FINLAND & PALESTINE Proceedings of a Joint Workshop

ual activists often criticize the church harshly for not fully accepting
homosexual couples.
Finland is often presented as a model country of gender equality.
Some religious Finns think that it is because Finland is a
Lutheran majority country. My own opinion is that Finland has
achieved a great deal in the field of gender equality, but it is
not because of any religious affiliation. I am convinced that the
more secular a society is, the more chance it has to create a
situation of equal rights, not only for women, but for all minorities
as well.
Feminism in Finland, nowadays, is a complex phenomenon.
There are feminist groups who object to the so-called state
feminism of the country. State feminism means the assimilation
of feminist efforts and inclinations into the general politics
of the state, and the way in which women's movements act in
co-operation with the state, working from inside the state
structures, and aiming to change the society from the inside.
This kind of state feminism is not unknown in the Middle East
either; the way Syrian secular feminist movements have
worked for several decades is very close to this model.
Some groups think that Finnish state feminism consolidates the
existing power relations between the genders and, in fact, only
re-assert the present situation. There are new trends in feminism
in Finland, as in many other Western countries. We speak
about post-feminism, which refers to feminists who consider
simply that "women are people". Thus, views that separate the
sexes rather than unite them are considered sexist, rather than
feminist.
We speak about postcolonial feminism, which argues that oppression
relating to the colonial experience, particularly racial,
class, and ethnic oppression, has marginalized women in post­
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