Elin Engström

Elin Engström
Born	1 January 1860  Klara Church Parish
Died	1 September 1957  (aged 97) Sankt Matteus
Occupation	Politician, women's rights woman

Augusta Eleonora "Elin" Engström (1860–1956) was a Swedish politician (Social Democrat) and trade unionist.^[1] She belonged to the pioneers of the labour movement, the Social Democratic movement, as well as the trade unionism and women's rights movement within the Social Democratic labour movement in Sweden.

Life

Elin Engström was the daughter of the bath house attendant Fredrik Carlsson (d. 1874); her mother was also employed as a bath house attendant. In 1878, she married the Cooper (profession) and trade unionist Jöns Engström (1849–1889).

Her husband died of tuberculosis, and she was left to support their six children alone. She supported herself with several temporary jobs such as writing letters on behalf of others, washing clothes and babysitting, but was still forced to place two of her children in an orphanage: at that time, it was common for poor parents to place their children in orphanages temporarily for economic reasons, and take them back when they could afford to take care of them.

From 1886 to her retirement in 1935, she worked as an office clerk on the Social Democratic newspaper and organ Social-Demokraten. Initially, this was a temporary volunteering work (the paper itself barely keeping afloat), but eventually, the paper was thriving along with the labour movement, and in 1904, Elin Engström was given a permanent position as the chief of the paper's subscription- and distribution office and was able to support herself as such.

Political career

Her husband was a co-founder of the Cooper Trade Union as well as pioneer member of the Social Democratic Association, and a co-founder when the association was transformed into a political party in 1889.

She was one of the first few women to become a member of the Social Democratic Association before it was organized into the

Further reading

• Elin Engström at Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Swedish. (July 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Elin Engström]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|sv|Elin Engström}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.