no distinction is made between married and unmarried couples with respect to tax assessment or when housing allowances or child benefits are granted (Hoem, 39). This liberal view may help explain why non-marital cohabitation was so rapidly accepted in Sweden compared to many other countries, being soon regarded as a social institution rather than as deviant behavior.Non-marital cohabitation is not a new practice in Sweden, in particular in the capital and in the northern parts of the country. According to Swedish history, there were two different types of cohabitation at the beginning of the century. One very visible type was called samvets- ktenskap (marriage of conscience) and was practiced by a group of intellectuals as a protest agains the fact that only religious marriage existed in Sweden at the time. Their protest was successful in that civil marriage was introduced in 1909. The other form of consensual union was called Stockholms- ktenskap (Stockholm marriage) and was endemic among poor people who could not afford to marry (Hoem 41). As time went on, this practice of cohabitation appears to have almost disappeared, however. Cohabitation was not very common during the decades before 1960. When informal cohabitation then suddenly started to grow in popularity, it received almost no public attention initially. When marriage rates fell dramatically, it became clear that the number of marriages was no longer a reliable measure of family formation, and consensual unions were recognized as a recordable living arrangement in the 1975 census. Nevertheless, it came as a real surprise when the 1981 Swedish Fertility Survey revealed that as many as every third woman born in the period 1936-1940 had started her first union without marriage (Hoem 44). The survey also showed that these cohabitants, which most often came from the working class, married soon afterwards, and that durable consensual unions were relatively rare. In subs...
