The Swedish journal Morgonbris on political violence in Finland 1917–1918

Abstract

Women participated actively in the Finnish Civil War in January 1918–April 1918. The radicalization of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the embracing of a revolutionary discourse sent tremors also to Sweden. In this article, I investigate how the Swedish Social Democratic women’s journal Morgonbris addresses women’s political violence in the period surrounding the Russian Revolution in March 1917, the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover and the following Civil War in Finland early 1918.

Morgonbris did not shun from reporting or debating women’s political violence, however, as this article shows there is a great discrepancy between how different acts of violence are understood in the greater discourse. Some violence, and especially some acts of violence committed by women, is clearly framed as more legitimate than others.

Keywords:

• Sweden
• Finland
• women
• violence
• socialism
• civil war
• revolution
• feminism

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Erratum

In the name of the cause she was like flint, as hard as steel.¹

Introduction

The sentence by Alexandra Kollontai cited above combines the ideological struggle for a cause with steely determination in a positive spirit. Historically, the women’s movement and early feminist theorists have emphasized the propensity for violence as a male prerogative, often contrasted to women’s innate peacefulness. The history of feminism and the women’s movement has, consequently, been written in the same vein. And even today, the reception of the film Suffragette by Sarah Gavron (2015) was followed by a debate where, for example, Swedish feminists had to defend or explain the use of violence a hundred years ago. Yet, although women have not been in the front line in waging wars, neither in positions of political power nor in military leadership, they have indeed participated in war efforts, revolutions and terrorism. The commemoration of 100 years of independence in Finland has given reason to highlight research on women’s political activity during Finnish independence and the following Civil War 1917–1918.²

The aim of this article is to investigate how the Swedish Social Democratic journal Morgonbris, a journal addressing the women of the party, reported on the Finnish Civil War and violence, with a primary focus on women as actants rather than victims. I will analyze how the topic was approached in Morgonbris in editorials, articles, feature pieces, letters and reviews. The cooperation between Social Democratic parties and movements was intense during the first decades of the twentieth century, as several historical and political science studies have shown.³ The journal had trouble dealing with the revolution and use of violence in Finland in an ideological revolutionary framework, while Russia appeared as an exemplary revolutionary nation. It is therefore interesting to study how violence was discussed as a viable alternative more generally, in order to give a framework for understanding socialist women’s violence especially. What approaches to violence were discernible in Morgonbris’s reporting, and what attitudes did it convey to its readers? In bringing together contemporary theory now and contemporary reflection then, in the concluding section of the article, the strict division between sources, empirical material and theory is (at least temporarily) halted, which allows for a feedback loop between now and then. I thus understand the historical-empirical material to convey a theory on violence. And likewise, contemporary theory now does not only offer new ways of understanding or interpreting historical events, but interpreting historical events anew fundamentally affects how we understand, in my example, women’s political subjectivity today. This is, of course, a starting point for many historical investigations and at times used to legitimize historical research per se. Without getting deeper into this extensive scholarly conversation, I only want to make the point in relation to my use of the different textual materials, where the status of empirical material and theory is conflated, for example in the case of Alexandra Kollontai.⁴ The two years covered in this article, 1917–1918, constitute a period of great social and political turmoil in Europe. Rather than offering one attempt as contextualizing the situation I have opted for a framework where the changing political contexts are intertwined with the texts and events that are analyzed, thus emphasizing the rapid changes and reactions.

The journal Morgonbris and the years 1917–1918

The Swedish journal Morgonbris: Arbeterskornas tidning [Morning breeze: The working women’s journal] was established in 1904 by the Women Workers’ Union under the editorship of Anna Sterky and Maria Sandel, both of whom combined political and union activity with journalistic and literary writing.⁵ In 1909 the publishing continued within the fold of the Social Democratic Party, with Ruth Gustafson as editor and an updated name Morgonbris: Tidning för Socialdemokratiska kvinnorörelsen [Morning Breeze: The journal of the Social Democratic women’s movement].⁶ It is still today the official organ of the Social Democratic Women’s Group in Sweden. During the studied years the journal was published monthly and had a print run of c. 12 000.⁷

The journal offers material for an ‘outside’ perspective on the events in Finland in 1917–1918. The journalists and writers working for Morgonbris were dedicated to the Social Democratic party and its ideology. There is a clear ideological interest in following the Finnish Social Democratic women’s progress, for example the fact that Finnish women had gained the vote early (1906), something both the Finnish and Swedish voices in the journal emphasized.

The participation of Finnish women in armed struggle has been controversial and largely absent from public discourse as well as historical research, until recently.⁸ The Civil War in Finland has been described as, at least partly, a consequence of the failure of the parliament to initiate thorough social changes for the people who benefitted from universal suffrage in 1905–1906.⁹ Finland remained part of the Russian empire until the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 and the period between the revolutions in the Russian empire, in February and October 1917, saw a radicalization of the Finnish left. In the Civil War, from late January 1918 to April 1918, and during the following incarcerations and executions in prison camps some 37,000 Finns died.¹⁰ The events of the general strike and suffrage in 1905–1906, and the independence and the Civil War in 1917–1918, are extensively covered in previous research regarding the events themselves and the political discourse that was an important radicalizing element.¹¹ An estimated of 2,600 women, from the age of 14, served on the Red side during the war, later between 360 and 500 were executed.¹²

In the reporting Morgonbris conveyed to its Swedish audience, predominantly union-affiliated Social Democratic women, a mode of social and political orientation nationally and internationally.¹³ Throughout the first decades of its publication the journal contained a large section of information on union matters such as summaries of meetings, newly constituted associations and new members, and specific information on, for example, union actions at workplaces. Another central issue was the ongoing debate on women’s rights and suffrage and to a large extent children’s rights concerns. There were also recurrent practical articles on clothing and romantic short stories. These were domestically oriented. Editorial comments on current politics and international outlooks often dominated the journal as they were given more space and placed on the first pages. These are clearly part of the educational project of the left and include many review articles on art and literature, as well as political comments supplied by the editors or prominent Social Democrats around Europe.

