This article focuses on women’s business positions in Swedish porn publishing from the 1950s to the 1970s, i.e. when pornography was legalized and when sexually explicit magazines made their commercial breakthrough. The research draws on statistical information on women’s entrepreneurial roles in the overall publishing industry, which is then compared with women’s agency in porn publishing. According to the findings, women seem to have had a slightly more central role in pornography than within the mainstream publishing industry. The analysis is also expanded with details about a few key female pornography entrepreneurs, tracing their publications and business strategies connected to the Freedom of the Press legislation. It is argued that women’s presence in pornographic print and in the overall publishing industry were in fact similar, with a high ratio of family businesses. Women’s entrepreneurship in pornography thus followed a more general historical pattern whereby women engaged in small-scale business with relatively low barriers to entry.
This article is part of the project “In the shadow of the Swedish welfare state: Gendered entrepreneurship 1950-2005”, led by Prof. Lena Andersson-Skog and funded by Vinnova. The research was carried out at the Department of Economic History, Umeå University