Forcing the Way: Women in Professional Networks of Power and Knowledge in 20th-Century Finland

Project leader: Professor Jouko Vahtola
Department of History, University of Oulu
January 1, 2007 – December 31, 2009

The project investigates the tactics that women have employed in entering, upholding and challenging professional and scientific networks of power in 20th-century Finland. It studies women actors in four key institutional contexts: (1) academia, (2) the church and ecclesiastical organisations, (3) the school and (4) the media. The project asks why women have found it more difficult than men to occupy positions which allow for effective use of institutional and professional power. Instead of focusing on political, administrative and judicial decisions and measures, which have already been amply studied and which have proven insufficient in explaining the persistent institutional and professional inequality, the project will concentrate on microlevel networks and mechanisms of power at work in specific historical contexts.

The team is composed of three postdoctoral fellows and two doctoral students, whose individual projects are: 

(1) PhD Heini Hakosalo's Exclusive Treatment: Women in Academic Medicine in 20th-Century Finland will be the first comprehensive historical account of Finnish medical women. Its international significance lies above all in the fact that the first generations of medical women have not previously been studied from the point of view of the microlevel mechanisms of power that have facilitated and / or impeded women's integration into the academic and professional community.

(2) PhD Seija Jalagin's Paradoxical Emancipation: Women Missionaries and Ecclesiastical Power in 20th-Century Finland asks how power relations and gendered identities that were constructed in the missionary fields "out there" influenced the development of the church at home. Although women in missionary work and in the Finnish church have been investigated in several studies, the influence of the two institutional contexts to each other has remained unexplored.

(3) PhD Marianne Junila's Mirage of Power: Women Educators in the Finnish Secondary School System in 1915–1975 focuses on gender and power within the teaching profession. It is motivated by the fact that power relationships between teachers and students have so far been studied without gender perspective and intraprofessional relationships have not been studied at all.

(4) MA Heidi Kurvinen's doctoral thesis, Female Journalists and the Power of Media in Finland, 1965 to 1975, explores, through gender perspective, the role of women journalists in the media in post-war Finland. The study analyses the reasons for the gendered nature of media both in terms of professional structures and in terms of the contents of the media. More generally, it will also throw light on the role of the media as the gatekeeper of public discussion and a nexus of social power.

(5) MA Niina Timosaari's doctoral thesis Gender and Social Criticism in the Research of the Westermarckian School in Early 20th-Century Finland analyses how the members of the Westermarckian School perceived women's role as objects of their anthropological field studies and in their critique towards western society and Christianity in early 20th century. It focuses on the ways in which they used scientific power in maintaining or challenging the existing gender systems, roles and practices of anthropological research.