relates that the writer greeted the prime minister and “cheerfully gave him a dressing down, wagging her finger and promising reprisals if he didn’t do something about it. Afterward she patted him on the cheek like the little boy she considered him to be. His bodyguards stood and watched.”
Astrid the Environmental Party
The elderly Astrid Lindgren’s gentle yet firm handling of this powerful politician—a skill she had also exercised during the Pomperipossa debate—hints at the gender perspective that lay like volcanic subsoil beneath all the political causes she got involved in during the final twenty-five years of her life. When campaigning for animal welfare, Astrid Lindgren made no secret of the fact that the people fighting for better living conditions for Swedish livestock were two women, facing an array of male ministers, politicians, and senior figures within the agricultural industry. Nor did she think this was a coincidence. The majority of those men shared Mats Hellström’s view, though he didn’t dare articulate it until twenty years later, in the book Not a Bit of Filth: “Should a writer of fairy-tales be allowed to dictate modern-day food production as a birthday present from Ingvar Carlsson?”
Of course, two men could equally have decided to fight for more humane treatment of hens, pigs, and cows in Swedish farming, but as Astrid Lindgren observed in January 1986 in an open letter to Anders Dahlgren, former Swedish minister for agriculture, the popular animal welfare debates were dominated by women, as were the anti–nuclear power movement and the peace movement. In the letter she repeated the feminist mantra she had used during the Pomperipossa debate, threatening Dahlgren and his masculine supporters (with a twinkle in her eye):
Women in particular, I think—judging by the letters I’ve received—are coming out in force, wanting to see results. And women make up more than half the population of this country. Dear oh dear oh dear—woe betide us if they decide to get seriously angry! It’s not primarily political issues but ethical ones that need to be resolved if we don’t want to lose our standing as a cultured nation. I think it would be good to see some tangible results over the coming years, ideally before the next election. Can’t you talk to the prime minister and the minister for agriculture and other sensible people, maybe quoting that old folklorist on Swedish women: “Women are tough and strong and bake good bread with currants in it, but if they’re baited they’ll immediately go on the attack”?
You can almost see Lovis and Undis—the wives of the two robber chieftains in Ronia the Robber’s Daughter—before you, each standing in her woodland castle, each surrounded by a gang of men. Tough, strong women who bake excellent bread, cultivate their kitchen gardens, take care of their extended families, and show respect for nature. Both women know that men make the majority of decisions, but they also know that there are things in life their husbands have no control over or insight into, things they only partly understand. Ethical questions, for instance. In that sense, the men in Ronia the Robber’s Daughter are “pea-brains.” As a despairing Ronia tries to explain to Birk, just as Lovis and Undis tried to explain to their husbands: “Life is something you have to take good care of, don’t you see that?”
In a pioneeringly feminist country like Sweden, it’s remarkable that Astrid Lindgren’s name has never been linked with the controversial term “ecofeminism,” because in many ways her advocacy for environmental issues in the 1980s and 1990s suggests the connection. Astrid Lindgren would never have accepted such an absolute term, however, which refers to the much-criticized notion that there’s a connection between the patriarchy’s oppression of women and its unwillingness to protect nature and the environment. In her Introduction to Ecofeminism (Introduktion till ekofeminism), Lotta Hedström, former spokesperson for the Greens, writes that the Småland writer Elin Wägner “must be considered the first Swedish ecofeminist,” although she draws no connection between her and the environmental movement in 1980s and 1990s Sweden, in which Astrid Lindgren was an especially active participant.
Like Elin Wägner before her, Astrid Lindgren didn’t consider women better than men, and she never called herself a feminist. Yet she wasn’t shy about speaking up for women’s rights and gender equality when provoked, or when confronted with male prejudice or shows of force. Astrid Lindgren considered herself part of a generation that had continued women’s historic struggle to attain the same rights, opportunities, and responsibilities as men, without resorting to demonstrations or barricades. In this respect she resembled most of the women she associated with over the years: Elsa Olenius, Anne-Marie Fries, Eva von Zweigbergk, Greta Bolin, Louise Hartung, Stina, Ingegerd, and others.