Women’s journals are here understood as a forum for trans-Nordic debate, made possible by related languages and multilingualism, and an arena for international outlooks which was catered for by the many translated articles on and by prominent women in politics, in arts, literature and science.¹⁴ Journals offer a public arena in which to debate, among other things, the topics of war, violence and revolution in relation to gender. Morgonbris is thus part of a discourse that creates and upholds a gendered order and channels gendered expectations by offering images of women’s subjectivity and actions also in controversial matters such as political violence. It is not my intention, however, to investigate the details surrounding publication policy, but rather to understand what the predominantly Social Democratic, union-affiliated woman could read in a journal addressing her specifically. Since Morgonbris was a Social Democratic journal, its writing and theorizing of violence is not only connected to gender, but often primarily connected to class struggle and different (changing) understandings of the relation between class and gender.

The rapid national and global changes taking place are reflected in the reporting in Morgonbris. With the First World War raging in Europe, the press was of course full of stories of atrocities: violence, hunger, misery, death. Important related issues for the press were those of censorship and the ongoing unrest related to food shortages in large parts of Europe.¹⁵ The women’s press was no different and even more light-hearted magazines followed current events and offered perspectives to complement the day-to-day reporting in newspapers.¹⁶ Morgonbris did not have a radical pacifist attitude, although it clearly took a stand against the war. The Social Democrats were keen to keep Sweden out of direct war efforts and the journal thus followed the party line.¹⁷

To isolate, define, divide and identify separate acts of violence from each other is not always easy as comments and articles in the journal are part of a general discourse. My aim is therefore to highlight the interplay and potential conflicts in the discourse of violence and the discernible differences. Women’s journals in general display a high awareness of what is going on in Europe and the rest of the world, thus relating their standpoints to those made in other national, international, ideological contexts of war and conflict. War and violence are present throughout Morgonbris, in editorial material, in reportage, in letters from abroad, and in feature pieces, reviews and portraits. A central part of my argument is that reports on singular events need to be understood in the context surrounding violence that is created by the journal. Thus, even though most articles on violence do not address Finland, articles on violence in general give a context for understanding the case of Finland, especially as violence is strongly connected to ideologies and changing patterns of cooperation within the Social Democratic movement.

Looking eastward at Finland and Russia

When the Russian Revolution erupted in March 1917 in Petrograd it was depicted as an inevitable and expected course of world history in Morgonbris. Anna Lindhagen, chief editor 1911–1916 and thereafter a regular contributor, explains how she was ‘filled with a greater joy than we have ever felt in our whole life’.¹⁸ The revolution was at this moment in time seen as the mother of all revolutions that would ‘give birth to new revolutions, new victories over oppression’ all over the world.¹⁹

The Swedish papers, of course, closely followed the political turmoil 1917–1918 in their eastern neighbourhood, and the events played a significant role in the Swedish parliamentary debate, as Pasi Ihalainen has shown in his book The Springs of Democracy (2017). The major Swedish newspapers sent out correspondents to Russia, the Swedish Social Democratic leader Hjalmar Branting visited both Finland and Petrograd, and party officials on all sides paid visits in order to observe and influence.²⁰ However, the initial support from the Swedish Social Democrats dwindled rapidly and Finland did not receive backing for its request for recognition as an independent state following the declaration of independence of the 6th of December 1917.²¹ Although Sweden never experienced a revolution, the events in Russia and Finland, as well as the food shortage brought on by the First World War, had a great impact on Swedish national politics. The radicalization of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and its embracing of a Bolshevik revolutionary discourse, with Lenin representing the only group in Russia who supported Finnish independence, alienated the majority of the Swedish Social Democrats. Furthermore, the events in Finland could be seen as a springboard for revolutionary ideas between Russia and Sweden.²²

In Morgonbris, there were a number of letters from Finland published. Often, they were informative accounts of the struggles and victories of the Social Democratic women’s movement or, for example, the coop organization Elanto. Hilja Pärssinen (1876–1935),²³ a Social Democratic MP, author, teacher and editor, wrote in a letter dated 25 April 1917, at a time when Sweden was experiencing a revolutionary ‘wave’ inspired by the revolution in Petrograd, that: ‘The effects of the revolution have been so profound that they cannot be conveyed in a short article […] a political change from oppression and violence to total freedom.’²⁴ Pärssinen is here commenting on changes happening in Finland. She iterates in her article the workings of the women’s organizations, the parliament and the senate, emphasizing issues of a new constitution, logistic provision of food and social welfare, but also women’s wages. All in all, Pärssinen’s article gave the impression of well-orchestrated activities in organizing political life anew in Finland. Yet, several challenges remained:

Many reactionary attitudes have to be overthrown. The people need to be enlightened, prepared for continuous struggle, because capitalism still stands strong and the bourgeois are only waiting for the moment when they can yet again oppress the working class and exploit it.²⁵

Pärssinen is speaking in the same discourse as Morgonbris articles in general where women’s issues, workers’ issue, children, and provisions are central. Anna Lindhagen also tried to catch the spirit of the Russian Revolution and the confiscation of the granaries: ‘Therefore not only freedom for the people, they wanted to supply them with bread.’²⁶ At this moment, Pärssinen’s analysis of bourgeois exploitation did not give rise to any editorial comment, which suggests that her analysis of the situation was considered reasonable.²⁷ Violence, as we can read in Pärssinen’s article, was the tool of the oppressor and her interpretation of the expected counter-revolutionary readiness of the bourgeois was quite in line with the prevalent Russian revolutionary discourse that had gained a strong-hold on the Finnish left.²⁸ Pärssinen was well versed in socialist theory, and personally knew both the Russian socialist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, whom she cooperated with, and Clara Zetkin, the leading figure of the German Social Democratic women’s movement and editor of Gleichheit (Zetkin contributed to Morgonbris). The letter ends, accordingly, with a wish that the women workers of Europe will gain the vote and be part of their legislative governments soon, as the Finnish women had been since 1906, but Swedish women were still actively struggling for. This is a gesture to unite women’s interests across national borders.

