Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Sweden and America, 1898-1945: Unsparing Honesty - Paperback

by Walter a. Jackson (Author)

This dual biography of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal examines their work as architects of the modern welfare state and probes their struggle to to combine love and work in an equal partnership as they designed the social supports necessary for women both to raise children and to contribute to society.

Author Biography

Walter Anderson Jackson III (1950-2015) is best known for Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism,1938-1973 (1990), which analyzes the making of Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) in relation to early twentieth-century Swedish and American social thought. Jackson grew up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement and earned a BA (mcl) from Duke and a PhD from Harvard. His life's work was prompted by questions about racial inequality in the United States and the perspective a European social democratic thinker brought to this fraught issue. Jackson published numerous articles on white racial liberalism, African American sociologists and anthropologists, and theories of interracial relations. Beloved by students and the public for grounding the civil rights struggle in local history and highlighting the voices and viewpoints of participants, he appeared on the 2015 PBS program, "American Denial."