It seems paradoxical that Astrid Lindgren never became a prominent member of the feminist movement, especially when you consider that she was the brains behind modern feminism’s undying role model: Pippi Longstocking. As the artist Siri Derkert once yelled across the table at Astrid during a ceremonial royal dinner: “Pippi’s the most distinguished feminist of our age!”
Yet it was only as an elderly woman in the 1990s that Astrid let go of some of her reservations about feminism and began sounding more combative, particularly with foreign journalists. A case in point: an interviewer from the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad visited Dalagatan in April 1992 and asked how Astrid felt about the movement. She answered: “I would be very eager to fight for women. Because in reality there’s still only one gender—male. Recently I saw a well-known American on TV, visiting somewhere in Europe, with a whole army of pinstriped gentlemen on his heels. Not so much as a skirt in sight. Not even among the servants was there a member of the female sex. And there are so many talented women. But when it really comes down to it, it’s still only men who count.”
Many of Astrid Lindgren’s power struggles with men indicate that she was acutely aware of gender politics. The way she forced Reinhold Blomberg into a corner in 1943 is a particularly clear example, when the aging, prosperous editor revealed his tightfisted side and tried to weasel out of paying child support for Lasse. Lassemamma’s letters were hard-nosed in tone, based on dry legal facts and with the constant threat of dragging Reinhold back into the courtroom, where he had already faced another furious woman in 1926–27. Putting further pressure on Lassepappa, she asked Stina to visit Blomberg in person and make it clear to him that this was serious—and that Stina’s sister wasn’t to be toyed with. In case Reinhold had forgotten that.
Another issue that demanded a feminist approach arose in fall 1957, in the form of a national debate about women priests. Were they conceivable—or permissible—in church? Senior figures in the church had strong opinions on the matter, and so did Astrid Lindgren. She outlined them in a letter to Louise Hartung dated October 18, 1957:
In my diocese, Linköping, not a single vote was cast in favor of women priests. Before the synod I was asked by a parish magazine called Linköpings Stiftsblad whether I would write something about the town for their Christmas issue. And since I’m a kind and obliging person, I said yes. But then I saw in the newspaper, in the Dagens Nyheter’s report on the synod, that the Linköping diocese was the only one where there wasn’t a single vote in favor, and so I got angry and wrote to the Linköpings Stiftblad, “Let women be silent in the assemblies, believe the diocese’s priests, like the apostle Paul. If newspapers had existed two thousand years ago, Paul would probably have said: let women also be silent in parish magazines. So that’s what I’ve decided to do. I will no longer be working with the parish magazine. I’m sure Paul up in Heaven will be satisfied with that.”
Twenty years later, Astrid Lindgren helped topple Olof Palme’s man-heavy government at the 1976 election, just as in 1988—with the help of another woman—she pushed Lex Lindgren through, although the law
in its final incarnation wasn’t quite what Astrid Lindgren and Kristina Forslund had hoped. The story drew fervent attention abroad. After astonishing news reports in the mid-1970s about world-famous Swedes being hounded out of their own country due to colossal tax bills, the new law helped “Sweden, the People’s Home,” regain its reputation as the globe’s most idyllic society, a place where even animals led happy lives.
Yet Astrid wasn’t finished with the fight for a more environmentally friendly Sweden. On the contrary: around 1990 she was drawn into another campaign for greater environmental awareness, emphasizing better food quality and—most important—the preservation of the open landscape in which she had grown up, and to which she owed so much. Collaborating with the politician Marit Paulsen and the biologist Stefan Edman, in June 1991 Astrid Lindgren published an article that caused a stir, one that should be read in the light of Sweden’s application for membership of the European Union (which Astrid voted against in 1994). It argued the following: “Our environment and our biologically species-rich cultural landscape need the kind of agriculture that produces food with nature, not against it.”
