Suomen Akatemia VALTA-OHJELMAN HANKKEIDEN TULOKSET

Our project research was based on concrete empirical materials such as interviews, newspaper and
magazine writings, internet diaries, court records, and ethnographic descriptions, and focused first
on descriptions of discourses and practices represented within these materials, as well as their
historical and cultural contextualization. However, the long-term aim was a theoretical
condensation of our results, and this was presented in a joint article written for the Valta Suomessa
anthology which appeared in spring of 2010. As a result of our regular discussions and exchange of
ideas, a consensus within the project has emerged regarding the importance of power at the microlevel
of everyday life.
By applying in our research the intersectional approach (according to which gender cannot be
studied in isolation because gender identities are affected by other distinctions such as race, class
and age), and combining it with anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s formulation of agency as well as
James C. Scott’s notion of power played out as hidden versus public transcripts, we have arrived at
one of the concrete results of our research, namely that what concerned women in the past most was
not power struggles with men or gender inequality per se, but the fear of not attaining an ideal
gender standard, because it was this attainment which had the most direct impact on their access to
power. Such aspirations should not be understood as merely a consequence of ideological gender
domination. Although many of these gender ideals were undoubtedly subordinating and
constraining to women from our modern-day perspective, a rigorously historical approach must
recognize that power and agency are culturally defined and, in order for its dynamics and
implications to be fully understood, must be studied from the perspective of those who wielded
and experienced it.
Our discussions urged us toward a consideration of how theories of agency and resistance need to
take gender into consideration, and what these theories look like when they do. Agency only exists
within an intersubjective field of relationships, and gender, being a set of relations with unique
characteristics, plays its own determining role in what sorts of agency is possible to a person. For
instance, other subordinate groups have resisted domination through the production of hidden
transcripts in secluded spaces. But due to the fact that married women have had to carry out their
activities within the family sphere (and even in non-nuclear households, patrilocal marriage patterns
have kept male kinsmen together but female kinswomen apart), most women in history have not
had the opportunity to gather in such a space with other women who would be sympathetic to their
possible oppression, one where men were not present.
Our research has further demonstrated to us that gender is a matter of taking different positions,
either through discourse or practice. These gender positions comprise often contradictory identities
which must be negotiated and balanced in everyday life. Within this negotiation, the body is not a
fixed, given, nor natural point of departure, but is also assigned various ‘positions’ in different
discourses and practices. The relationship between agency and gender can be summed up in project
member Heli Niskanen’s assessment that “the goal of agency is a desired gender position”. The
importance of rhetorical and narrative conventions in the discourses through which the self is
positioned has been noted by all project members. The importance of historical and cultural
contextualization when studying gender and power is another aspect emphasized in the work of all
the project members.
Women who aspired to the gender ideals in their society were, from the point of view of power,
acting in their own concrete interests. Numerous historical studies have provided evidence that
socially valued notions of womanhood – those that have formed the basis of power claims – have
generally only applied to upper-class women. Research has emphasized how these ideals fostered
men’s patriarchal control over women, but less research has been carried out on how they benefitted
the women who were seen most likely to achieve these them, or how lower-class women might
have recognized the benefits and aspired toward the ideals. In 19 th - and 20 th -century Finnish history,