Her Own Worth: Negotiations of Subjectivity in the Life Narrative of a Female Laborer by Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto (review)

Her Own Worth, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto's ethnography of her grandmother, Elsa Sanelma Koskinen (née Kiikkala), not only details what it meant to be a worker in Finland in part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but, just as importantly, if not more so, serves both as an exposé on how oral narrative is essential to understanding cultural identities and as an ode to what can be learned from the quotidian. Koskinen-Koivisto's main objective is, in her own words, to "analyze narrated experiences and to draw attention to the process of personal meaning making and the negotiation of cultural norms and ideas" (14). So the book begins with a snapshot of Koskinen-Koivisto's grandmother and then folds into it the cultural, political, and economic backdrop of the history of the Inha Ironworks between 1851 and 1943, as learned from Elsa's remembrances (Elsa worked there for a number of years and also recounted stories of other women who worked there before and with her). Undertaking her study in this way allows Koskinen-Koivisto to show how the sociohistorical is inextricably attached to lived experiences.

The fact that Koskinen-Koivisto is studying a family member does not go unnoticed: she is fully aware of the complexity of her position relative to her subject—that of granddaughter to grandmother—and she discusses this positionality throughout the text. Normally researchers frown upon such closeness, urging that subjectivity, a certain level of intimacy with an individual, can be damaging to one's analysis. For example, how can a researcher analyze a spoken text that is part of her own history? Or, as another example, in what ways does hearing a story told so many times before in youth, adolescence, and adulthood affect the ways in which one hears it anew? Such questions and others are not lost on Koskinen-Koivisto, as she discusses the roles, for example, of the setting in which stories are told, of studying the history of a close relative, and of the ethical challenges faced during her research process as part of this ethnography. Through a two-part analysis, Koskinen-Koivisto describes her methodology and her understanding that both the researcher and informant have their own individual preconceptions of the world that they bring to the encounter (the narrative interviews) during which both participants reflect on their understandings of an already-shared knowledge. I truly appreciated that Koskinen-Koivisto made visible how reflexivity, subjective knowledge, and validity are fundamentally intertwined (she dedicates the whole second chapter to this process), and the ways in which negotiations of subjectivity are acted out.

Reflecting on one's own life is oftentimes, especially as in this case, a learned behavior—passed down from woman to woman, family member to family member: Elsa listened to stories from elders and older women on the steps of the Inha Ironworks factory, simultaneously learning how to remember and the importance of remembrance. She then incorporated this kind of historical, experiential reproduction of storytelling into her own life, her own history. What Koskinen-Koivisto learns of the Inha Ironworks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is beautifully layered and multifaceted: her grandmother's remembrances of her own experiences and her grandmother's remembrances of others' remembrances. Through her grandmother's cycle of memories, we, the readers, have the opportunity to learn about almost one hundred years of life, social structure, and the intricate dance of power dynamics of a work-sanctioned town of western Finland from one narrator. Beyond this history, Koskinen-Koivisto simultaneously explores other over-arching themes gleaned from her grandmother's history, such as change and continuity in a life narrative, the different selves that exist in various spaces and at different times of life, power, community, sexuality, femininity, and social identities.

As a cultural text, Koskinen-Koivisto's book reminds us how gender negotiations and...