ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author investigates the gender progressiveness of the Nordic countries both as a contemporary historical imagining of the Nordic nations and as a foreign image first made when women's demands for political rights intensified at the turn of the nineteenth century. For the emerging discourse on the gender-progressive Nordics, this strategic and generational shift within the organized international feminist movement would prove decisive. Within the international suffrage movement, the Finnish victory, as it was presented, would also change the discourse on the Nordics in ways that would have an impact well beyond the movement itself. Newspapers were increasingly interested in covering the well-off and sometimes quite eccentric suffragettes and their fight for political enfranchisement. As the American suffragist movement turned international in the early 1900s, a new arena had opened for Nordic feminists seeking to promote the cause of the female vote to their governments.
