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EditorialEqualler than thou?One of my friends says she regrets her choice of career, having earned her living through translation projects and journalism, without keeping track of the hours she puts in. In between, she completed a doctorate on Shakespeare... and believes that training as a plumber would have earned her a proper wage. Finnish women are better educated than the average for the European Union. My friend’s doctoral thesis didn’t get her a raise. There are plenty of broken pipes. Plumber is, in Finnish, putkimies, or drain man. In Finland drain women are very rare. So far. Finland is often lauded as a democracy that promotes equality. But: there are still men’s professions and women’s professions, and a woman’s salary euro is claimed to be 80 cents as against the full shilling that men earn. And why are women still in the minority in the society’s leading jobs?
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The most radical feminism is founded on the theory of the patriarchy: the ruling class of society is made up of men, and it uses all methods and means to discriminate against and oppress women everywhere. In Finland and the Nordic countries, which support the development of equality, this is not a very popular theory. However, the collection of writings Mies vailla tasa-arvoa (‘The man without equality’, edited by Arno Kotro and Hannu T. Sepponen, Tammi, 2007), offers a defence against a feminist attack. The authors propose that the social health and welfare system does not treat the sexes with equality. Men are discriminated against, are overlooked in custody conflicts, and, unlike women, are eligible for national service in the military. In debates about violence within the family it is often forgotten that women can be the aggressors. The marginalisation of men is not politicised: official equality policies are centred on the promotion of women’s interests. (The authors also claim that in reality a woman’s salary euro is as much as 96 cents.) The writer Hannu Raittila’s polemical text, ‘The next hundred years’, argues that because the women of the future will be more educated than their male counterparts, ‘women will find themselves noticing that in the domain of everyday life, from cleaning sewers to turning screws, men will know their own worth. Unclogging toilets and assembling furniture will become quite expensive.’ But in the United States, for example, women have gradually been making their way into union jobs in the trades, traditionally the territory of men: ‘When Raittila says that in the future men will be relegated to the roles of plumber, builder, etc., as if this will be a kind of discrimination against men, my reaction as an American woman is to think of those jobs as highly desirable, well-paid and historically exclusive,’ commented Lola Rogers, who translated Raittila’s text for us.
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In the fiction introduced in this issue of Books from Finland we encounter women and children at war: Sirpa Kähkönen’s new novel Lakanasiivet (‘Linen wings’, page 19), depicts a single wartime day in the town of Kuopio, in northern Finland, in 1941. Helvi Hämäläinen’s posthumous novel Raakileet (‘Unripe’, page 29), which had to wait 57 years for publication, on the other hand, tells of mothers and their young sons in Helsinki in the late 1940s — their men had often been lost in the war, in body or in spirit. And the battle between the sexes seems to go on… and on; see Jyrki Lehtola’s column (page 62), which follows the story of how sexual harassment has recently been a hot issue both within the Finnish Parliament and outside. The sexes should not, however, compete for the role of victim: a po-faced ‘who is the more discriminated against’ argument is hardly likely to raise the standards of the sexual equality debate, let alone bring results. Po-facedness brings to mind the well-worn claim that women do not have a sense of humour. To see the claim proved wrong, take a look at the cartoon series Maisa & Kaarina on page 53 — which doesn’t avoid irony directed at women themselves. Both sexes are equally welcome to read the world’s greatest
Finnish literature on our pages in 2008! |
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