Elin Jacobsson

Elin Jacobsson (1886 – 1978), was one of the first two women to graduate from a Swedish educational program as a civil engineer.

Life and work
Elin Jacobsson was born on 9 January 1886 in Adolf Fredrik parish in Stockholm to August Leonard Jacobsson (born 1850), a cartographer at the General Staff Lithographic Institute, and Josefina Wilhelmina Bernhardina Jacobsson, nee Ammilon, born (1849). She had two brothers.

Jacobsson entered the Technical School in Stockholm (now called Konstfack) which had already established a department for "female disciples" in 1859. Women in this course of study were allowed to pursue "various types of education in, among other things, construction technology, mechanical engineering, drawing technology and in art industrial occupations."

After completing their studies as architectural draftsmen in the women's department in the school, Elin Jacobsson and her classmate Anna Sandstedt (born 1885) transferred to the Construction Vocational School department. That program provided a three-year training course for students hoping to become supervisors in the construction industry. As part of their studies, after getting special permission from the school's board because they were women, the two students completed the mandatory six-month masonry internship, which was done in the "utmost secrecy" in the basement. In 1907, Elin Jacobsson and Anna Sandstedt graduated as "structural engineers," the first women to do so, and the news published in the magazine Idun.

In the 1910 census, Jacobsson is listed as a drawing assistant, and the next year, on 18 February 1911, Elin received an employment offer from architect Axel Brunskog in Linköping.

While details remain unknown about the lives of either woman in later years, Elin Jacobsson was reported to have worked as a draftsman and structural engineer at an architectural and engineering office.

Private life
Elin Jacobsson married Bror Gustaf Johansson in 1913 and took his last name as her own. He died in 1954.

She died on 14 July 1978 in Hedvig Eleonora parish in Stockholm and is buried in her family's grave at the Northern Cemetery in Solna in Stockholm County.