International or Transnational? Continuities or Ruptures? Introduction to the Special Issue on Nordic Women and the Transnational Networks during the Cold War

In the field of women’s and gender history in the Nordic countries, this geographic region has served as an important contact point for scholars since the interest in women’s history awakened in the 1970s. The Nordic point of view was placed at the centre when the first biannual Nordic women’s history conference was organized in 1983. The exchange of ideas has flourished since then, following the research trends within the field in the Anglophone world (e.g. Blažević, 2015; Kurvinen & Matilainen, 2021).

Despite the longstanding research networks on Nordic women’s and gender history, research has mostly been based on national case studies whereas comparative or border-crossing projects have been a rarity. This reflects the organization of historical research that necessitates archives as well as language and cultural knowledge to be performed. Nevertheless, national case studies have made an important contribution in increasing our knowledge of the variety of ways gender has affected the history of the Nordic countries. For example, previous scholarship has shown the differences in the history of Nordic women’s ways of organizing as well as their understandings of feminism, even though the Nordic countries—as a single entity—are often portrayed, in popular speech, as the leaders of gender equality in the world.

The more multifaceted image of Nordic gender history is partly a result of the transnational turn that has taken place in history as well as other humanities and social sciences during the 2000s (e.g. Kurvinen & Yoken et al., forthcoming; Seigel, 2005; Yoken, 2020). Among other things, it has led scholars to trace the histories of the transnational organization of social movements and it is this scholarship, in particular, to which this special issue is connected. The idea for the special issue was born as part of the workshop that took place at Stockholm University, Department of History, in February 2021. The workshop brought together about 15 researchers from several Nordic and European countries and dealt with transnational women’s rights activism during the Cold War period in the Nordic countries and beyond. The papers published in this special issue, however, were selected based on a specific Call for Papers. Some of the articles are further developed versions of the workshop presentations whereas others came from outside of the original circle. All papers touch upon multiple aspects of transnational activism, but they cannot cover all the topics and problems connected to women’s rights, feminism and transnationalism in the Nordic countries. Thus, the aim of this introduction is to place the articles in their historical context and to show some points of interconnection.

Nordic women’s history and the transnational turn

The transnational turn has placed the focus on the flow of ideas between various national entities and turned a critical gaze towards the use of the concept of “international”. Previously, “international” was used rather freely to refer to a variety of activities that involved an interest in foreign countries or politics that focused on foreign affairs. Currently, both concepts appear in research, but the transnational turn has sharpened their usage. The choice of word is partly related to the historical era. For instance, both concepts can be used to discuss differences and similarities between feminist and women’s rights activists as they appear in the articles in this special issue.

Women’s feminist organizing of the 19^th and early 20^th century often crossed national borders, but for the women who were active in them the concept of “transnational” would not have made any sense. However, as Karen Offen (2014) has argued, if we define transnationalism as cross-border activities containing critique of politics or social and economic structures, women’s feminist organizing can be viewed as transnational from the beginning. Ann Cova (2014) and others have shown that the first long-lasting international women’s rights organization, the International Council of Women (ICW), was launched as an international organization, not as a gathering of already existing groups or as a society open to individuals who sympathized with it. On the contrary, the rule that only national sections could be part of the ICW sparked the creation of national women’s rights associations. Similarly to the ICW, other feminist associations of that period—such as the Women’s International Suffrage Alliance (IAW), the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) (the last one founded after World War II)—successfully crossed national borders. It can even be claimed that for them, internationalism as an ideology offered an alternative to the 19^th and 20^th centuries’ hyper-nationalism and war.

Consequently, the international women’s rights organizations put a lot of effort into lobbying and supporting the first large international organization of nation states, the League of Nations, aiming to avoid war and to set standards for the entire world, as Leila J. Rupp (1997) has exposed. After the Second World War, the United Nations received a similar kind of attention from the international women’s rights organizations. While the UN expanded and created new international organizations and committees during the next few decades, an increased interest in cross-border activities flourished among women around the world. The article by Christian Gerdov is an example of this development. Analysing the work of the Swedish head of the IAW in the 1950s, Hanna Rydh, Gerdov shows how international women’s rights organizations struggled to balance their activities between the United Nations—and their presence in foreign countries—and the domestic front, where they tried to keep the organization running as a material institution and an activist practice. He underlines the scarce resources that limited the organization’s practice and restrained the choice of international leaders to those who could support, by their own means or through help from elsewhere, the time-consuming presidency of such an organization.