In subsequent years, several similar articles appeared in the agricultural newspaper Land, where Astrid’s younger sister Ingegerd had once been employed as a journalist. Aided by Volvo CEO Pehr G. Gyllenhammar and several other campaigners, Astrid was trying to drum up support for the newspaper’s petition for land conservation and area payments for environmentally responsible farmers. Like a true extraparliamentarian, she called upon Swedish farmers to organize a noisy protest march: “One thing is important, more important than anything else. For farmers to give their opinion on this issue, and not just through their organizations; no, every single farmer struggling on his farm should raise his voice. Speak up, cry out, tell people what things are like, tell people what you think is good and what you think is bad, for yourself and your animals and Swedish farming in general! . . . P.S.: I’m game for a Swedish farmers’ march. To push something through!”
The last major political fight of Astrid Lindgren’s life brought her back full circle. Back to life on the farm at Näs, where she and her family had lived in close contact with all kinds of people and animals, earth and crops, fields, meadows, and woods. Back to her happy Noisy Village–esque childhood. Those among her adversaries who claimed that Astrid Lindgren’s political visions were pure nostalgia, dreams unanchored in reality, seemed to be proved more and more correct as she aged. Whether in the animal welfare debate or the conservation campaign, the farmer’s daughter couldn’t hide how much she missed the “age of the horse,” which had been irretrievably outstripped by the “age of the machine.” She longed to return to an earlier stage in her own and her country’s development. As early as 1982, in a text published in the magazine Allers, “My Piece of Sweden,” she recalled with cheerful naïveté the paths and idyllic fields of her childhood, which came under threat in the 1990s from both local urban planning and large-scale European politics:
Narrow paths run through grassy fields enclosed by hedges, trodden from the outset by cows on their way to and from the pen where they’re milked. Cows and sheep have always walked here, keeping the grass suitably short. Children have always run about, picking wild strawberries among the ancient gray stones. Birdsong has always echoed here. Finches and chickadees have twittered, blackbirds have celebrated the bright early summer’s evenings, and cuckoos have called to their hearts’ content on early summer mornings. . . . A Småland field, an angel’s field, with children and animals and flowers and grass and trees and birdsong. Now soon to be gone.
Part Cyborg
When the magazine Välkommen inquired in 1976 how sixty-eight-year-old Astrid Lindgren was finding old age, she answered that she hadn’t reached that stage yet: “So long as I’m still working as usual, so long as I’m completely healthy, so long as I can sprint a hundred meters without getting terribly out of breath, I refuse to feel old. It’s not like I’m going round shouting for joy and thinking, ‘Oh, how young I am,’ but I don’t think of it as old age. Of course, when I suddenly can’t remember names or what I was supposed to be fetching from the kitchen, I realize it’s a sign of getting older, which I have to learn to live with.”
After the deaths of Elsa Olenius and her sister-in-law Gullan in 1984, and especially after Lasse lost his battle with cancer in 1986, the aging Astrid Lindgren entered a difficult phase. Her eyesight began to fail: she had trouble focusing on specific points and could no longer read, even with glasses. In a letter to Rita Törnqvist-Verschuur on January 10, 1986, Astrid introduced herself as a “cyborg with magnifying-glass spectacles and a hearing aid, but at least I’ve still got my teeth.” And when Vi came to Dalagatan for the author’s eightieth birthday in November 1987, she called herself half-blind and half-deaf, pointing out the two phones that rang at the same time, making the living room sound like a rural landscape full of bell-wearing animals.
