This thesis argues that men’s violence, and women’s fear of that violence, constitute a central problem for democracy. Women’s possibilities of participating in society are drastically limited by their bodily integrity being threatened, both in public and in the home. As long as women lack the fundamental right to their own bodies, it makes no sense to speak of a functioning democratic order or equal citizenship for women and men.

The thesis seeks to investigate how men’s violence against women has been dealt with in Swedish politics from the 1930s to the 1990s. The raw material consists in the Swedish public record – public inquiries, parliamentary bills,reports and parliamentary debates – from the period in question. The issue of violence against women is limited to two phenomena: physical assaults on women, and rape.

An important question concerns what sort of representations of violence and sexuality, of gender and gender relations, dominate political life; and what sort of political measures these representations make possible. The thesis also presents,in terms of power analysis,an interpretation of public policy dealing with violence against women.

The thesis claims that it is possible to interpret public policy as partly challenging the gender order. In different ways political barriers are challenged, both in terms of what can be brought into the public arena as a political problem,and the way a problem so flagged comes to be framed. Bit by bit the naturalness and banality of violence is eroded. Violence against women becomes a question on its own terms and demands a direct public answer.

But the analysis also shows that public policy to a large extent is characterized by continuity. Two processes that reinforce the existing order are identified.The first process deals with how men’s violence against women is depoliticized. If the problem of violence is to win legitimacy as a political issue, it has to be defined and understood as something other than as part of a gendered order of domination and subordination. The second process that reinforces established gender power concerns how men’s political primacy is upheld in the public treatment of violence.The content and ambit of politics tends to be determined in relation to a male subject. When the male subject symptomatically becomes the departure point and central figure in political discourse – when it is he who sees and defines issues – women are constructed as the other, as the exceptional (even deviant) case.

The analysis shows that political discourse to a large extent rejects both the definition of violence in terms of gender power and measures based on that understanding. From the viewpoint that citizenship means equal possibilities to politicize one’s life conditions and situation,women’s citizenship under present conditions must, the thesis suggests, be assessed as highly conditional. In political life women’s practical possibilities are circumscribed by the continuing règle du jeu that their experiences must be capable of formulation as the same as men’s in order to gain political legitimacy.