Women as Producers of Global Historical Knowledge

Women’s Suffrage in the Periphery of the Russian Empire, the Grand Duchy of Finland, 1890s–1910s

Abstract

In 1907 the Grand Duchy of Finland of the Russian Empire became the first state in the world to elect women to its national parliament. This paper explores an overlooked part of the process that led to Finnish women attaining full suffrage, which is their own agency in the production of knowledge arguing for universal suffrage in the conjuncture of local intra-imperial and global inter-imperial politics and circuits of knowledge. In the process, Finnish women activists from across the political spectrum developed a particular theory of history and progress, a theory that ran against the grain of patriarchal sovereign power, metropolitan democracy, and incrementalist and teleological understandings of progress. It tied the argument for full women’s suffrage to the global position of the grand ducal state and the socalled Finnish Question. The concept of democratization that emerged from the theorization of Finnish women’s activists dissociates and undermines earlier, more unequal forms of democracy. Building on previous literature on the international dimension of suffrage activism in Finland, I argue that the role of these women as producers of global historical knowledge is an integral part of explaining democratization in Finland in 1905/06.