"The Swedish welfare state did not spring into being overnight. The Social Democrats had won power in 1932, but even into the late 1940s many unjust practices survived. In Only a Mother, Sjöberg dramatizes the plight of the so-called statare, agricultural workers who lived together in gypsy-like communities and who were exploited (or at best tolerated) by the big landowners." (Peter Cowie) Rya-Rya suffers the typical life of a statare. Manipulated by the men around her, caught in a perpetual routine of childbearing, and slipping into evermore menial tasks, she eventually dies from sheer fatigue and lack of hope. A young Eva Dahlbeck plays Rya-Rya, eloquently summing up the exhausting fatalism of a class locked into a desperate cycle. But as Peter Cowie states: "Only a Mother never becomes a sombre tract. From the vigor of the country dance at the start of the movie, Sjöberg finds the pulse of this bucolic tragedy, and makes excellent characters of the drunken husband, Henrik, and the cynical, grasping steward. Nothing can take the film away from Eva Dahlbeck, however. She dreams not only of her vanishing youth, but also of escape from the toil and humiliation of her life on the farm. One can well understand why Bergman cast her in his great films of the 1950s."