In the same genre was a reportage written by editor Julia Ström-Olsson (editor 1917:3–1919:7) about the Finnish Social Democrat MP Miina Sillanpää’s visit to Stockholm. The article focuses on the ‘expensive times’ and food shortage, Sillanpää was especially engaged in the work for social issues and women’s issues. Ström-Olsson concludes: ‘Finland has never been a nation over which the kind goddess of plenty has poured her cornucopia’.²⁹ Sillanpää was understandably reserved in her commentary on the events in Finland, with an ongoing radicalization towards revolutionary socialism, but Ström-Olsson mentions that the March Revolution had had positive consequences for ‘working hours in most jobs’, a central issue for the Social Democrats and the worker’s unions.

The reporting directly connected to Finland can thus be said to have been positive in tone and appreciative of the achievements during 1917, before the declaration of independence in December the same year. It soon became obvious that Finland was facing an internal ideological conflict not only between the larger blocks of left and right, but also within the left, as was Sweden.³⁰ Many articles by Julia Ström-Olsson dealt with what she perceived as a one-sided image of Finland and compared the Swedish reaction to the eagerness with which the Swedish right had wanted to intervene in the World War in 1914. Now, she wrote in the spring of 1918, Swedish public opinion was demanding that the country should intervene on the ‘White’ side as a way of ‘saving Finland’, while Ström-Olsson wanted to emphasize that even the ‘Reds’ are ‘Finland’.³¹ Alternative mediation plans that did not give one side priority over the other had been suggested by the women’s movement, proclaiming a more cautious approach since it was still uncertain exactly what would be the best way of action, Ström-Olsson continued. The conservative establishment in Sweden, she argued, perceived the conflict as a chance to use force against the Reds. For some, then, saving Finland was equated with saving White Finland while cracking down on the Reds. In August the same year, Ström-Olsson commented on the work of a committee that was deliberating how and whether the orphans of the Red and the White casualties were to be treated differently or equally.³² Any idea of treating them differently was ‘unpatriotic’, she concluded, and let the reader understand that the question itself was immoral. In the May issue 1918 a protest against an ongoing campaign to allow export of weapons to Finland during the conflict from the Social Democratic Women in Karlstad was printed.³³

Ström-Olsson was here siding with a humane view of the revolutionary Finns in a time when the Swedish Social Democrats had already clearly distanced themselves from the actions in Finland. The moods towards both Russia and Finland had changed during the months following the October Revolution and the declaration of Finnish independence, as subsequent events became unpredictable and increasingly violent. Anna Lindhagen wrote specifically about Finland in the article ‘No spring’ from May 1918 that criticizes the Bolshevik takeover in Russia.³⁴ The article starts with the joy of spring of 1917 as the ‘big breakthrough in Russia, which we had longed for as long as we could remember’ but which eventually ‘robbed Russia of the possibility to create a voluntary union between those peoples that had previously been part of the unfree Russian empire’. Simultaneously, she writes, her thoughts have been with Finland in ‘mortification over the Finnish Social Democrats’ extremely inappropriate revolution supported by Russian troops, shuddering before the violent acts, now shivering in waiting for the White revenge.’ Violence begets violence and in Sweden any revolutionary sentiment of the early 1917 had been abandoned.

The gendered revolutionary subject?

To a large extent the articles on women and political action emphasized peaceful activities and political work on the ground. Who, then, was the proper revolutionary subject in Morgonbris? It was hardly the ‘scum’ that ‘has floated to the surface in the Finnish civil struggle’, as Ström-Olsson so suggestively depicted the Finnish revolutionaries in the March 1918 issue.³⁵ The role model par excellence in Morgonbris was clearly the figure of the Russian woman. She appears in different articles by different authors in the roles of a political subject, as literary character, as refugee, as aid worker, as revolutionary, and as politically and ideologically more hardcore than any other women.³⁶ And she was passionate both erotically and politically, as one author explains.³⁷ The discrepancy between the understanding of the Finnish and the Russian women is difficult to explain. On the one hand, women’s journals of all kinds often published idolizing portraits of women with outstanding achievements.³⁸ Alexandra Kollontai received a lot of space and attention, alongside Rosa Luxemburg, as there were few available socialist women role models. Yet, ordinary Russian women seem to have reached the level of outstanding. The party line in general was much more clearly reluctant to idolize ‘the east’. Quite the opposite, both Swedish Social Democrats and some Social Democrats in Finland abhorred the ‘uncivilized’ east and emphasized the westernness of Social Democracy. Such ethnic and civilizational criticism of the east seems to have been predominantly aired by those who questioned a revolutionary line, such as the Swedish-speaking Finn K. H. Wiik, as Matias Kaihovirta has shown.³⁹ Morgonbris thus seems to diverge somewhat from the general sentiments in Sweden as the idolization of the ‘east’ continued. There were, of course, different opinions also within the left in Sweden, but there is no reason to assign Morgonbris to any extreme left faction or the like. Apparently, it was important to identify the proper revolutionary subject, the timing and the modus operandi of any revolution: ‘Liberation has been accomplished, but not from the outside, but rather, as it should, by their own [people]. The only ones who could do it as it should be done,’ Ström-Olsson commented on Russia in April 1917.⁴⁰ Thus, women were not positively associated directly with acts of violence except in the case of the ideologically driven Russian women, and furthermore, any revolution in Finland was ‘imported’, that is, not grounded in the national specificity. There was a genuinely felt fear of the revolution reaching Sweden at least on three occasions, at the time of the March Revolution, during the Finnish Civil War early in 1918, and in the autumn of 1918 the Spartacist rebellion in Germany,⁴¹ and therefore it may have been of utmost importance to distinguish between proper revolutionary events and second-order revolutions.

An article by Alexandra Kollontai comparing different strategies employed by women in situations of violence, be it ‘militarism’ or ‘revolution’, was published in the spring of 1917. She wrote about women who during war supported the capitalist government, and then waited for the vote. Instead, the women of Russia ‘wanted to maintain their own politics: first and foremost, overthrow the tsar and obtain political rights for the workers, continue working for an organization that could conquer political power, take over the functions of the state, get help for the misfortunate, provide bread and realize socialism step by step.’⁴² Kollontai contrasts this to women who act as ‘social patriots’ and support the bourgeois liberal aid organizations that are in the hands of the government. In the argument of the article she identified women as the prime movers of both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Although ‘objective historical facts’, such as the inevitable clash between tsarism and capitalism, were paramount to the revolution, it was nevertheless the working-class women who ‘initiated the first assault on Tsarism’ and ‘gave the first thrust of the revolutionary action’. They stood, Kollontai writes, side by side with the fighting men, with sabre, revolver and rifle in hand.

