Comments on: Finland 1906: The revolutionary roots of women’s suffrage — an International Women’s Day tribute https://johnriddell.com/2015/03/04/finland-1906-the-revolutionary-roots-of-womens-suffrage-an-international-womens-day-tribute/ MARXIST ESSAYS AND COMMENTARY Fri, 14 Jul 2017 00:47:15 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.10 By: Jara Handala https://johnriddell.com/2015/03/04/finland-1906-the-revolutionary-roots-of-womens-suffrage-an-international-womens-day-tribute/#comment-5047 Thu, 05 Mar 2015 01:06:34 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=2194#comment-5047 Enboldened by universal adult suffrage, young Finnish women played a full part in political life of social democracy, as shown in a striking book chapter about the usage of humour in a small town newspaper from 1914 to 1925.

Valistaja (The Enlightener) was handwritten, a not unusual form at the time in many parts of Europe, and circulated & read out at weekly politico-cultural meetings in villages & the town of Högfors (now Karkkila), then home to the largest ironworks in the country. The women, in part, “brought questions of love, emotions, and gender identity to the discussions.” The paper was closed down by the police because it advocated communism. It is now archived, having come to light in the early 1980s when “a pile of issues of Valistaja were found in the attic of the local police station.”

(Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, ‘Bitter Memories and Burst Soap Bubbles’, in Hart & Bos (eds.), Humour & Social Protest, Cambridge UP, 2008, 189-207; first pub’d in International Review of Social History, 52, 2007)

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