Of proper Conduit : Private tutors in Stockholm and its environs 1793-1795

OF PROPER CONDUCT: PRIVATE TUTORS IN STOCKHOLM AND ITS ENVIRONS 1793–1795 This paper studies private tutors in Stockholm and its environs 1793-1795 by examining work advertisements written by said tutors. It is in part a continuation of a previous study of the education market in Stockholm 1798. It utilizes Yvonne Hirdman ’s gender theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic capital to analyze differences in what male and female tutors offered to teach, how they portrayed themselves and if any social groups could be ascertained. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used, where the quantitative method is partly influenced by the verb oriented-method from the Gender and Work (GaW) project and the qualitative method is influenced by hermeneutics. The study shows that most of the tutors were men, and of those men a majority were students, priests, educated men and officials. The female tutors did not use titles overall, but the subjects they offered to teach suggests most were in the mid- to upper mid layer of society. The French salon culture was dominating among the nobles at the end of the 18th century. This study argues that the salon culture was the cultural capital by which the tutors measured themselves. Because of their academic merits, men tended to use institutionalized cultural capital while women used only partly embodied cultural capital through their knowledge of the French language. Where men tended to use formal merits, women used a wider array of strategies. There were however a number of men who used strategies of weakness when faced with financial difficulties. Women taught mainly needlework and French, where female tutors offering to teach how to sew of clothes showed a shift from male professional tailors to female seamstresses. It is argued that Hirdman’s principle of segregation between men and women both affected the subjects the tutors were able to offer as well as the subjects they did offer