Centenary of women's political rights in Finland

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De-politisation of women's political participation in the 20th century

Marja Keränen

“Unfortunately, no coherent proposal was given in 1906 which would have shown how and on what basis the Finnish people were expected to make their choice between different parties. However, there are some authoritative statements which indicate what was officially expected from the ‘ideal voter’ as universal suffrage was established here.”

These were Pertti Pesonen’s words in his article published in Aamulehti in 1964, where he evaluated the work done by the 1906 Hermansson Committee that prepared the bill concerning universal suffrage in Finland. Pesonen reproduces long quotes from the statements of the Committee, but naturally was assessing the quotes from the perspective of his own times, the 1960s. According to Pesonen’s article and the sources he quotes, at least these two groups were not ‘ideal voters’ for the Hermansson Committee:

1) Youngsters:
“Higher age seems to be a prerequisite”, “lack of independence can make young people vulnerable to the sonorous rhetoric of stately instigators who know how to manipulate the impressionable minds of the young”.

2) Women:
Another issue disputed in the Committee was giving women the right to vote, of which there were two points of view. According to some, “young women, who would constitute a considerable part of the electorate, had thus far followed stately and social legislative affairs very little, and hardly had much to say about them. And it is reasonable to doubt that they should artificially, with the power of an electoral decree, be pushed towards developing sudden maturity in these issues”. However, the majority of the Committee was of the opinion that “married women, who were more numerous than unmarried women, have learned to consider arguments and counter-arguments in the ‘school of life’” (Pesonen 1964).

The article raises some questions:

• Why would it need to be considered what the ideal voter would be like? Why is it not discussed what an ideal government is like, or how citizens could best control the use of public power and hold it accountable?

• Why was it necessary to place voters in hierarchical positions, into that of the centre of the political system and its periphery? Why is there such a strong set-up between the norm and the exception to the norm, where a part of the electorate are valued highly and others less so, obviously not asking them why they were not interested in integrating into the political system?

• What does this kind of clearly gender-based hierarchisation reveal about the political construction – the way of conceptualising politics – which was already in place? And how could it be possible to de-politicise women’s issues like this, to leave them outside the political sphere?

• What gave the writer the authority to draw such strong conclusions?

• Why does the author write like this in the 1960s, mentioning several times how current the 1906 statement of the Hermansson Committee still was? And how could anyone in 1964 still believe in this kind of a view of the world?

Post-war political science produced "fact" about the passivity of women

It is not possible to answer all these questions here. I can only consider the issue from the perspective of my own field, political science. When political science was made more ‘scientific’ through behavioural quantitative research based on large-scale surveys, researchers had the possibility to define what ‘correct’ political participation was. What was seen as politics was defined more loosely in behaviouralist science: the object of research was conceptualised differently. When the object of study was politics instead of the state, and the methodology was taken from the new survey methods, academic study focused on ordinary people – including women. New research focused on political participation, and one of its most central issues was gender difference: were women and men just as politically active?

According to even a secondary analysis of surveys done in the 1950s and the 1960s, one could draw the conclusion that women were as politically active in Finland as men. However, this was not the finding conveyed within political science. Even though electoral statistics in Erkki Allardt’s 1956 study show that gender – and age – had no effect on electoral activity, survey researchers would define their yardsticks so that political participation began to strongly reflect gendered practices. At the same time, they began to repeat a hypothesis generated by American research about women’s political passivity. The opposite was an active person, who talked with his friends about elections and “expressed the most opinions” (Pesonen 1960, 537). Those who were more interested in political matters than the average citizen were “men, especially married men, as well as middle-aged and those from higher income groups” (Pesonen 1965: 80).

Even though an analysis of electoral statistics did not prove the hypothesis about women’s political passivity, the definitions formulated by researchers and the presuppositions taken from Anglo-American countries became research findings through rather constrained means; for example through measurements of who voted on the first and second day of elections. This was how women’s special political activity was marginalised. The sphere of citizenship was broadened, women and youngsters were integrated, but as a marginal class B population.

What if things had been seen differently?

