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Abstract
This article examines how working-class women helped transform Finland in 1906 into the world's first nation to grant full women's suffrage. Activists organized into the League of Working Women fought for full suffrage in the context of an anti-imperial upsurge in Finland and a revolution across the tsarist empire. These women workers simultaneously allied with their male peers and took autonomous action to prevent their exclusion from the vote during the political upheaval of late 1905 and early 1906. In the process they challenged traditional gender norms and articulated a political perspective that tied together the fight against class, gender, and national domination.
Keywords: Finland, gender, labor, nationality, socialism, suffrage
In 1906, Finland became the world's first nation to grant full female suffrage.1 A pivotal role in winning this watershed achievement was played by the League of Working Women in alliance with the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
In this article I trace the radical roots of the suffrage victory, with a focus on the autonomous activities of the League of Working Women during the revolutionary upheaval that swept the tsarist empire, to which Finland belonged. I show that full suffrage was won through a mass general strike and anti-imperial insurgency in Finland, combined with an empire-wide revolution. Female labor militants and the SDP led the fight for universal women's suffrage, while liberal and conservative parties and women's organizations supported wealth qualifications for the vote until the end of 1905. Decades before the emergence of theorizations of "intersectionality," Finnish socialists simultaneously fought gender, national, and class domination.
Most Western historians have overlooked Finland's suffrage struggle. Abraham Ascher's standard work on the 1905 revolution in tsarist Russia, for instance, omits any mention of Finnish suffrage and argues that "the efforts of women to achieve equality bore few concrete results during the revolution."2 In the few non-Finnish books that address the 1906 victory, the role of both male and female labor militants is generally marginalized: David Kirby writes that suffrage "was conceded virtually without a struggle," and Barbara Evans Clements gives the impression that upper-class women's rights activists like Alexandra Gripenberg were the suffrage battle's main protagonists.3 Recent monographs by Rochelle Ruthchild and Jad Adams highlight Finland's pioneering role in achieving the vote, though neither focus...