Our Friend in the north: Torbjörn Söderquist on the writer and activist Elin Wägner

‘For Wägner, peace with the Earth was the way to peace on Earth.’

Elin Wägner is not well known in the UK. But in Sweden she is famous as a feminist writer and activist. She was also a Quaker, which deeply influenced her life, her writing and her longing for social reform.

Elin Wägner had a deep emotional connection to the vicarages in the county of Småland in southern Sweden, where her grandfather and uncle served as vicars. Elin spent many summers there during her childhood. Despite not agreeing with the patriarchal and doctrinal Christianity that was practised there, she returned to live in the area later in life. Although she was respected by the locals, she was not popular with the farmers, due to her stand against the use of chemicals and the increasing mechanisation of agriculture, which she claimed destroyed important microorganisms in the soil.

Elin Wägner experienced the powerless position of women in society at first hand during the first world war. She had tried to live without religion as a source of strength in her life, but found no solace in that, especially as she had witnessed how leaders of the church sided with the political powers supporting the war. Her own life had by now begun to move in a Christian direction and in 1916 she wrote this in her journal:

‘The Christian truths have become so solemnly wonderful for me. I see them in a new light… Now I understand so very well the crucifixion and the fury, but what I cannot comprehend is the total deceit throughout Christian Christianity. The priests as defenders of the war, the advocates of hate and revenge, the support of the upper class, this is a dreadful mockery of the one whose name they bear witness to. I’ll become a Christian.’

The first time Wägner met Quakers was at international peace conferences. After the first world war she was invited to travel as a reporter with the English Quaker Ruth Fry in occupied Germany. She saw how the victorious countries mistreated Germany and worried that this would lead to a new war. Contacts with German, US and English Quakers became a turning point in her religious life, and it was here that she discovered a new way of being a Christian. An inner experience of God that leads to a mission to reform society was a form of spirituality that she could consent to. She described her encounter with Quakers in an article written in 1936:

‘When I started to work with the Quakers I discovered how to live in a way that was contrary to my own. Not discussing or understanding so much, not making so many plans, not expecting to accomplish great things, but instead quelling the nervous anxiety and pace and listening to the inner voice. Even if the fate of the world was at stake, helping one single human being to get on the right track again was not a waste of time. One didn’t always know what was big or small, important or unimportant.’

Her friendship with the theologian and author Emilia Fogelklou drew her into the group of people who started the Religious Society of Friends in Sweden in 1936. Here she found her spiritual home and in the silent Meeting for Worship and the loving trust of the worshipping community found strength, new courage and a direction for active social work. Here there was a long radical-pacifist tradition, an acknowledgement of women as strong and the idea that the whole of life was sacramental – that everything was a bearer of the holy.

It is easy to see Elin Wägner as a peace and suffrage activist. She helped to found Save the Children in Sweden, and the retail cooperative Swedish Home and International Work Camps. For a while she was editor-in-chief of the magazine Tidevarvet and tried to organise nonviolent actions in the spirit of Gandhi to persuade women to say no to the use of weapons when a new world war seemed inevitable.

Wägner was also a mystic and several people witnessed her listening and profound silence. She could remain silent in a discussion until she had something to say. When she did speak, her words were wise, calm and spiritually grounded. She could also be found sitting in deep stillness on a boulder beside the road or in the woods. She may have been contemplating the spiritual truths of the time and her own relation to them, so that her message came from a place of deep inner truth. 

Wägner also had a prophetic clarity for her age and stood up for what she considered to be right. She could be harshly critical too, but behind the cold exterior lay a warm and loyal compassion. Elin Wägner never depicted the world in black and white. No human being was wholly good or wholly evil. She believed that the ideal was a world that emanated from a reciprocal cooperation between man and woman in equal measure. In her book Alarm Clock (1941) she warned against the devastating consequences of male dominance and saw war as its logical result: ‘We have understood that the world can be conquered. But never its splendour. When the conquest of the world is complete, all its splendour will vanish.’ For Wägner, peace with the Earth was the way to peace on Earth.

Wägner hoped that women’s increasing influence in society would change it in a more peaceful direction. But she felt let down by women who didn’t stand up for peace across their own national borders. She wrote the following in a letter to Emilia Fogelklou in 1944:

‘I once thought that it would be women who would say that this was no longer acceptable. Now I believe that it will be Mother Nature through her children the animals and plants that will speak out about it. When we discover what our merciful Father has given us to live on, namely the soil (that world of living cooperating organisms), which we are about to destroy, all other problems will be disappearingly few. There is a chain from the living God to the living mushrooms that transfers nutrition from the humus to the roots of the plants, which is awe inspiring to think about, but it is also dreadful that the human link in this chain emancipates itself in both directions and believes that it is all-powerful.’ Elsewhere she wrote that ‘Caution, good management and care are the right ways to deal with nature’. A lesson as true today as then.

Torbjörn is from Sweden Yearly Meeting. Thanks to Mijke van Leersum and Sue Glover Frykman for translation.

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