The article by Rebecca Adami shows that the international women’s rights organizations were not alone in investing in the United Nations as an agent of change. The gradual advancement of women’s equal rights with men actualized not least thanks to the presence of women as official representatives for their countries in the United Nations. Adami studies three Swedish social democratic women and shows how they represented Sweden as an alternative to the Cold War East–West divide and as a model for how individual freedom and democratic rights could go hand in hand with economic and social equality.

The Nordic region also presents an important context for the special issue as inter- and transnational collaboration in the work of various Nordic organizations and governmental bodies has had a regional emphasis. Valgerður Pálmadóttir and Johanna Sjöstedt’s article is an example of this. More specifically, they argue that the Nordic Summer University, as an alternative international institution for knowledge production, offers valuable insights into how feminism as a social movement and scholarly project was negotiated in the 1970s.

Nordic women, the (post)colonial condition and the Iron Curtain

The period after the Second World War up to the end of the Cold War, in particular, is the period when trends towards globalization and connectivity between different regions, continents and countries constantly grew (Scholte, 2015). Even if social movements, including women’s organizations, were transnational already in previous periods, the accelerating decolonization of the 1950s is viewed as one explanation for the widening transnational activism of the post-World War II era (Bracke & Mark, 2015). Thus, (post)colonialism is an important marker of the period discussed in this special issue. Another explanation can be found in the mediatization of society in which the television, in particular, offered information from other parts of the world in an accelerating speed also in the Nordic countries from the early 1960s onwards. Television visualized the struggles that took place in countries such as Vietnam and Cuba and brought the dreams and realities of the revolutions closer to Nordic citizens. This resulted in wide solidarity movements around the world and, simultaneously, new ways of protesting began to circulate transnationally (Ellis, 2014; Gradskova, 2021; Horten, 2011; Kurvinen, 2019; Mark, Apor, Vučetić, & Osęka, 2015; Wahlberg, 2017).

Several articles in this special issue discuss the ways in which the growing connectivity of the world and, not least, growing cooperation between European countries gradually began to influence feminist thinking. However, these influences were not always straightforward or exclusively positive. Hannah Yoken, who analyses the Danish and Swedish women’s campaigns against their respective countries joining the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1970s, shows how knowledge of the other is used to construct the national even within an emancipatory movement like feminism. In addition to its focus on campaigns in primarily two Nordic countries, the article has important implications for the discussion on the broader geopolitical divisions of the time. Indeed, as Yoken shows, the campaigners used “culturally and politically protectionist discourse” (page number) when discussing how solidarity and sisterhood, key concepts of the 1970s feminist rhetoric, should be organized. Perceiving themselves as having a distinctively Scandinavian position in the (West) European discussion on equality and welfare for women, the socialist feminists from both countries considered their situation to be much better than that of many of their sisters. More specifically, Yoken’s analysis illustrates the colonial attitudes that were activated in anti-EEC/EEA campaigns of Danish and Swedish feminists. Also Pálmadóttir and Sjöstedt contribute to the current debate on the role of the Nordic countries in postcolonial and decolonial discourses (see Keskinen, Tuori, Irni, & Mulinari, 2009; Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert, & Knobblock, 2019). Their article on the Nordic Summer University is not only an example of transnational entanglements between Nordic feminist activists, but also refers to the complicated relations between Nordic feminism and postcolonialism.

In their influential book, Keskinen et al. (2009) showed the limitations of the Nordic countries’ exceptional position with respect to imperial/colonial division and, as the title of the book shows, insisted rather on “colonial complicity”. In particular, they showed that “colonial histories and mentalities” that shaped “gendered and racialized power relationships in the European countries” as such (Keskinen et al., 2009, p. 16) were relevant also for the Nordic countries and, because of this, scholars should pay special attention to the process of “othering” (p. 19). Indeed, also Nordic countries were affected by the anti-colonial struggle in the Global South that led to a radical change of world geography—the appearance of independent states that replaced former colonial territories in Africa and Asia. The change of the maps was part of new alliances, connectivities and solidarities as well as new divisions and borders, not least cultural and ideological ones. According to Tydén, Berg, and Lundberg (2021), in Sweden decolonization changed worldviews and informed political decisions.

The articles by Gerdov and by Ingrid Ryberg discuss two different cases in which colonial complicity seems relevant when analysing Nordic women’s activism. However, the answers are not so simple and uniform. According to Gerdov, Hanna Rydh, the President of the IAW (1946–1952), wanted to “improve the status of women all over the world”, while the Nordic countries were seen as “advanced” with respect to both modernity and women’s status. It made the women outside of Europe be seen as an object for “help”; after her travels through several Middle Eastern countries and India in 1946–1947, Rydh comes to the conclusion that there is a “duty and necessity for the West to aid the Easterners” (Gerdov 11). However, the author shows that while Rydh saw this external help and solidarity as important, she made it clear that the activities of Eastern women themselves were the ones that mattered the most (Gerdov 12).

