Working together? Different understandings of marital relations in late nineteenth-century Finland

This article is about the understandings of marriage, work and gender relationships in a rural society in a period when the household still structured everyday life, a period when there had also emerged new understandings of gender, marriage and family positions. I focus on a young married couple, Hanna and Johan, in the early 1890s. Johan Niss, born in 1867, and Hanna, born in 1868, lived in Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia, a rural district in western Finland. Johan married Hanna in 1885. Three months later and still only about 18 years old, Hanna moved to Johan’s parental home, where she worked with him and the rest of his family.