Flor Viola celebrated the Russian revolutionary woman who ‘sees in every representative of the [tsarist] system an executioner whose dirty fingers are dripping with the blood of Russian subjects…’.⁴³ Although she was a kind-hearted being ‘she has been struck by an idea … that has made her a fanatic in the great sense of the word’ and this idea that ‘makes her cheer when she finds out that a bullet has done its deed…’. The idea referred to here is of course socialism, an ideology that, according to the article, replaces both God and husband as the centre of the revolutionary woman’s attention. Here violence was clearly connected to the undoing of social and political injustice and the socialist women’s violence was made legitimate with reference to the cause. Thus, it was a different kind of violence than ‘militarism’, workers have the ‘opposite interest to fight militarism in every way’.⁴⁴ There was a wish for a different kind of ‘reason in history’. A rationality of the heart, rather than cold-headed, and the revolution gave hope for ‘the victory’ of this kind of reason in history.⁴⁵ Was it possible to publish articles that romanticized the revolutionary woman a year later when the majority Social Democratic opinion in Sweden had turned against any revolutionary ideas? Yes, the celebration of the Russian women’s achievements as revolutionaries throughout history continued. And, as before 1917–1918, articles often offered a mix of literary and real-life women in their emphasis on the specificity of the Russians.⁴⁶ Was there a different logic to the women’s journals due to their emphasis on equality between the sexes? Even when explicit war, political violence, assassinations or armed revolt is discussed, there is an element of emphasizing women fighting alongside and equal to men. Thus, the stories about violence also became stories about equality.

Violence connected to nation

Articles that more generally discussed violence tend to associate women negatively with violence when and if they belonged to hostile nations, such as Germany, while for the French ‘democracy is and will forever be the golden rose, even though the container [nation?] is broken at the moment!’⁴⁷ Many articles that connect women to acts of violence address women on a European scale and, just like the ones celebrating the Russian woman, they are generalizing on both a national level and a gendered level.

The woman is more sensitive than the man, more dependent on her passions, more easily moved, heated in love as in hate. The world war has confirmed this. In the furthest extremes among both the defenders of the war and the instigators of violence, as among the most ardent opposition to war, women have taken prominent positions.⁴⁸

This quotation from the socialist/Social Democratic agitator and author Ture Nerman’s book Folkhatet (‘Hatred of People’) was part of a longer abstract that starts in the negative depiction of women’s writing as violent, at least as violent as the writings of men if not worse, and ends on a lighter note, citing women that had produced peaceful texts. Women are used as representatives of ideologies, nations and carriers of specific national characteristics: ‘the Russian death battalion of young women’, but also ‘the hysterical bourgeois suffragettes who joined the government they had hated … in support of the war.’ War and violence were further connected to a degradation of family life and to women’s immorality – there was something about the war itself that made for immorality through the disruption of the social order. In Ola Vinberg’s case, which we will return below, women were explicitly prone to prostitution as a mode of warfare through which allies could be lured or enemies persuaded. In Nerman’s case it is rather the war situation itself and the need to deal with violence that created problems. When men are absent, it leads to women taking on new chores and paid jobs, and even the fact that there was a need to write about war and violence is troublesome.

One important aspect in the construction of such arguments was the connection of capitalism to nationalism. That is, characteristics that were tied to nation and nationalism were generally seen as negative, while characteristics that could be connected to internationalism, revolution, struggles for rights or socialism, were positive. For example, France was ‘good’ because of the democratic ideals of the French Revolution; the Russians in their revolutionary capacity were also ‘good’, while the Germans were generally the epitome of ‘bad’ nationalism because of the outright and explicit struggles between workers and state. It was the hatred of other nations that constituted the opposite to workers’ internationalism, of course. Those exemplary women who ‘preach peace’, according to Nerman, were Angelica Balabanoff, Marcelle Capy, Alexandra Kollontai and Rosa Luxemburg because they ‘put their lives against the mother state [moderstaten], against their fatherland’. This readyness to go against anything and everything military or nationalist was by Nerman connected to a ‘motherly instinct’.⁴⁹

Only one article takes issue directly with Finnish women. The first part of Ola Vinberg’s ‘The Finnish Woman’ was stopped by censorship and only part two appears to have been printed.⁵⁰ Morgonbris thus did not escape wartime censorship. Vinberg’s article is the most misogynist, racist and bigoted article published in Morgonbris during the investigated period. The reasoning behind the editorial decision to publish such an uncharacteristic text for Morgonbris, and also uncharacteristic for Vinberg’s other publications in the same journal, remains unknown. Vinberg was a person whose actions and political ideologies are hard to grasp. He was a socialist, a spy for the Soviet Union, later associated with the National Socialists.⁵¹ Apparently, based on the introduction to the published article, the first part dealt with ‘the Finnish woman more generally’, while the second article deals with women who ‘more actively participated in the social struggle and the importance of their efforts’. The article is, in fact, not predominantly about Finnish women, but Finns in general. According to Vinberg, Finland lacked a history of social struggle like the ones seen in France or Russia, and therefore had had no opportunities for women educated in socialism to step forward. The struggle was more of a collectivist class struggle than a terrorist one, meaning that no ideological revolutionary elite leaders emerged. Therefore, individual education and the ability to take initiatives was lacking in both the Finnish workers and the intellectuals who fought alongside the masses. The result of the circumstances and the organization of the worker’s movement created an atmosphere such that Finland could not ‘raise national heroes’, which it would so badly have needed. Instead, the collective emphasized the ‘streaks of rawness in the race’, its ‘brute characteristics’ and ‘pessimism’, as the Finn was a ‘fine member of a suicide club’. There seems to be only one way to reach the ‘heights of heroism’ – through ‘open-fight mass action’, yet ‘in everyday life they are dullness incarnate’ albeit with a ‘heart of gold’. This nation, with such insignificant male persons in its historical struggles and social development, of course did not have any female persons of any rank, and even less did they have any ‘revolutsia babushka’ (revolutionary grandmothers of the Russian kind), who, Vinberg points out, instigated and carried out deeds of violence, thus showing that there was equality between the sexes in Russia in throwing bombs at those working within the system.