The strongly Snellmanian idea that women belonged to the private sphere and men to the public sphere might have been the reason for perceiving gender and politics as so hierarchically structured. Nevertheless, a new version of history has been written in gender studies by historians and welfare scholars according to which women participated strongly in the construction of the welfare state. They participated in public policy-making as mother-citizens, as the ones furthering the interests of the fields assigned to them in a gendered division of labour, in the social sector and in education. Women participated in the temperance movement, in the Martha Organisation and in other self-contained organisations. Within political parties, women participated in women’s organisations that were relatively unknown from today’s perspective. One must bear in mind that until the 1970s, political parties were mass organisations and their members eagerly took part in the activities. If, despite all this, it was possible to characterise the work done in party-political women’s organisations as coffee-making activities, maybe the same happened to research as well: Raili Ruusala defended her doctoral thesis about party-political women’s organisations at the University of Tampere in 1967. However, I doubt it has been regarded as a central or significant piece of work in the history of the discipline.

Women were still viewed as political newcomers still in the 1960s and after that, as if they had entered from the outside as beginners, as an internal ‘other’. Thus there has been a tendency to champion women’s right to vote in Finland as part of the official liturgy about Finland as one of the first countries where it was granted. This right has been expressed to have “appeared” without women having to work hard for its realisation. It is only now, on the 100th anniversary of parliamentarianism, that this idea is questioned.

The image of women’s political participation has been characterised not just by de-politisation, but by discontinuity as well. While conceptualising gender difference has differed, these variations have produced their own discontinuities. In its own way, the equality ideology of the 1970s contributed to the negation of women’s separate political activities. Along with the new equality ideology, women’s separate activities were once again seen as petty activism with no “real” political significance.

The discontinuities in gender studies and women’s history have their consequences. The spread of the equality ideology to that of a broad, widely accepted general ideology can be seen as a historical “Sattelzeit” [1], through which it has not been possible to interpret history very well. The narrative of Finland as a country where equality has already been attained and where it advances the whole time is very well rooted in national consciousness. It also has an effect on how the earlier history is seen: how it is analysed and the type of value statements that are made about it. This metanarrative, according to which Finland (under modernisation) is gradually becoming more equal, is owed to education and the development of attitudes, plays down earlier history. At the same time, it creates a discontinuity in conceptualising history.

When the radical phase of the women’s movement began in the 1970s, well after the equality movement, the equality narrative began to be questioned. However, questioning the equality narrative happened such that the women’s movement presented itself as a new and ahistorical social movement, and not so that the radical phase would have rehabilitated the earlier women-specific activities. Neither did contradicting the equality narrative happen such that the women’s movement would have been interested in parliamentary politics. Instead, it functioned as a rather private alternative grassroots movement. However, the influences embraced in this alternative movement came from countries where women’s parliamentary participation had been virtually non-existent, which was not the case in Finland. Thus, the work done by earlier gender researchers is seen as uninteresting by the gender researchers of my generation. For example, the extensive work done by Sirkka Sinkkonen and Elina Haavio-Mannila on women in politics has not been very much appreciated because it focused on tedious everyday politics.

Moreover, the nature of politics has changed so much so that neither men nor women see it as being very interesting. Political parties have become electoral organisations, and the television appearances of their leaders are seen as if they would be the most important aspect of politics. Everyday politics was de-politicised in other ways as well. People were not expected to be active in politics apart from blaming politicians individually for their actions. “Once again, young people have not gone to the polls”. The development of the welfare society has led to people being interested in the kinds of services being offered and not in how to be politically active. Furthermore, the new culture of governance says that non-governmental organisations should offer those services as well.

Does it matter how history is written?

Is it necessary to think about gender if political science is not solely done by men and about men anymore? What significance would all of this have if the gender division in politics had already been dismantled?

There problem with the marginal position of women is what is marginal never becomes canonical, and it will never have a history: no one recognises their comrade, let alone another generation of female actors. Maybe women in Finland have indeed been active in politics for the sake of their own interests. Maybe history like that could be written, and thus make it possible to champion women’s rights also in the future. Should we in any case persevere in writing the political history of women, which would overcome the discontinuities and the marginalisation caused by these discontinuities?

References

[1] “Sattelzeit” is a term used by the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck. With this concept, he refers to discontinuity or a period of transformation, which entails the difficulty of translating concepts from the time preceding this ‘saddle period” to the language in place after the Sattelzeit due to change in the meanings of these concepts.

Literature and sources