Elise Ottesen-Jensen is a journalist, women's rights activist and anarcho-syndicalist politician as a member of the SSP (Svenska Syndikalistiska Partiet). She is married to Albert Jensen.
History[]
Early Life[]
Elise Ottesen-Jensen, called Ottar, was born in 1886 in then Sweden–Norway. She was the seventeenth of eighteen children in between a priest and a bishop's daughter. Her relations with her family became very strained when she refused Christianity and when her father sent away her little sister, Magnhild, to give birth in Denmark, so that she could be forced to give up her child. Maghild committed suicide because of the longing for the child she had to leave behind. For this, Ottar could never forgive her father, and the fate of her sister became a strong driving force for her commitment to the struggle for women's rights. Instead, she became a dentist's assistant, although an accident costing her two of her fingers ended that career quickly.
During the Weltkrieg[]
During the war she became a stenographer and wrote articles for various syndicalist and socialist papers until she met Albert Jensen, her future husband. They eventually married and moved to Copenhagen and later Stockholm.
Personal Life[]
She started a Women's newspaper and acted as a sort of sexual educator and agitator of women's rights, recognising the many struggles of the Scandinavian working class woman, with poverty, responsibility for the children, running double jobs and abusive marriages. Eventually she started touring the country, holding gatherings and sex ed evening classes all around the country. In these she turned out to be a skilled agitator.