Karin Dorothea Wilhelmina Åhlin (25 November 1830 – September 30, 1899) was a Swedish educator. She was the founder and director of the ''

Åhlinska skolan Åhlinska skolan (Åhlin School), or Åhlinska flickskolan (Åhlin Girls' School), was a girls' school in Stockholm, Sweden. Active from 1847 to 1939, it was one of the first schools in Sweden that offered serious academic education to female stu ...

'' in Stockholm, and its principal from 1847 to 1899.

Biography

Karin Åhlin was born and raised in Stockholm as the eldest daughter of Major Paul Pehr Åhlin and Wilhelmina Gustafva Norberg. After the death of her mother in 1847, she was left with the responsibility of raising and educating her younger siblings at the age of seventeen. At this point, the normal profession for a middle-class girl in need to support herself was that of a teacher, and she started to give lessons in her home to not only her siblings but also to paying pupils. She was an appreciated educator and was able to accept more and more pupils, some of them as guests in her home, an enterprise which gradually developed into the expanding ''Åhlinska skolan''. During the expanding of the school, she initially employed her sisters as teachers as they reached adulthood, and eventually also educated teachers she could provide a proper salary. Åhlin was principal of the school until 1900 and subsequently succeeded by

Lydia Wahlström Lydia Katarina Wahlström (28 June 1869 – 2 June 1954) was a Swedish historian, author and feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, ...

, who remained until 1934. Åhlin remained the school's director until her death at the age of 68 in 1899. Her work was a significant contribution to the educational system for girls, which experienced a rapid expansion in the mid-19th century from girls' schools, which only offered a shallow education, to the network of private secondary education schools for girls which covered Sweden in the 1870s, a development in which she played an important part. In 1890, Åhlin was presented with the royal medal '' Illis quorum meruere labores'' in gold for her achievements in the education of women in Sweden.

References

Bibliography

*Thore Grönqvist (1977
''Elever i icke obligatoriska-skolor-1864-1970''
Stockholm: Gotab) ISBM 91-38-03480-8 *Sara Backman Prytz: (2014
''Borgerlighetens döttrar och söner. Kvinnliga och manliga ideal bland läroverksungdomar, ca. 1880−1930''
(Uppsala University) *

Gunhild Kyle Gunhild Kyle (28 August 1921 – 14 February 2016) was a Swedish historian.Sweden's population 1970, CD-ROM, Version 1.04, Swedish Family Research Association (2002). She was Sweden's first professor of women's history at the University of Gothenbu ...

(1972)
flickskola under 1800-talet''
(Doctoral Theses from University of Gothenburg)

Biography

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading