Parental Attitudes
When young women became interested in higher education in the middle of the 1880s, the upbringing of girls was one of the most discussed issues in Finnish society. From the 1870s until the beginning of the twentieth century, women’s access to higher education was argued about at the university, in the Diet, in the newspapers, and in fiction (Wilkama 1938, 281–315; Canth 1884, 289–303).
The issues of gender, language, and social background became entangled in these debates. The Finnish realist writers contributed to the debate by means of fiction to express their views on the education and family life of girls, focusing on the suffering girls endured within the patriarchal upper-class family. Juhani Aho, an author and journalist, understood the contradictions regarding the education of girls and participated in this debate with his novel, Papin tytär (‘The Parson’s Daughter’), which was in 1885 an important and a long-awaited literary event. Minna Canth, a female writer, criticised the education provided for girls in her novel Hanna, published in 1886. In her literary salon in Kuopio, the Finnish-speaking cultural elite—writers, theatre directors, and critics—gathered to discuss not only cultural questions but also scientific questions and societal problems, such as inequality, poverty, and women’s rights (Lappalainen 2000; Isomaa 2011, 23–30; Launis 2018, 63–65; see also Rossi 2003, 35–47).Minna Canth campaigned against traditional female education. In Hanna, the daughter of an upper-class family is sent to school to learn the manners, skills, and values that a woman of a higher rank would need in order to be a good wife and mother. Hanna, the eponymous protagonist, wishes to continue her studies, but her father prevents her. For Canth, the most important aims of education for girls should be intellectual development and skills that would allow them to earn a living (Canth 1884, 288–295; Wilkama 1938, 284; Lappalainen 2000, 159–161, Launis 2018, 63–65).
In Kuopio, Canth organised a campaign for the establishment of a new kind of educational institution, ‘a women’s secondary school’ (naislyseo), in which the aim of the studies would be the matriculation examination, leading to university and an academic degree (Wilkama 1938, 284–289; Isomaa 2010, 22).Juhani Aho’s Papin tytär describes the intellectual development of a modest rural clergyman’s daughter. The vicar and his wife cannot understand their daughter’s emotional life (Isomaa 2010; about the history of emotions, see Olsen 2015, 1–11). They want to restrain their daughter’s personality and control her feelings (Isomaa 2010, 15–17). The novel begins with an episode in which Elli, the eleven-year-old protagonist, climbs onto the roof of a farm storehouse out of a desire to climb high—to see far further than the yard of her home—and to be alone. Elli wants to fly. Elli’s parents view climbing as unsuitable behaviour for a girl; Elli’s mother threatens the girl with a whipping, and her father mocks Elli’s desires and emotions. This episode illustrates the attitudes of Elli’s parents towards her character and aims. They struggle to bring up Elli, and they aim to resolve this problem by sending her to a girls’ school to learn to behave like a fine lady. Elli’s father would decide when Elli had achieved this goal and could return home. Aho’s novel illustrates the contradictions in the family and the consequences of when a daughter grows up without her parents’ intellectual support. Elli’s home, a rural vicarage, and her dogmatic father and religious mother can be seen as symbols of the entire Finnish clergy and its attitudes towards female education. As Kati Launis concludes, the educational message in Aho and Canth’s novels is ‘let girls fly’ (Launis 2018, 63–65).
A few representative family cases from the 1880s illustrate the family values and attitudes to the higher education of women during the period in which this literary debate on girls’ education was raging.
The Soderhjelms from Vyborg offer a representative example of how the idea of daughters’ higher education was first understood by an urban, Swedish-speaking, upper middle-class family. In turn, the Krohn family from Helsinki is perhaps the most famous and appreciated academic Fennoman family. Both of these families had daughters of the same age.There were eight daughters and three boys in the Soderhjelm family. Two daughters, Alma and Sanny, decided to reach for the stars and aim to achieve academic degrees. The father of the family held a high position at the Court of Appeal and was later a procurator. The wealthy family was able to offer a good education to all their children, including the daughters, but the idea of female university education was so new that the parents did not have knowledge of all the details and instructions. Alma’s father thought that she could study jurisprudence, but he did not think it probable that Alma would be able to study for a degree at the university. Alma’s mother did not know the practice of female higher education because she thought that the only career opportunity for the female student would be as a physician, a profession she thought unsuitable for Alma. The career of Rosina Heikel, the first female physician in Finland and the Nordic countries, was well known (Riska 2001, 62; Soderhjelm 1929, 352; Engman 1996, 32–35).4
In the Krohn family, the daughters—Helmi, Aino, and Aune—did not take the matriculation examination or study at the university, but for the sons—Kaarle and Ilmari—an academic career was self-evident and both became professors (Leskelä-Kärki 2006, 292–309; Vuorikuru 2017, 25–26). The head of the family, Professor Julius Krohn, devoted his life to the fight to elevate the Finnish language.5 He realised this vocation in all spheres of life—as a scholar, a poet, and a journalist (Lassila 2003). Julius Krohn appreciated female education, but he, like the conservative Fennomans, wanted to maintain motherhood as women’s true vocation.
