ABSTRACT
Until the Second World War, women governed Finnish drama. Of the four most notable dramatists in the history of Finnish theater, only the first was a man. In the 1860s, at the turning point from romanticism to realism, Aleksis Kivi wrote the first significant Finnish language plays. Two decades later, in the 1880s, Minna Canth, following in the footsteps of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, depicted women both sympathetically and critically. Toward the end of her literary career, Canth's writing evolved from an indignant realism toward a sympathetic portrayal of women's spiritual life. Even though they might be the moral victors, her leading women characters nevertheless were left without power. Minna Canth was an active suffragette; however, her progressive and even radical ideas reflected her own time when a woman was squeezed between the demands of society and her husband. She was the product of others, searching for her own identity, pointing out social and gender inequities. Maria Jotuni's women, from the first decades of the 1900s, were already conscious of their subordinate position and ironic about it, but they were incapable of freeing themselves. What was new in these plays was that illusions were stripped away: a “happy” ending meant that illusions faded out as reality became inevitable. The women are strong because they acknowledge their marginality. Jotuni is linked to the artistic movement at the beginning of the century which has been characterized as sensual and colorful. Hella Wuolijoki depicted a new world in which women were not only conscious of, but also consciously governed, their own lives quite independently of men. They felt no need, like Nora in A Doll House, to go in search of their own identities. From the start, Wuolijoki's women knew who they were; the play's drama was not born of women's internal, but rather their external, struggle for acceptance as equals in work and at home. The nature of their struggle was inseparable from Finland. Unlike English drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Finnish women's drama does not demand women's political independence. This is understandable in a country that achieved suffrage early. From 1809 until its independence in 1917, Finland was an autonomous republic under Russian rule, with laws inherited from the Swedish period. The Great Strike of 1905 in Russia affected Finland as well, for it unified diverse political parties and portions of the population. The governmental reform initiated by the strike instantly changed Finland from a conservative, class society to one of the most modern societies in the world: whatever their economic circumstances everyone, including women, was given the right to vote in elections for the unicameral Parliament. A noticeably large number of women were, in fact, elected to the first Parliament in 1907. Hella Wuolijoki had become radicalized during the Great Strike and her dramas were guided by this social context and her own leftist ideology, although it is true that the influence of the latter did more to color her characters’ opinions than to guide their actions. In Finland, many women attempted to enter Parliament, as Hulda does.
