Preliminary Programme

Mainstream media is a central forum in which the meanings of feminism are negotiated. By framing the feminist movement, media can downplay its meaning or help it to reach wider audiences. In this presentation, I will focus on the 1970s and 1980s Finnish mainstream media and ask how the uprising of the feminist movement in Finland was framed in media texts. Were the activists heard in these texts? Did journalists present their own views or did they use neutral reporting style? Whose understanding of feminism was presented to media consumers?

The presentation covers decades from the 1970s to 1980s during which the feminist movement entered the public discussion in Finland. At first, feminism was a marginal movement consisting of a small group of mainly Finnish-Swedish women and it was also presented in the media as such. When the movement spread to wider circles the image became more multifaceted. However, the word feminism continued to be a difficult word throughout the studied period.

The presentation is based on a selection of newspaper and magazine articles dealing with the feminist movement in Finnish and Finnish-Swedish media. To be more specific, media texts are viewed as forums that present the negotiations of the meanings of feminism between feminist activists and journalists. Additionally, oral histories of both activists and journalists will be used to deepen the understanding of the negotiations that have taken place in interview situations. (Show less)

By the 1990s the grassroots feminist movement in Spain lacked the momentum and visibility that had marked its activism throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The Spanish government’s founding of the Instituto de la Mujer, or Women’s Institute, in October 1983 gave citizens a new government body through which to channel women’s concerns and debate equality policies; as a result, independent feminists using grassroots organizational strategies no longer drove the political or cultural debates about women’s rights. Instead, both independent feminism and its grassroots organization, eclipsed by the Instituto’s efforts, faded into the background.

Notably, the shift from independent activists using grassroots techniques to institutional feminists organizing through formal political networks and using government resources coincided with a simultaneous shift in international feminist activism over the 1980s and 1990s. This shift saw newly formed national women’s bureaus from across the globe participate in the World Conference on Women series and lobby organizations like the UN and EEC for policy changes to expand women’s rights. Indeed, institutional feminists in the Instituto found that working through official government channels plugged them into the inner workings of the EEC and the UN’s equality bodies, something that independent feminists had not achieved.

Yet instead of alleviating the challenges that Spanish feminists in general faced, the creation of the Instituto and its reach for international networks added complication for both independent and institutional feminists seeking political solutions to womens’ problems. Independent feminists increasingly understood institutional feminists’ entrenchment in government-created networks, including their embrace of international organizations’ policies to alleviate gender discrimination, to be evidence that institutional feminists were feminists in name only. As such, independent feminists developed a deep ambivalence toward institutional feminists and their policies: on the one hand independent feminists denied their counterparts’ identities as feminist, while on the other hand independent feminists recognized that they sometimes needed the political leverage that institutional feminists and their networks could apply even though they disliked, disagreed with, or disavowed institutional feminism itself.

Ultimately, the relationships between competing groups of self-identified feminists, in addition to the political leverage derived from internationally-accepted and in some cases internationally-mandated policies, shaped the rights and the political representation that ordinary women could access in Spain. The shift from grassroots activists’ internationalism to the decreasing possibilities for international engagement that independent feminists still using grassroots organizational techniques faced once the Instituto’s own internationalism predominated; the limited role of the national Instituto in deciding women’s rights policies for the whole of Spain; and the conflict between ideologically opposed groups of self-identified feminists over what equality meant and who got to be feminist all illuminate the ways in which Spanish feminists of different ideological camps mobilized for and effected domestic political change in the late 20th century. (Show less)

Before the establishment of the (radical) feminist movement in Finland in the beginning of the 1970s, questions of gender equality were brought up into public discussion by the so-called gender role movement (sukupuolirooliliike) that was active in Nordic countries in the 1960s. Feminists and gender role activists themselves have emphasized ideological and conceptual differences between these two movements, and the differences were later been reinforced by academic studies analysing the history of feminism in Finland. In these interpretations, the gender role movement represents institutional equality discourse that aims to extend the rights of men to the rights of women via political and legal reform while the feminist movement represents grassroots activism that sought for women’s liberation by challenging the role of men as the goal of gender equality.

My analysis that is based on archival and oral history material shows, however, many similarities between these movements, both in the aims, practices and discourses. In my presentation, I will critically review the previous popular and academic narratives and discourses of the Finnish second wave feminist movement by re-analysing the role of the gender role movement in initializing public discussion of modern gender roles and sexuality. I will especially highlight the role of the movement in challenging contemporary social order of public and private spheres and in problematizing men’s role in society
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