Talk:Florence Stephens

Removed content

I am placing a note here just to for the sake of information, since I don't have the energy to engage in conflicts. The case of Florence Stephens is well known in Swedish history. The fact that she had been given the typical education of an upper class daughter of the time - which was accomplishments in order to get a husband and act as a society hostess - and no education which could enable her to manage the estate she inherited from her father, was the very reason as to why she became dependant on advisers to manage her estate: advisers who caused the problems which resulted in her becoming a ward of the state. I admit that it was simply my own fault for starting the article once upon a time and then simply did not add references to everything in it, simply because this information is so well known in the story about the Stephens case that it did not - foolishly - occur to me that I should do so. But really: the whole point of her tragic life in connection to the Huseby Affair was the fact that she had been given a conventional "women's education" and consequently became taken advantage of. When this was removed from the article, the reader - unless they are a historically interested Swede - are losing a lot of context, interesting not the least from the point of view of women's history. I don't have the energy to argue and get involved in a conflict so I will simply take the article of my watch list, but some one should really introduce this, because it is in no way to give these circumstance undue weight, as one ditor of the article has claimed: that she was given a conventional female education which caused her to become dependent on advisors are in fact crucial to the entire case. So it is indeed a shame that it was removed. I am a historian who specialize in women's history, so it is a little frustrating to see. But I hope some Swede can put it in again someday. --Aciram (talk) 21:40, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

@Aciram: Thanks for starting a talk page section; I am pinging you because you may have already taken the article off your watchlist and not seen that we conflicted; I was simultaneously starting a section of my own discussing balance. You undoubtedly have access to sources I was unable to find, and thank you for writing the article. If there are published analyses that emphasise that aspect of her situation, then of course it should be put back with citations. But as it is, I think we had a similar reaction to the story. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:03, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Balance

I have reverted the readdition of a large amount of material about the deficiencies in Stephens' education being related to the assumption she would become a married society hostess. For one thing, I did not find this in the cited source, SBL (version finalised 2007–11); is there another SBL article other than the one on her grandfather from which this material is drawn? The universal identifier provided for that reference does not work, and no other URL was provided; I tracked down the reference via Swedish Wikipedia and it is possible more than one version is online. For another, there was a gulf between the brief and dismissive account of her management in SBL and the emphasis on her capabilities and mention of her being taken advantage of by advisors who actually enriched themselves at her expense in the recent Kvinnobiografiskt Leksikon, which has an obvious and different point of view but included a lot of specifics. And what newspaper coverage I was able to see emphasized that she was taken advantage of, and also enabled me to source (and correct) the point about the letters. I did not find much material portraying her as an obsessed royalist or a person obsessed with being a society hostess, so I removed those statements too and kept it factual, winding up with a portrait of a woman who was far from incompetent (and Kvinnobiografiskt Leksikon noted that she had to be talked into surrendering her majority and sought to reverse the decision, and that it was only reversed in 1976 after a change in the law rendered it no longer valid). I don't think that editorialising on stereotypical upper-class female roles and education for them (merely implied in the references) adds to that portrait, indeed I think the circumstances as described, with her assisting in managing the estate for decades beforehand, expanding it, and having her own strongly held philosophy in agriculture, and with her being deprived of her legal agency under a legal doctrine that was later rescinded, speaks far more strongly to her having been victimised by the system (while it also shows how disastrous the combination of her decisions and the advisors and agents who took advantage of her had been; SBL speaks very generally of mismanaagement, clear-cutting, and bad business decisions).

Where I found it hard to achieve balance was between the insinuations about Prince Carl Bernadotte—limited as my access to the newspaper sources is, I didn't find anything citeable on why and how he was cleared of culpability, and indeed I was unable to find anything on her having named him her heir, so I omitted both—but some of the more gossipy sources say dark things about him; and the hints that her guardian(s) treated her harshly. Whereas the prince's particularly culpable friend was not named in Kvinnobiografiskt Leksikon, but I was able to find out who he was from other sources and thus to keep the mention of his prison sentence that had been in the article without a reference, I found nothing at all associating Stephens with the guardian who had been named in the article without a reference, which was disturbing since it accused him of wrongdoing. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:57, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The Huseby scandal

Why is Prince Carl's involvement virtually unmentioned here? According to his article, he was a central member in trying to defraud her or whatever they were doing. He was in disgrace and left Sweden permanently because of all of that, yet he barely gets a mention. 2600:1700:BC01:9B0:544F:E012:2320:EFE4 (talk) 21:22, 10 June 2022 (UTC)