Alva and Gunnar Myrdal are the only couple ever awarded Nobel prizes as
individuals: Gunnar won the prize in Economics in 1974, and Alva won the
Peace Prize in 1982. This dual biography examines their work as
architects of the modern welfare state and probes the connections
between the public and private dimensions of their lives. Drawing on
their extensive personal correspondence and diaries between their
electrifying first meeting in 1919 and their protracted marital crisis
in the early 1940s, this book presents the psychologist and the
economist as they sought to combine love and work in an equal
partnership. Alva and Gunnar simultaneously experimented with a new kind
of intimate relationship and designed the social supports necessary for
women both to bear and raise children and to contribute their talents
and energies to society. Like all genuine revolutionaries, they
struggled to free themselves from the burdens of their upbringings; to
evaluate their own actions with what they called "unsparing honesty,"
and to test their policy recommendations in practice, measuring
everything against the values they shared.
