Sámi schools, female enrolment, and the teaching trade: Sámi women’s involvement in education in early modern Sweden

Abstract

This article analyses Sámi women’s involvement in education in the Swedish part of Sápmi in the eighteenth century, both as students and teachers. During the eighteenth century, girls became increasingly frequent among the students. After the turn of the century, the schools achieved gender balance. Female enrolment was initiated around 1740, when the Sámi schools changed their recruitment policy in other respects, too. The explicit idea behind opening the schools for girls highlighted women’s better teaching opportunities. Excluded from the most formal teaching positions as vicars and schoolmasters, Sámi women could occasionally serve as ambulant catechists, a teaching trade where Sámi ethnic identity prevailed. Women more frequently appeared as ‘informants’ being awarded premiums for having taught individuals to read or master the catechism, and in their own households they dominated as teachers. Consequently, the more informal the teaching duties were, the higher the representation of Sámi women.