The article discusses two elusive components in the construction of bourgeois and middle class femininity in Sweden, 1870-1914: the corset and the mirror. Two popular genres of images are contrasted: images of corsets in Swedish fashion advertisements, and images of corsets and undergarments in Swedish fashion magazines. While fashion advertisements in general copied fashion magazine images, they chose a different path in regard of the corset and the mirror. The two objects, albeit important parts of the period's fashion, are made invisible in fashion magazines while clearly visualized in the advertisements. The purpose of Swedish fashion magazines was not only to present the latest fashion, but also to construct a conception of timeless womanhood well integrated into the predominant ideology of domesticity. Vanity, gossip, and erotic desires were staple goods of traditional misogyny and were hardly possible to express in fashion magazines. Advertising on the other hand communicated with the female consumer as an individual and presented her as a vain, sexual and emotional creaturewithout condemning her at the same time. Fashion advertisements emancipated, clearly not woman, but fashion itself, from the morals of domesticity.

This chapter analyzes the changing public opinion towards street entertainers, as expressed in nineteenth-century Swedish press, identifying a shift towards a discourse of securitization 1850. Until then, entertainers were seldom mentioned and occasionally seen as a positive element of urban social life; their services were often appreciated, and this in a country which otherwise had developed strong legal institutions for controlling and rejecting itinerant and marginalized individuals. From 1850, entertainers became more present in the press, the tone being almost completely negative, portraying them as threats to public morals and economy. Criticism focused on three issues. Firstly, entertainers were claimed to be beggars in disguise, parasites on the social body. Secondly, they made noise, making everyday life a nuisance to the urban population. Lastly, their use of children was used to emphasize their inhumane greed. Behind the shift was an increase in the numbers of entertainers following processes of proletarization in Europe, but also the growth of a middle-class striving to take control of city spaces. Between the lines, it becomes clear that entertainers still were popular among working classes. The discourse of securitization seems to have lacked the necessary audience, and the outcries against entertainers mostly without effect.

The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volume and explicates its guiding questions and conceptual framework. Our focus is on the Baltic Sea region, considered as a multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict and its specific legacy of hospitality. In terms of guiding concepts for the empirical chapters, this introduction combines issues of host–guest relations with the problems of securitization. It is our contention that hospitality in Baltic migration contexts, from the turn of the first millennium until the twentieth century and beyond, triggered security issues both on the part of arriving strangers and receiving host communities. Why and how were multifarious categories of guests and strangers—migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries, vagrants, vagabonds, etc.—portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity? Under what circumstances did hospitality turn into hostility? How was hospitality practiced and contained spatially? By focusing predominantly on coastal contexts as spaces for meetings and confrontations, we decouple the study of hospitality and migration from state-centered methodology. Instead, we offer a close-up view on hospitality dilemmas and practices of dealing with arriving guests and strangers, which we consider in transhistorical perspective. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters.

No abstract