The brutishness and collectivity of the Finnish national characteristic was discernible in the women as well, Vinberg writes. The Finnish women did not fight in their own battalions (sign of collectivity), were not appealing to men (as the Russians apparently were?), and they were so worked up that they acted in a brutal hatred, driven by class hate and mass psychosis. Clearly, the women were no better than the men. In Vinberg’s account women are sexualized in a manner recognizable in other articles in Morgonbris, a mode of entanglement of female gender and sexuality that is still today a staple in analysis of women and violence.⁵² Vinberg gets himself into a longish tirade on prostitution during the 1918 events, declaring that the allegations of Red prostitution in the famous defence of the Työväentalo (‘Workers’ House’) in Helsinki were totally false. Whites, he maintained however, used middle-class girls as prostitutes to lure German soldiers to the White side.

Vinberg has to be understood in the context of the long-established conflict between western civilization and the eastern (non-)civilization, which the previously mentioned K. H. Wiik represented, and a disdain and scorn for segments of the Finnish-speaking population.⁵³ Clearly, classist and racist attitudes were pronounced, through which the peasant background of the Finnish working class was seen, in accordance with some Marxist interpretations, as not yet ripe for a truly revolutionary mind-set. However, while Wiik identified an east/west division and favoured the west and could see the Russian influence in Finland as negative, Vinberg appears to have viewed the Finns as a parenthesis and the Russians (still) as the true revolutionaries.

Some conclusions can be drawn about how Morgonbris dealt with women and violence. When it came to Finnish women specifically, not much was written apart from Ola Vinberg’s negative article. Seen in the broader perspective of how violence was tied to national characteristics in the cases of France and Germany, for example, Vinberg’s tirade makes sense as the unsettling events in Finland can be tied to character rather than ideology. Many comments suggest that it was unfortunate, even wrong, of the Finnish socialists to use violence and that the call for independence was ill-timed. It was a case of the right ideology but wrong methods. They were unable to carry out the revolution properly due to defaults in the movement such as lack of elites, too intense collectivity, or overt brutishness. With the fear of violence erupting in Sweden, this was of course a useful strategy of disassociation.⁵⁴ More surprising was the continuing celebration of Russian women in this context. Even as the Bolshevik take-over was criticized, the Russian women remain an object of admiration and their participation in the army, defence or the traditionally male workforce, understood as a sign of gender equality.

Feminism and women’s political violence

Violence is potentially both productive and destructive; it can produce new social orders, and the mere participation in violence can create new gendered orders by disrupting stereotyped expectations. Many women theorizing violence around the start of the twentieth century can generally be identified to the left on the political scale, that is, ideologically close to Morgonbris. One aspect of this discussion that is widely researched, but will not be addressed here, is women’s participation in pacifism and women’s internationalism, and the conflicts caused by different positions in relation to the First World War.⁵⁵ Instead, I will mention just two theorists here in order to offer a framework for the then contemporary debate: Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Both wrote widely about questions of gender and violence, and further, they explicitly argued against the prevailing understanding of women’s predominantly mothering/nurturing/reproductive role in society. Kollontai, as we have seen in the previous pages of this article, was one of the idolized women in Morgonbris who was interviewed over the years and supplied comments on the current situation. Kollontai, like many of her contemporaries, did not identify herself as a feminist, nor did she produce theory in the traditional academic sense. However, given the amount of work she did, in fact, on analyzing, explaining and theorizing women’s role and situation in capitalist society and in a future socialist society, she is clearly to be considered an important influence in her time. Her work was re-evaluated again in the 1970s when she became a feminist icon for a new leftist movement.⁵⁶ Goldman was also reluctant to associate herself with feminism, and for both the feminist movement was ideologically far from their understanding of a desirable society. Goldman was an anarchist theorist who agitated for union rights and participated very actively in the movement, yet her major impact historically has likewise been on issues associated with women such as marriage, sexuality and contraceptives. Goldman’s feminism has been considered her greatest contribution to anarchist theory.⁵⁷

Emma Goldman writes in her article ‘The psychology of political violence’ that ‘it comes from desperation with the way things are’.⁵⁸ Indeed, political violence emanates from those who cannot stand to live with structural economic and political injustices. The politically violent person is thus the logical outcome of an unjust society, a reaction to extreme socially induced stress, not a psychological or moral deficiency in the individual. In Goldman’s short text, all the examples of ‘Attentären’ are men, but in her published autobiography she clearly also writes about women’s active participation in attacks.⁵⁹ Goldman’s text builds on examples of actual attacks with both men and women figuring in the text, most notably Goldman herself as the alleged instigator (but not perpetrator) of anarchist attacks. Goldman makes no claims as to the psychology of women being different from men in this text. Alexandra Kollontai, on the other hand, not being an anarchist of course, emphasizes a different aspect of women’s participation in violence – the revolution and the army. Kollontai’s text is a commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and lists a number of women who were of great importance to the revolution, emphasizing a variety of functions: women as intellectuals and politicians, and, women as aid/service workers and foot soldiers. Goldman and Kollontai offer frames within which women’s political violence can be interpreted.

Concluding discussion

Only recently has women’s participation in political violence been seriously approached.⁶⁰ Institutionalized violence, as well as proscribed violence, has historically been a male prerogative, and legitimate exercise of violence restricted to military and police forces. The dividing line between legitimate violence, on the one hand, and proscribed or revolutionary, or other socially and politically disruptive violence, on the other hand, must be understood as a continuum. The continuum of violence and its legitimacy, as well as the gendered agency of violence, are central questions in Morgonbris, where the use of violence became a dividing line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ social change and revolution in relation to instigators, forms of revolution and use violence.

