War agency in women’s auxiliary military organizations: the case of Lotta Svärd in Finland

ABSTRACT

Women’s participation in auxiliary military organizations is a little-studied subject in the field of international relations. This article examines women’s war agency – or, rather, agentic capacity – in the Finnish women’s auxiliary organization Lotta Svärd during the Second World War. I discuss how war agency emerges from the embodied capacity to act through the primacy of corporeal, relational, and material practices by which experiences, meaning, and matter create reciprocally agentic capacities. The war agency of these women was not based on particular subject positions within the organization; instead, it came about as a result of the capacity of the material and the relational to enact the world anew. My analysis of the life-story data reveals that the ideological work of participating in an auxiliary military organization played only a minor role in the lives of the members. The finding calls into question the presumed distinction between the political and the apolitical and generates a broader view of what counts as political experience and agency during war.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s auxiliary military organizations
• war agency
• feminist new materialism
• Lotta Svärd
• narratives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Russo-Finnish War, also called the “Winter War,” was a war waged by the Soviet Union against Finland at the beginning of the Second World War, from November 30, 1939, to March 12, 1940. It was followed by an “interim peace” – the term used for the time between the Winter War and so-called Continuation War – lasting a little over a year, from March 13, 1940, to June 24, 1941.

2 Haavio-Mannila, the Martha Organization, and the Finnish National Board of Antiquities (1987–1988). The data is stored in the Finnish Social Science Data Archive at Tampere University. It is organized into a set of 43 digitized and anonymized files. The first number in my reference indicates the number of the file, and the second number is the number of the anonymized author. The translations are my own, and I have invented names for the women to whom I refer.

3 While research on Lotta Svärd and Lottas’ experiences has gone through various phases in Finland over time, there has been a renewal of interest in the topic in the past ten years, as a new generation of historians has taken up themes, approaches, and methods that challenge the canonized Finnish war and military history, including the history of Lotta Svärd (see, for example, Kinnunen 2006; Kinnunen and Kivimäki 2012; Näre 2016). Finnish research has recently focused on topics such as the gendered workforce and labor market (Peltokorpi 2011); care work, particularly nursing (Elomaa-Krapu 2015; Virtanen, Lämsä, and Takala 2017); memory processes (Ellefson 2016); the history of lived experiences and the microhistory of war (Peltokorpi 2011); and the gendered social order and representations of femininity and masculinity (Nevala-Nurmi 2012; Virtanen, Lämsä, and Takala 2017).

4 The White Guard as a voluntary militia was formed out of paramilitary groups established for protection and to preserve order in the wake of the Russian Revolution. They fought against the Red Guards in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academy of Finland: [Grant Number 297053].

Notes on contributors

Tarja Väyrynen

Tarja Väyrynen is Professor in Peace and Conflict Research and Research Director of Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI) at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include gender and peacebuilding, theories of conflict and conflict resolution, subaltern and Indigenous resistance, and post-conflict memory work. Her recent publications include the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, co-edited with Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, and Catia Confortini (Routledge, 2021); Corporeal Peacebuilding: Mundane Bodies and Temporal Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and Choreographies of Resistance: Mobile Bodies and Relational Politics, co-authored with Eeva Puumala, Samu Pehkonen, Anitta Kynsilehto, and Tiina Vaittinen (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Her current research project deals with environmental conflicts and feminist new materialism.