Wallpaper makers - self-sufficient and skilled in 18th-century Stockholm

Eleven women were granted permission to print and paint wallpapers as manufacturers in Stockholm during the period 1739-1759. Based on existing research, wallpaper makers should not have existed. Professional skills in the capital's manufactories should have been an exclusive male monopoly, but this study shows that the wallpaper makers' performance was very much comparable to that of the wallpaper makers. The aim of the project is to provide in-depth and nuanced knowledge of women's agency and independent professional activity in the early modern period. Thanks to the microhistorical method and the biographical presentation, important and often surprising causes and driving forces behind women's independent professional activities have been identified. The comparison of wallpaper makers among themselves offers a colorful and varied palette of social identities, material resources and skills, from which three rather distinct profiles of female agency emerge that do not follow expected patterns. What remains is the editing of the collective biography of the wallpaper makers, which will be published by Stockholmia Research and Publishing in 2020.