Sonja Branting-Westerståhl

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Sonja Branting-Westerståhl (15 September 1890 – 18 July 1981) was a Swedish lawyer and politician. She was one of Sweden’s first female lawyers and specialized in matrimonial law. A Social Democrat, she worked to raise awareness about the rise of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Spanish Civil War, she visited refugee camps in France and Africa and spoke out against the suffering there. In 1948 she served briefly in the lower house of the Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag.

She was born in Stockholm, the second child of Hjalmar Branting, a leading Social Democrat and former Prime Minister, and Anna Branting, a journalist and writer. She attended Palmgren school until 1909 and then studied law, graduating in 1916. She met her future husband, Olof Westerståhl, while studying, and they began a legal practice together in 1927. She built a career in matrimonial law and was named an advokat in 1930.

Apart from her legal work, Branting-Westerståhl was active in politics, especially on women’s issues. She was a long-time member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and served on the executive board of the Social Democrat Women’s Organisation from 1936 to 1952. She joined the editorial board of Morgonbris, a women’s political journal, with Disa Västberg.

In the 1930s she warned about the dangers of Nazism, touring the United States in 1935 to speak about totalitarianism and campaigning against the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. She also campaigned for those suffering in the Spanish Civil War and inspected refugee camps in France and Africa as an international delegate.

After World War II she remained active in politics and briefly sat in the Andra kammaren, the Swedish lower house, in 1948. Her papers and correspondence are kept at ARAB, the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library. She married Olof Westerståhl in 1914, and they had one son, Jörgen, who became a political scientist. Her husband died in 1948. Sonja Branting-Westerståhl died on 18 July 1981.