“I wish you were at least a social democrat!” Family relations remembered by former radical communist women

Authors

• Liisa Lalu Turun yliopisto

Abstract

This article examines Taistoism, a radical communist movement in Finland in the 1970s. The focus is on young girls and women in the movement and their family backgrounds. Taistoism is often considered as a counterculture of youths of the 1970s against previous generations and their patriotic values: painful breaks and arguments have been described occurring especially between bourgeois fathers and rebellious sons. Conversely, I study the radicalization of Taistoist girls vis-à-vis their family backgrounds and relations. I investigate this through interviews and oral history methods: the radical adolescence and family relations are recalled by women in their 50s and 60s in the 2010s. In these interviews, the interviewed women emphasize more their mothers’ influence and interactive parenting than rebellion against their parents. These educated and working mothers acted as role models for their daughters, and through their discussing and tolerant parenting, they inculcated values such as peace and equality on their radicalizing leftist daughters.