Gertrud Månsson

Gertrud Carolina Månsson (18 December 1866 – 30 December 1935), was a Swedish municipal politician (Social democrat). She was the first female member in the City Council, and also the first elected female politician of her country as a whole (1910).

Gertrud Månsson was born in Stockholm to the iron worker Johannes Månsson and Charlotta Christina Lindqvist. Because of her poverty, she left school at the age of eleven to support herself as a maidservant. By 1896, she had managed to open her own shop in .

Gertrud Månsson educated herself through autodidacticism and engaged herself in politics and the Swedish Social Democratic Party. On 11 June 1892, she became one of the co-founders of the , which was the first women's branch of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. She became a member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party the same year, and served as the chairperson of the three times: 1892–1895, 1897–1898, and 1906–1908. Between 1897 and 1900, she served as chairperson of the Commune of Female agitation, and as secretary in 1900-1902. In 1902, she was elected to the board of the Women's Trade Union alongside Anna Johansson Visborg and Anna Sterky. Between 1907 and 1922, she was a member of the Gustav Vasa parish poor care board, and its chairperson in 1922.

By a reform in 1909, women became eligible for municipal and city councils in Sweden, and in the following election in 1910, 37 women were elected to city councils and municipal councils all over Sweden, all of them being, in effect, the first elected female politicians of their country. In Stockholm city council, two women were elected: the social democrat Gertrud Månsson, and the right wing Valfrid Palmgren. As the votes were counted in the capital first, and the votes from the area electing Månsson were counted prior to the area of Palmgren, Gertrud Månsson could be regarded as the first woman elected in Sweden. Månsson had been nominated as candidate of her party because of her previous assignments in the poor care board.

After the 1910 election, Gertrud Månsson as well as Valfrid Palmgren was interviewed by Idun (magazine), where Månsson commented: "What is to be done, I can not say now, before I have had the time to acquaint myself with the details of the office. But if I can ever in even some degree be of use to better the appalling living conditions, the source of so much discomfort and misery, it would be the greatest joy to me. But me, what can I do, other than what life have taught me?"

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