Marginal Experiences?: Learning from Early-Twentieth-Century Nordic History

Marginal Experiences? Learning from Early-TwentiethCentury Nordic History Hilda Romer Christensen. Mellem backfische og psene piger: Ken og kultur i KFUK 1883-1940. (Between Teenage Girls and Respectable Women: Gender and Culture in the YWCA, 1883-1940.) Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 1995. 294 pp. ISBN 87-7289-286-2. Maria Lähteenmäki. Mahdollisuuksien Aika: Työläisnaiset ja yhteiskunnan muutos 1910-1930 luvun Suomessa. (The Time of Opportunities: Working-Class Women and the Change in Finnish Society from the 1910s to the 1930s.) Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1995.348 pp. ISBN 951-710-014-0. Anne Epstein and Birgitte Soland In the English-speaking world, the majority of scholarship on European women's history has long focused on the "Big Three"—Germany, France, and Great Britain. In comparison, studies of women's experiences in Mediterranean , Eastern European, and Nordic countries remain comparatively few and far between. Study of the largest and most influential nations undeniably offers its intellectual rewards, although pragmatic constraints —from current politics to the linguistic barriers that timit most scholars to mastery of two or three of the most widely spoken and taught languages—also contribute to this geographical lopsidedness. Yet, the literature available in English does not represent the entirety of our knowledge about European women's history. Across Europe, women's historians are producing a wealth of studies in languages from Finnish to French, Polish to Portuguese. Many of these works also focus on the great powers, but scholars with a speciaUzation in other geographic regions and access to less commonly spoken languages are adding to our collective knowledge of the past. As the two books under review here clearly demonstrate, we can learn much from studies of areas that so often have been relegated to the margins of European experience. In these works, Nordic women's historians Maria Lähteenmäki and Hilda Ramer Christensen explore the impact of transnational frends on women's experiences and gender relations in two of the smaller, less industrialized , and more agrarian European societies, Finland and Denmark. Their scholarship offers fresh insights into women's responses to social, cultural, and gender change. Finally, these analyses challenge some of our assumptions about historical causality, thereby raising questions that all European women's historians may want to consider. © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 2 (Summer) 218 Journal of Women's History Summer Maria Lähteenmäki's Mahdollisuuksien Aika: Työläisnaiset ja yhteiskunnan muutos 1910-1930 luvun Suomessa (The Time of Opportunities : Working-Class Women and the Change in Finnish Society from the 1910s to the 1930s) examines a two-way process: how economic, social, and political upheaval and government action affected working-class Finnish women and their families in the early twentieth century as in turn the growing presence of these women in the workforce and in political organizations shaped public debate and, ultimately, social policy. Lähteenmäki explores this dynamic by analyzing women's living and working conditions , political activities, and individual problems as wives, mothers, and breadwinners together with the larger social and political developments and institutional changes that structured their daily existence and to which they also contributed. Combining a sociohistorical approach with a focus on working-class culture and individual experience, she builds on the international scholarship that informs her work by emphasizing the special features of Finnish economic and political history. Married women industrial workers are at the center of Lähteenmäki's analysis. Finland remained overwhelmingly agrarian during the period under study, and no more than 10 percent of economically active women earned wages from industry in 1910. These women worked mainly in the wood and paper industries, clothing and textile manufacturing, and food production, and most were young and single; wives and mothers constituted only a very small proportion of the industrial workforce at this time. But by end of the 1930s, women held jobs as construction workers, machinists , stevedores, and metalworkers, and the proportion of married women among them had risen considerably. Lähteenmäki demonstrates that between the wars, the increasing presence in the industrial workforce of these wives struggling to balance work and family attracted public concern and led to a...