page_title: Kata Dalström
section_title: Social Democrat
hierarchical_section_title: Kata Dalström / Social Democrat
caption_attribution_description: English: Swedish socialist Kata Dalström in the rostrum in the early 20th century. Svenska: Kata Dalström på ett av sina "härjartåg" i början av 1900-talet.
context_page_description: Anna Maria Katarina "Kata" Dalström, née Carlberg, was a Swedish socialist and writer. She belonged to the leading socialist agitators and leftist writers in contemporary Sweden, and has been referred to as "the mother of the Swedish socialist working class movement".
context_section_description: Opposed to authoritarian discipline and conservative views already as a child, she came to be a sympathizer of liberalism and then Marxism and socialism by her intellectual contacts, particularly Ellen Key, Knut Wicksell and Fridtjuv Berg. She studied socialism and contacted leading socialist such as Hjalmar Branting and Fredrik Sterky.
  In 1893, Kata Dalström joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party. The following year, she became a member of the Social Democratic Women's Club, Stockholms allmänna kvinnoklubb, and a travelling lecturer or "agitator" for the Swedish Social Democratic Party. As a lecturer, she participated frequently as a freelance writer in the Swedish socialist press, such as in Socialdemokraten, Stormklockan and Politiken. It is as a lecturer she became most famous, and she traveled as such all over the country, being the first of her sex in this position. She participated in the Social Democratic Party congress in Stockholm in 1897, Malmö in 1900, and Stockholm 1902.
  In 1898, she became a member of the social democratic party's executive comity in the district of Stockholm, and in 1900-1905, Kata Dalström was the first woman elected as a member of the executive committee of the social democratic party, as well as any Swedish political party. She served as the Swedish delegate at the International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen in 1910.
  As a lecturer, she was initially engaged in the organizing of the working class women, but expanded to include all the spheres of the working class movement. She placed her main focus in trade union activity, organizing the workers of the textile industry, railroad, miners and others within the trade union, as she regarded strikes as an efficient method to achieve suffrage. She was engaged in Swedish trade union work from 1898, and a member of the comity organizing the great strikes of 1905, 1908 and 1911. With her powerful agitation, she reportedly had the ability to awake great enthusiasm: her fiery, aggressive and drastic speeches made her one of the most popular and efficient agitators of the Swedish working class movement, and her ability to enthusiast the masses and give them courage to keep fighting during conflicts with the authorities and in the midst of disappointments, especially during the great strikes of 1902 and 1909, has been described as an unusual one.
  Kata Dalström supported women suffrage, but she never engaged much in the question, because she regarded it as politically necessary to introduce full male suffrage before the issue of women suffrage could be properly raised without damaging the transition to democracy. In 1905, she supported the dissolution of the union of Sweden-Norway.
caption: Kata Dahlström as lecturer
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