Historical research often tends to focus on the radical and progressive forces of a period, highlighting movements and profiles at the forefront of change, formulating the new impulses.[1] The historiography of the women’s movement, in Sweden and elsewhere, has often had a focus on explicitly progressive (leftist and/or liberal) forces, actors and pioneering policy breakthroughs. While this may be understandable, it has resulted in a shortage of research on other actors in the political landscape, including those who more gradually came to accept and recognize gender equality as a positive value and political objective. The shortage of research is, in addition, augmented by the fact that political historians working with this period have not paid much attention to issues of gender equality policy or female politicians.[2]

Historically, politicians in conservative parties have been less feminist and less concerned with gender equality in comparison to political parties on the centre and left.[3] Still, gender equality policy today appears as a diverse and broad field, where groups from left to right attribute different meanings to concepts such as gender equality and feminism. In the 2000s, it has not been uncommon for right-wing Swedish politicians – especially female – to call themselves feminists. A growing scholarly research examining ‘the righting of feminism’ frequently assumes the incorporation of gender equality-goals in conservative parties to be a rather recent phenomenon, arising in the 1990s.[4] Here, a historical account has the potential to provide a genealogy that furthers our understanding and helps to explain the passing, in Sweden in 1980, of the first Gender Equality Act, forbidding gender discrimination, and the establishing of a Gender Equality Ombudsman (JÄMO) to offer a channel for complaints, both under a centre-right government.