Suomen Akatemia VALTA-OHJELMAN HANKKEIDEN TULOKSET

values attached to high-status femaleness have enabled women to lay claim to esteemed public roles
as social reformers, to demand political and educational rights alongside men, to organize
autonomous women’s religious communities and to construct for themselves relatively independent
social roles that included philanthropic activism, among others. In short, elite women could push
through cultural projects that gave them not only status but also public spaces for collective action
separate from men and thus the possibility of their hidden transcripts gaining public acceptance. To
be a woman of the dominant classes was to be a person whose gendered status was more fully
elaborated in the public transcript. Women of the lower classes strove to be as gendered as elite
women, in whatever way that the ideal gender distinction was defined and developed at that
historical moment. The more clearly one was defined as a ‘woman’ according to the value system
of the public transcript, the better chance she had to lay claim to the rights and powers available to
women of the dominant classes. Women’s agency, in the sense of pushing through historicallyspecific
cultural projects, had as much to do with estate and class as it did with gender.
Two other results worth noting have come up in the course of our research: first, despite seemingly
strict communal and social norms dictating personal behavior, most of the studies conducted within
the project show that in the final analysis it is individuals, including young women, who make their
own decisions, often going against the norms, and strategizing to their own advantage. Second, calls
for various types of gender equality among the landowning farmer class (recognition of wives’
equal labour contribution on the farm, equal inheritance for farm sons and daughters) appear in
Finnish public discussion surprisingly early, namely in the early 1860s, predating the issue of
women’s rights in Finland by more than two decades. This is clearly a topic needing further
research.
Naturally, during our research, questions have arisen. Most of these are concerned with perceiving
and identifying power and agency. How can we discern individual agency and the dynamics of
power when all we have available to us are written traces of cultural discourses, which are
themselves already shaped by power relations? Such questions encourage us to examine our sources
with a critical eye and open to multiple possibilities for interpretation.
The influence of our published work and presentations will surely be most strongly felt in our own
fields of history and ethnology. Our project members, most of whom are in the beginning stages of
their research careers, have benefitted greatly from the rigorous approach to power and gender
practiced within the project, and they leave the project at the end of this year well equipped with
extensive knowledge in this area and capacity for critical analysis. The three more senior
researchers within the project are disseminating their power-based studies within their pre-existing
academic networks, through publishing, teaching, and presenting their results at conferences.
The five most important publications of the project so far:
Koskinen-Koivisto, Eerika. 2008. “Categorizing a Family, Categorizing the Self –
Experience of Class in the Life Story of a Female Worker”, Nord Nytt Vol. 4.
Niskanen, Heli. 2009. “New Acquaintances. An Attempt to Introduce Online Diaries
into Ethnology”. Ethnologia Scandinavica. Vol. 39.
Saarimäki, Pasi. 2010. Naimisen normit, käytännöt ja konfliktit. Esiaviollinen ja aviollinen
seksuaalisuus 1800-luvun lopun keskisuomalaisella maaseudulla. Jyväskylän yliopisto, Jyväskylä
(Doctoral dissertation).