ABSTRACT
Role sharing means power sharing, and there's the rub. Swedish women have the highest representation in parliament of any Western country, 25 percent of seats, having edged ahead of Norway with 24 percent and Denmark and Finland with 23 percent of the total. Women's growing political consciousness is a feature of all the political parties. The number of seats held by women in the Swedish parliament has risen from 50 in 1972 to 89 out of a total of 351 in the 1979 elections, compared to 19 out of 635 in the United Kingdom. Numerical advances have been made not only by Social Democratic women, who increased their places from 29 to 42, and by Communists, but by women in the parties to the right (See Table 10). Women have also strengthened their position on their parties' executives, especially in the Conservative and Liberal parties where they occupy well over one-third of the seats.