Laura Sjoberg and Carol Gentry argue in their book Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics that today, women’s violence receives proportionally more attention than men’s violence, and that ‘women’s violence is often discussed in terms of gender: women are not supposed to be violent’.⁶¹ They capture the dilemma of violence from political-ideological and feminist standpoints: conservative ideologies depict women as peaceful and apolitical, liberal ideologies depict women as a pacifying influence on politics, and ‘feminists who study global politics often critique the masculine violence of interstate relations’.⁶² These ideal-types also recur in the historical material studied here, although there seems to be a partiality towards Russian women revolutionaries.⁶³ No admiration or courage was, however, extended to the Finnish women (or men). When women do side with violent movements their ideological convictions are seldom analyzed; rather they are assumed to choose between either women’s/feminist movements or violent men’s/masculine political movements.⁶⁴ The violent faction of the British suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union, is an exception to the rule and has been ridiculed and widely discussed ever since.⁶⁵ This puts violent women in a precarious position and often women who committed violent acts have not been characterized as regular criminals, soldiers or terrorists; rather they have been imagined as captured by fantasies, as emotionally instable, as caught in movement led by men they love, which is a way of denying women’s political agency. Instead it becomes a way of reifying gendered stereotypes and women’s intellectual and political immaturity.⁶⁶ The same belittling attitude is exposed in a Nordic and Finnish perspective in the volume Gender, War and Peace edited by military historians Anders Ahlbäck and Fia Sundevall. They make an interesting point in emphasizing that feminist studies have rightly framed militarism and nationalism as masculinist projects, but that this does not make women automatically into passive victims of violence, nor into heroic agents of peace movements.⁶⁷ The complexity and complicity of women participating in all political and social movements needs to be addressed seriously. Yet, there are still tendencies in research on the Finnish Civil War to downplay women’s ideological and political convictions.⁶⁸

To what extent is the readiness to participate in the defence or struggle for one’s country a necessary act to gain full citizenship?⁶⁹ If women are and have been designated as innately, even essentially, peaceful, women by their nature cannot offer the kind of sacrifice that the nation requires, although motherhood was offered as a substitute for military service. This aspect is corroborated by chief editor of Morgonbris, Julia Ström-Olsson, who writes that in the debate about women’s right to vote in the elections for the national parliament ‘women’s strong will for peace’ has been used against their demand for political suffrage. This line of reasoning forces what Ström-Olsson calls the ‘culture of incompetence’ to its extreme, meaning that those asserting women’s incompetence as political subjects shun no methods, even ones that make themselves look ‘ridiculous’.⁷⁰

Discussing the depiction of violence in Morgonbris calls on a cultural-historical understanding of violence. Charlotte Tornbjer pays special attention in a chapter titled ‘Krigets våld: Det röda våldet’ (‘The violence of war: The Red violence’) to Swedish reports from Russia during and after the revolution.⁷¹ She concludes that reporting was ambivalent, especially on women’s role in relation to armed conflicts, women soldiers, and women revolutionaries. Both positive and negative reporting could be found, and the revolutionary leftist reporting was, not surprisingly, more positive. The women in the celebratory marches in Russia on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, which Kollontai commemorates in the article discussed above, surprised and unsettled foreign visitors, however, Tornbjer concludes that the marches were not understood as a display of militarism but rather of the workers’ achievements.

Whereas men’s violence may be misdirected and executed by political opponents, women’s violence has often been depicted as distinctly mad. Women’s violence is thus not a movement on a continuum, but rather totally off the charts. These images are familiar from many different settings: the crazy tricoteuses of the French revolution; the unruly anarchist women in the union struggles in the early twentieth century, the mad British suffragettes of the WSPU, the Red wolf-bitches susinartut of the Finnish Civil War, just to give a few examples. Since the 1970s there has been a growing interest in men’s political and ideological refusal to carry out acts of war and violence.⁷² Just as the mutinies, strikes, cowardliness, and passive aggression, has been reclaimed as agency, so today there is a growing willingness to rearticulate the violence committed by women.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katarina Leppänen

Katarina Leppänen is Professor of Intellectual History and coordinator of the Master’s Programme in Critical Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her doctoral thesis was on the feminist Elin Wägner and the European feminist movement in the interwar era. Leppänen’s research covers question of women’s independent nationality, education for internationalism, and trafficking in women in the interwar era. Her ongoing research deals with the uses of literature in transnational, international and regional exchanges of political ideas, in the Nordic and Baltic area in the early twentieth century. Address: Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1 Alexandra Kollontai, ‘Women Fighters in the Days of the Great October Revolution’. Zhensky zuhurnal 11 (1927): https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1927/fighters.htm (accessed August 08, 2017). There appears to be an error in the digital transfer to pdf, ‘hint’ should probably read ‘flint’.

2 See e.g. Tiina Lintunen, Punaisten naisten tiet: Valtiorikosoikeuteen vuonna 1918 joutuneiden Porin seudun naisten toiminta sotaaikana, tuomiot ja myöhemmät elämänvaiheet (Helsinki: Otava, 2017) deals with the adjustment of the Red women who did not carry arms in the Civil War to life after it; Tuomas Hoppu, Sisällissodan naiskaartit (Helsinki: Gummerus, 2017). See also Marja Piiroinen-Honkanen, Punakaartin aseelliset naiskomppaniat Suomen sisällissodassa 1918 (Helsinki: Kirja kerrallaan, 2006); and Anu Hakala, Housukaartilaiset. Marian punakaartin naiskomppania Suomen sisällissodassa. (Helsinki: Like, 2006).

3 For the most recent study see Pasi Ihalainen, Springs of Democracy: National and Transnational Debates on Constitutional Reform in the British, German, Swedish and Finnish Parliaments, 1917–1919 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2017), which also renders this vast field of research.

4 A similar argument on the relationship between the theoretical and empirical is made in Katarina Leppänen, and Svensson Therese. ‘Förundran och förbrödring: Om naturupplevelser hos Hagar Olsson och Elin Wägner lästa i vithets- och ekokritisk belysning’. Tidskrift för genusvetenskap 36, no. 4 (2015)–37, no. 1 (2016): 11–31.

