Naisten poliittinen kulttuuri ja kamppailu äänioikeudesta

Taustaa ja kysymyksenasetteluja

Authors

• Aino Saarinen

Abstract

This article deals with a new approach in the study of the Finnish women’s struggle for suffrage — or for complete equal rights. It suggests that the concept of a women’s political culture would be a key to the understanding of women, ’ordinary’ women included, as actors in, and agents of, structural changes. The importance of a broad concept of the political is stressed too, as well as an analytic difference between formal political power and informal influence. This approach, a view from ’below’ and everyday life, is said to make women visible even before the advent of their political civil rights. In other words: when explaining a change in the power relationship between men and women that resulted in women’s suffrage in 1906, it is not possible to overlook the political culture of women and its roots in civil society.