The article by Ryberg directly addresses the “discursive colonialism” of Swedish female film-makers from 1970 to 1980. In contrast to Tydén et al.’s (2021) analysis of SIDA’s activities as an institution of state developmental aid over several decennia, this article focuses on a particular case of several recipients of SIDA support: female film-makers discussing the life of women in the “Third World”, including Ecuador, Nigeria and some other countries. The article questions “the celebratory framework” of the Nordic female film-makers’ portrayals and attempts to access more contradictory aspects of their work, one of them being “the colonial and supremacist imaginaries” (Ryberg 15) behind these film projects.

Alongside decolonialisation, the political tension between the East and the West frames the case studies published in this special issue. It was the time when the division between the “Communist bloc” and the democratic “West” was so central to political, economic and cultural developments that it gave the name to the whole period—the period of the Cold War. Within the Nordic region, each country chose its own way to act as part of the overly tensioned world politics. While Norway and Denmark joined NATO, Finland relied on a specific friendship agreement with the Soviet Union and Sweden declared to be neutral. This so-called “Nordic balance” defined the regional politics throughout the period (Bastiansen & Werenskjold, 2015), but on a grassroots level the picture becomes more multifaceted. As Gradskova’s (2021) research has shown, the Cold War division between different women’s organizations did not necessarily have to coincide with the land borders between the “Eastern bloc” and the Nordic countries, but could divide members of the liberal or radical feminist women’s organizations from those belonging to the “pro-Moscow” Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). The pressure of needing to take these geopolitical divisions into account is visible in the articles by Gerdov and Adami. Gerdov shows that Hanna Rydh had to consider the fear of communism in her activities. Indeed, the IAW had to change the situation of women outside of Europe to prevent the growth of Communism (Gerdov 13). Adami shows another way of dealing with the pressure of “taking sides” when discussing three Swedish women and their activism in the UN in the early Cold War period. She illustrates how activism for the sake of women was limited on the basis of Cold War ideological pressures. According to Adami, however, Ulla Lindström, Agda Rössel and Alva Myrdal claimed to stand beyond the East–West divide (p. 4) and beyond the ideological dichotomies of communism and capitalism.

Women’s transnational activism: continuities or ruptures?

In popular speech and scholarly work, the metaphor of “feminist waves” has been used as an easy way to identify the specific era of women’s feminist organizing that an individual or a group of people belongs to. Resulting from this, as the critics of the metaphor have argued throughout the 2000s, the history of feminism has been simplified. According to the critique, an understanding of major feminist waves created a narrative in which the decades between the first and the second wave were seen as feminism-free zones, a notion that is questioned in this special issue (e.g. Hewitt, 2012; Nicholson, 2009).

Looking at the articles from the point of view of continuity or rupture, it seems clear that there is a strong continuity in the work of the international women’s rights organizations. More specifically, feminist ambitions were not eroded by the aftermath of the Second World War and the eruption of the Cold War, as has sometimes been suggested. The work of persons like Hanna Rydh, Ulla Lindström, Hertta Kuusinen and Helvi Sipilä is there to prove it. What they did is not framed in the modes of action of the 1960s and 1970s, but their activism is very much like the women’s rights activism of the first half of the 20^th century. In the same way as the pre-war activists had to deal with political changes, violence, colonialism, nationalism and wars, the postwar activists had to navigate in between the Cold War climate and the colonial liberation movements.

In this special issue, Yoken’s article shows a continuity in the discourse on the Nordic countries as advanced when it comes to gender and social equality. Pálmadóttir and Sjöstedt’s article in turn shows that the 19^th century idea of Nordic specificity and of the common benefits that could be drawn from closer collaboration was alive in the 1970s, even though it was investigated by activists of different sorts. At the same time, a clear rupture in organizing and tactics can be observed. The historical actors in the articles by Adami and Gerdov represent how women used strong organizations such as political parties and transnational women’s rights organizations to change society in the immediate postwar years, while the activists of the 1970s in the articles by Yoken, Ryberg and Pálmadóttir and Sjöstedt adopted academic research, grassroot activism and culture as their tactics. We hope that this special issue will inspire its readers to continue to find new ways of conceptualizing the history of women’s feminist organizing.