5 Tilda Maria Forselius, ‘Maria G. A. Sandel’. In Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, urn: sbl:6336 (accessed August 7, 2017); and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, ‘Anna C. Sterky’.

6 Göran Wendel, ‘Ruth V M Gustafson’. In Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, urn: sbl:13309 (accessed August 7, 2017)

7 Eva Ekstrand, Kaj Anderssons Morgonbris: Kvinnopress, trettiotal och längtan efter fri tid(Umeå: Umeå University, 2007), appendix B, 245. The journal is available digitally at http://www.ub.gu.se/kvinn/digtid/.

8 The research field is expanding. See for example Lintunen, Punaisten naisten tiet; and Hoppu, Sisällissodan naiskaartit.

9 Ihalainen, Spring of Democracy, 68–78.

10 The numbers cited are all approximations and there is still ongoing research updating the figures.

11 In this article I follow Ihalainen’s Spring of Democracy as it builds on an analysis of parliamentary discourse which constitutes a meaningful background to my much more narrow anlyasis of the discourse in a single journal. On the women guards see Lintunen, Punaisten naisten tiet; and Hoppu, Sisällissodan naiskaartit. These books include references to the wider field of research in Finnish. On the 1905–1906 events see e.g. Pertti Haapala et. al., Kansa kaikkivaltias: Suurlakko Suomessa 1905 (Helsinki: Teos, 2008).

12 The figures are approximations. Compare for example Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi, ‘The Gendered Defence Family in Finland’,in Gender, War and Peace: Breaking up the borderlines, ed Anders Ahlbäck and Fia Sundevall (Joensuu: UPEF, 2014), 27, with Hoppu 2017.

13 Ekstrand, Kaj Anderssons Morgonbris is to my knowledge the only book-length study of Morgonbris and it focuses on the 1930s. Because of the connection to both Social Democracy and women’s issues, Morgonbris figures in several other studies, although often focusing on a later period, such as Gunnel Karlsson’s,Från broderskap till systerskap : Det socialdemokratiska kvinnoförbundets kamp för inflytande och makt i SAP (Lund: Arkiv, 1996); and Renée Frangeur, Yrkeskvinna eller makens tjänarinna?Striden om yrkesrätten för gifta kvinnor i mellankrigstidens Sverige (Lund: Arkiv, 1998).

14 Mary Hilson et al., Labour, Unions and Politics in the Nordic Countries, c. 1700–2000 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 6; on differences in women’s journals internationally see e.g. Arja Turunen, ‘Naistenlehdet Suomessa 1880-luvulta 1930-luvulle’. Media & viestintä 37, no. 2 (2014): 38–56. Turunen’s conclusion, that Finnish women’s journals offer a wide variety of research topics because they address questions beyond ‘women’s issues’, is also true of the Swedish journals. See also Sherrie Innes, ‘Pretty Tough: The Cult of Femininity in Women’s Magazines’,in Critical Readings: Media and Gender, ed Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner (Maidenhead: Open university press, 2004); Andrea Bergström, ‘Women’s Magazines: Feminist Magazines’, in Encyclopedia of Gender in Media, ed Mary Kosut (New York: SAGE, 2012).

15 Håkan Blomqvist, Potatisrevolutionen och kvinnoupploppet på Södermalm 1917: Ett historiskt reportage om hunger och demokrati Stockholm (Stockholm: Hjalmarson Högberg, 2017); and Kjell Östberg, Efter rösträtten: Kvinnors utrymme efter det demokratiska genombrottet (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings förlag, 1997). Especially the chapter ‘1917 och kvinnorna’ on the organization and methods used by women.

16 Charlotte Tornbjer, ‘Det röda våldet: Svenska resenärer och den rysk-sovjetiska revolutionära kvinnan’, in Kvinnor och våld: En mångtydig kulturhistoria, eds Eva Österberg, and Marie Lindstedt Cronberg (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2005).

17 See Ihalainen in this issue.

18 Anna Lindhagen, ‘Inför den ryska revolutionen’, Morgonbris, 1917:5, 6. As the date of publication is central for my analysis I have chosen to include year and issue in the footnotes regarding Morgonbris.

19 The then prevailing understandings of democracy and ideological internationalism are elucidated in Ihalainen’s article in this issue, through the activities of, among others, Anna Lindhagen’s brother Carl Lindhagen.

20 Seppo Hentilä, Veljeyttä yli Pohjanlahden (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 1980), 41.

21 Ibid., 113–6.

22 The complexity of the events cannot be addressed fully here and I will in the following only comment on some of the significant political and parliamentary events. For a summary and comparison of the transnational political changes see Ihalainen, Spring of Democracy, especially the appendix, 1154–5.

23 Pärssinen was active in many social movements of her time, and early became a member of the Social Democratic party, serving in many capacities in the organization. See e.g. Sari Oikarinen, ‘Hilja Pärssinen: Työväenliikkeen poliitikko ja runoilija’, in Yksi kamari, kaksi sukupuolta: Suomen eduskunnan ensimmäiset naiset, ed Eeva Ahtisaari, 4 (Helsinki: Eduskunnan kirjaston tutkimuksia ja selvityksiä, 1997).

24 Hilja Pärssinen, ‘Brev från Finland’, Morgonbris, 1917:6A, 3.

25 Ibid.

26 Lindhagen, ‘Inför den ryska revolutionen’, Morgonbris, 1917:5, 6.

27 The editor does not hesitate to comment on articles that promote a controversial or diverging opinions, for example, when Alexandra Kollontai criticized the British suffragettes. [Editorial comment] Morgonbris, 1917:5, 7.

28 Ihalainen, Spring of Democracy, 384, 390–1.

29 Julia Ström-Olsson, ‘Partivän Miina Sillanpää’, Morgonbris, 1917:11, 5.

30 Ihalainen, Spring of Democracy, 1090–1.

31 Ström Olsson, ‘Nu börjar det igen’, Morgonbris, 1918:3, 4.

32 Ström-Olsson, ‘Röda barn och vita’, Morgonbris, 1918:8, 1–2.

33 ‘En protest’, Morgonbris, 1918:4, 6.