The attitude of the Fennomans towards the female higher education was complex. The Fennoman movement aimed to create a Finnish-speaking educated class, but the status of women in this project was contradictory. According to Fennoman ideology, women did not need university-level education or academic degrees. Agathon Meurman, the most authoritative Fennoman leader, argued that higher education opposed the only acceptable female vocation, motherhood (The Minutes of the Peasant Estate 12.4.1888, 845–861).Julius Krohn’s eldest daughter, Helmi Krohn (1871–1967), was one year younger than Alma Soderhjelm. Helmi was unsure of her future and felt uncertain what she should do when, at the age of seventeen, she graduated from the Finnish-speaking girls’ school in Helsinki (Helsingin Suomalainen Tyttokoulu). She did not want to continue her studies in the continuation classes of the girls’ school, which aimed to train girls to become teachers. However, she thought that her education was incomplete. In the summer of 1888, she wrote to her dearest friend that she would have been interested in continuing her studies and learning much more, but girls’ education was trifling: ‘You should be a genius and energetic to thread your way to university’ (Setälä 1966, 297; Leskelä-Kärki 2006, 93–95). Helmi thought that sitting and reading could not be a real vocation for all women. They had other duties to attend to than studies. Who would be responsible for those if every woman studied at university? Several decades later, Helmi wrote that in the 1880s it was thought that the matriculation examination and university degree were for exceptionally talented girls, and few had enough intelligence and courage to begin studies and continue in a male-dominated community such as a university (Setälä 1966, 272).
Both Alma and Helmi were excited and even afraid of the future. Alma had parental support, especially from her father, but Helmi’s situation was different.
In the 1880s, Julius Krohn examined his relationship with the women’s movement and expressed his objection that the natural female personality would be changed by higher education. He wrote that humble, self-sacrificing, and loving wives bring so much happiness, and the women’s movement had taken the wrong direction if it aimed to enable women to emulate men. In his opinion, the main task of women was to act as the mediators of Finnish culture (Krohn 1942, 146–149; Leskelä-Kärki 2006, 2016, 188–191; Vuorikuru 2017).6 Julius Krohn actually wrote a review of Juhani Aho’s Papin tytär (Krohn 1886, 39–43). While he appreciated Aho’s novel, he criticised Elli’s character, which he saw as full of contradictions. Krohn wrote that Aho made his protagonist a martyr of narrow and intolerant circumstances: Elli did not break but fell into apathy (Krohn 1886, 39–43). Perhaps Krohn could not understand the psyche and emotional life of Elli, even though he was the father of three daughters. In her study, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley, Patricia Ann Palmieri has analysed the first generation of women scholars at Wellesley College in terms of family culture, class, and educational opportunities.7 She discovered that many of the fathers of Wellesley women set high intellectual standards for their daughters. Fathers gave their daughters both emotional and intellectual support, often at critical moments in life. Intelligent, caring fathers had enormous influence on their daughters’ intellectual growth and career choices (Palmieri 1995, 62–65). The female vocation as a mother was understood to be in opposition to female higher education. In addition, there was another argument that caused prejudice. In Finland, like in the rest of Europe, physicians, educationalists, professors, and parents insisted that university studies could cause overexertion and health problems. Overall, higher education could be a health risk. As Katherina Rowold points out, the female body became an important site of contest in debates over female higher education (Rowold 2009, 8, 39). For example, professors at Owens College in Manchester, UK, argued that women were incapable of following an unbroken routine of work or accepting the fixed times of examinations without permanent injury to their health. The debate on female admission and co-education in Owens College lasted several years. In 1880, the University Senate released a resolution calling for the admission of women to selected classes. Owens College later became the University of Manchester and is one of the UK’s red brick universities (Fiddes 1937; Tylecote 1941, 31; Barnes 1994, 45).