From there it was only a hair’s breadth to being declared as good as dead. In Germany in November 1991, going on a badly translated interview in the Expressen, the Bild and Hamburger Abendblatt announced the aging writer’s tragic blindness and isolation from the outside world: “Ihr Haar ist wirr und die Augen starren in die Leere” (Her hair is disheveled and her eyes stare emptily into space). When Astrid Lindgren got wind of this grievous news she asked her private secretary, Kerstin Kvint, to reach for the typewriter—Astrid could no longer see well enough to type—and dictated a few letters. The first was dispatched on December 2, 1991:
Herr Redacteur, ich glaube, es war Mark Twain, der gesagt hat: “Das Gerücht von meinem Tod ist erheblich übertrieben” [Dear Editor, I believe it was Mark Twain who said: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”]. . . . After having read your gripping article of November 30 in the Hamburger Abendblatt, I’d like to say that reports of my “blindness” are also greatly exaggerated. All I told the Expressen (the paper you’ve clearly got this from) was that I can’t read anymore (and actually I can, if I use a strong magnifying glass). Reading your article, one is seized with sympathy for the exhausted, half-blind author, who barely has the strength to dictate a letter. Neither my secretary (whom you didn’t contact, by the way) nor I recognize anything in your description. Just for fun, I totted up the letters I’ve dictated over the last few days in only a few hours—and it came to 18.
The two German newspapers had described how the elderly Astrid Lindgren sat all day at the window, gazing down into Vasa Park, at the children she once had depicted so vividly. Astrid objected to being relegated to the role of spectator: over the course of that year she had been on trips to Russia, Finland, Poland, Austria, Germany, and Holland, and she was soon off to Poland again. Afterward, however, she would be sure to sit in the window, take a quick breather and watch life pass her by in Dalagatan and Vasa Park.
Kerstin Kvint could attest to Astrid Lindgren’s flourishing capacity for work throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s. Having previously worked with Astrid at Rabén and Sjögren, she now visited Dalagatan twice a week to sort out the mail, pay bills, fetch packages, conduct telephone conversations, and write all the letters Astrid dictated: “She maintained a fantastic pace all the way into her eighties, actually. Then she got age-related macular degeneration, which created problems for her eyes. Yet despite that, she always had a precise idea of how our meetings should go, and dictated lots of letters at a furious pace. Others were the kind I could sort out, with her approval. I might suggest an answer to a letter, and she would say, ‘Yes, write it!’ Or she would say, ‘You’re much kinder than I would have been.’”
In the 1990s, however, Astrid Lindgren’s life grew increasingly more difficult, bearing out something her elderly mother had once told her: “The last quarter is the worst.” One by one her old friends passed away, and in December 1991 she lost her beloved former schoolmate Anne-Marie Fries, who died after a painful period of illness. On January 5, 1992, Astrid made a note in her diary, w
hich by now had been reduced to brief summaries and retrospective appraisals around the New Year. As ever, she took a view on world history, as well as on life for the Ericsson-Lindgren-Nyman clan and her circle of close friends: “Anne-Marie died on Dec. 7 after a long and tragic stay at the hospital. I visited her at Blackeberg Hospital once a week for several years. But our 77-year friendship came to an end on December 7 at ten o’clock in the morning. I had wished that death would free her from all that sadness, but when it actually happened it felt unbearable. It’s wrong to say that our friendship stopped after 77 years. Our friendship endures even though one of us is dead.”
Anne-Marie Fries was buried on her parents’ plot at Vimmerby Churchyard, which the old best friends from Prästgårdsallén—and former cocompanions on the walking tour to Ellen Key’s house in 1925—had agreed they would haunt together after they were both dead. As ever, Astrid would be the clever and brave one, Anne-Marie the strong one. And just as in childhood, they would fight with all the boys, but never with each other.
Did the loss of Anne-Marie make Astrid fear her own death? The Dagens Nyheter put the question to her in an interview printed on April 10, 1992. “No, it really didn’t. I have nothing against dying. But not tomorrow. There are things I’ve got to do first.” Stina and Ingegerd said the same thing, and throughout the 1990s the bond between the Ericsson sisters remained strong. This bond was rooted in their childhood, which Astrid had immortalized in three Noisy Village books as well as the two Mardie books that came out sixteen years apart (1960 and 1976). Astrid was represented by older sister Mardie, Stina by younger sister Elisabeth, and Ingegerd by the baby of the family, Kajsa, who is born at Christmas and welcomed by her big sisters as a “blessed gift” the next morning.