34 Lindhagen, ‘Ingen vår’, 1918:5, Morgonbris, 7.

35 Ström-Olsson, ‘Nu börjar det igen’, Morgonbris, 1918:3, 4.

36 Some article apart from the ones analyzed here are for example a novella ‘I okänt fjärran’ by Leonid Andrejev running as a series in 1917; Lindhagen, ‘De som reser hem till Ryssland’, Morgonbris, 1917:5, 8, on repatriation after the revolution and the aid work Russian women had performed in Sweden among their own nationals; .

37 Erik Hedén, ‘De krigande ländernas kvinnor’, Morgonbris, 1918:12, 9–11. The article gives stereotyped images of different national characteristics of all the great European nations.

38 See also Margareta Stål, ‘För quinnans framåtskridande’, 91–2 on the use of portraits in women’s journals.

39 Matias Kaihovirta ‘Det var österns insats också i vårt samhällsliv: Civilisation, nation och etnicitet i Karl H. Wiiks syn på 1917–1918 års händelser’, Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 92 (2017): 49–78; and Håkan Blomqvist, Nation, ras och civilisation’i svenska arbetarrörelsen före nazismen (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2006).

40 Ström-Olsson, ‘Det dagas i öster’, Morgonbris, 1917:4A, 5 (italics added).

41 Hentilä, Veljeyttä yli Pohjanlahden, 110–111.

42 Alexandra Kollontay, ‘Genom kriget mot det bestående samhället’, Morgonbris, 1917:5, 6–7.

43 Flor Viola, ‘Ryska revolutionsmödrar’, Morgonbris, 1917:5, 1–3. She also wrote a follow-up article on soldiers’ wives; Viola, ‘Den ryska arbetarhustrun’, Morgonbris, 1917:10, 6–7. I have not been able find any further facts behind the apparent signature ‘Flor Viola’.

44 ‘Stora andars tankar om militarismen’, Morgonbris, 1917:4A, 4.

45 Ström-Olsson, ‘Förnuftet i historien’, Morgonbris, 1918:2, 1.

46 See e.g. Ola Vinberg, ‘Den ryska kvinnan i dikt och verklighet’, Morgonbris, 1919:2, 2–3. This article focuses especially on the Decembrist uprising in 1825, it thus refers to Russian women’s willingness for sacrifice throughout (revolutionary) history.

47 Ström-Olsson, ‘Litteratur’, Morgonbris, 1917:4A, 7. Review of Marcelle Capy’s book En kvinnas röst i stridlarmet.

48 Nerman, ‘Kvinnorna och folkhatet’, Morgonbris, 1918:5, 5–6.

49 Angelica Balabanoff (1878–1965) was a Russian-Jewish-Italian communist and Social Democratic activist. She served as secretary of the Comintern and later became a political party leader in Italy. Marcelle Capy (1891–1962) was a French journalist and author, specialized in women’s rights, workers’ rights and pacifism.

50 [Editorial comment] Morgonbris, 1919:7, 2.

51 See e.g. Ola Vinberg’s memoirs: En Bolsjevikkuriers dagbok eller Lenins öga (Uppsala, 1925). Referenses to Vinberg’s connections to Finland: http://veikkohuuska.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/216477-ow-kuusisen-majoittaja-ja-ss-kenraalin-luottomies-salamyhkainen-ola-vinberg. There seems some confusion between the identity of Ola Vinberg both in his activities as a radical Young Socialist and his turning to National Socialism.

52 See e.g. Linda Åhäll and Laura Shepard, Gender, Agency and Political Violence (London: Palgrave, 2012).

53 On the idea of the underdeveloped east see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

54 Ström-Olsson, ‘När freden kom’, Morgonbris, 1918:12, 3.

55 Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye, The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, Votes for Women (London: Routledge, 2000); Irma Sulkunen et al., Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); and Irene Andersson, Kvinnor mot krig: Aktioner och nätverk för fred 1914–1940 (Lund: Lunds universitet, 2001).

56 Yngvild Sørbye, Revolusjon, kjærlighet, diplomati: Aleksandra Kollontaj og Norden (Oslo: Unipub, 2008), gives perspectives on Kollontai’s relationship to and activities in the Nordic countries.

57 Bonnie Haaland, Emma Goldman: Sexuality and the Impurity of the State (New York: Black Rose Books, 1993), 5; Emma Goldman, Anarkistiska minnen (Gävle: Federativ, 2006). Goldman made an attempt to move to post-revolutionary Russia but was very disapointed at the lack of social and political change.

58 Emma Goldman, ‘The Psychology of Political Violence’, in Anarchism and Other Essays, 3rd revised ed. (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1917), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1917/political-violence.htm (accessed August 17, 2017).

59 Goldman, Anarkistiska Minnen.

60 Laura Sjoberg and Carol Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007), 11.

61 ibid.,2; and June Purvis, ‘Gendering the Historiography of the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian Britain: Some Reflections’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 4 (2013): 576–90.

62 Sjoberg and Gentry,Mothers, Monsters, Whores,2 (italics added).

63 Anders Ahlbäck and Fia Sundevall, ‘Introduction’.

64 See e.g. Karen Offen, European Feminism 1700–1950: A Political History(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). on the Irish women’s movement and the IRA in the 1920s, 223–6.

65 For the WSPU’s changing understanding of violence as method for political change see Angela K Smith, Suffrage discourse in Britain during the First World War (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004).

66 Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores,4–5.

67 Andres Ahlbäck and Fia Sundevall, Gender, War and Peace: Breaking up the Borderlines (Joensuu: UPEF, 2014), 6.

68 Hoppu, Sisällissodan naiskaartit.

69 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997). See also subsequent works by Yuval-Davis.

70 Ström-Olsson, ‘Till höga vederbörande’, Morgonbris, 1917:3A, 1. She uses quotations marks to distance herself from the concept.

71 Tornbjer, ‘Det röda våldet’.

72 David Englander and James Osborne, Jack, Tommy, and Henry Dubb: The Armed Forces and the Working Class’, The Historical Journal 21 (1978): 593–94; and Tony Ashworth,Trench Warfare 1914–18: The Live and Let Live System (London: Pan, 2000).