The industrial revolution that started in Finland in the 1860s was not
only a revolution of machines, but also a revolution of women. The
industrial revolution, the factory work and the urbanisation that came
with it brought poor women of the countryside to towns and cities to work
in factories or as maids of the middle class. It was for many Finnish
women their first chance to be independent, to earn their own money and
to use it as they pleased.
Soon after Finland gained independence on 6 December 1917, it went
through a bloody civil war between the Whites, who were mostly
conservatives, and the Reds, who were mostly Social Democrats and
communist-minded working class. In the civil war that was fought between
January and May 1918, the about 2,000 women also took to guns on the side
of the Reds. Women Guards were founded in eleven cities, towns and
villages in Finland during February and March of 1918.
This paper examines and compares the experiences of two of the Red
Women Guard units: the Tampere Guards, who were from one of the most
industrialised cities in Finland at that time, and the Maaria Guards, from
a rural area just outside the borders of the city of Turku. Who were
these women who decided to fight alongside the men? Why did they join the
women guards? What happened to them after the war? What was the public
opinion towards the women soldiers?
The Parties of the War
Between 1890 and 1920 Finland, which had been an autonomous province of
Russia until 1917, went through a period of change and disorder. A
nationalistic movement that promoted Finland's independence from Russia
gained ground all over Finland; it was no longer acceptable to be an
autonomous province of Russia. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in
Saint Petersburg overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, Finland declared itself
independent on 4 December 1917. The motion was passed by the Finnish
Parliament on 6 December 1917 (Ahtiainen et al. 78).
Shortly after becoming independent the Finnish people were torn in two
during the struggle for power between ideas and people. This struggle led
to a civil war in January of 1918. Finnish society in the 1910's was very
much a class society (Haapala, Ahtiainen et al. 80). The poor part of the
Finnish people felt that Socialism and a socialist state would be the
solution to their problems. Meanwhile, the wealthier part of the people
wanted to establish a sustainable democracy for the sovereign state that
Finland had just become (Ahtiainen et al. 91). The war was fought between
the troops of the legal Finnish government, hereafter referred to as the
Whites, and the Social Democrats and communist-minded people, hereafter
referred to as the Reds, who tried to take over in Finland in January of
1918.
The Whites mainly consisted of the conservative, wealthier part of the
people; Whites owned land and property, they were educated businessmen who
had employees. Teachers, landowners, soldiers and factory owners were also
Whites. The poor and poorly educated part of the people supported the
Reds, who were fighting for their own ideal of freedom, brotherhood and
equality that differed from the view of the Whites. Factory workers,
crofters, maids and hired men were Reds. There were also some Russian
soldiers fighting on the side of the Reds during the civil war. Finland
was an autonomous part of Russia until it declared its independence on 6
December 1917, and during the autonomy Finland did not have an army of its
own, since Russia had been responsible for the defence of all its
provinces. Even though all the Russian soldiers were supposed to leave
Finland right after it declared independence from Russia, some soldiers
were still in Finland during the time of the civil war and they decided to
fight on the side of the Reds (Ahtiainen et al. 90-92).
Right from the beginning of the war, the differences between the Whites
and the Reds were visible and substantial. Many of the White leaders and
also soldiers had gained experience from the Russian military before the
Independence, whereas few of the Reds had ever even held a gun. The
wealthy Whites had guns and clothing; the Reds did not always even have
proper shoes. The new communist order in Russia, soon to be the Soviet
Union, supported the ambitions of the Reds, but because the Russians were
also struggling in their own civil war, their help to the Reds was
insufficient. The Whites, on the other hand, got support from Germany and
Sweden (Ahtiainen et al. 93-94). The Swedish Military was not officially
involved in the war, but the Whites were supported by Swedish soldiers who
came to fight in Finland as volunteers. Germany supported Finland by
training Finnish soldiers in their military even before Finland gained
independence. By doing this, Germany wanted to ensure that after becoming
independent from Russia Finland would become an ally of Germany. Germany
also sent their own soldiers to fight on the White side (Ahtiainen et al.
82).
What Happened During the War?
The Finnish civil war began on the night between the 27th and 28th of
January, 1918, when the Reds took over Helsinki. At the same time, the
Whites in Ostrobothnia began the disarmament of the Russian soldiers who
were still in Finland from the time of the autonomy. The Finnish Senate
fled from Helsinki to the city of Vaasa, in Ostrobothnia, and acted from
there until the end of the war in May, 1918 (Miettunen, Ahtiainen et al.
90).
From January to mid-March the Reds were the more aggressive party of
the war. Their forces controlled Southern Finland, the area below the
cities of Pori on the Western coast, Tampere in South-western Finland and
Viborg in South-eastern Finland. Even though the majority of Finland was
in the hands of the Whites, the Reds controlled the most important parts
of the country: the largest cities and many important railways (Haapala).
When in battle, the Reds soon noticed their soldiers' lack of military
training. The red soldiers were poorly trained: most of the soldiers had
had only a day of training before going to the front. The lack of training
was the Red Guards' biggest problem. Another problem of the Reds was that
they could not keep their troops in control: individual soldiers and even
whole platoons fled from the front, and some soldiers illegally executed
white prisoners of war and even non-combatants who supported the Whites.
The Whites remembered this "red terror" after they won the war, and
partially because of it, the treatment of Red soldiers and the supporters
of the Reds was in some places inhumane and cruel, as the treatment of the
Whites by the Reds had also been (Nurmio).
The course of the war started to turn in March, and by mid-March the
Whites were the controlling party. The conquest of Tampere during the
early days of April was the crucial point of the war. When the Whites got
Tampere under their control, the Reds had in practice lost the war. The
Reds surrendered on 15 May, when nearly all of their leaders had fled to
Saint Petersburg and the Whites had clearly won the war. The Reds were
captured and put in prison camps to wait for their punishment.
The Idea of Women Guards Emerges
The Red women guards were founded in eleven towns and villages during
February and March, when the situation of the Reds had started to
degenerate and they needed every person available to fight. The first
cities to see women in trousers with rifles on their shoulders were the
two largest cities of Finland at that time: Helsinki, the capital, and
Viborg, near the eastern border. Before the end of March nine other towns
and villages had their own women guards; these towns included the
rapidly-growing Tampere, the heart of industrialisation in Central
Finland, and Maaria, a rural area near Turku, the former capital on the
western coast. The Red Women Guards of Finland consisted of roughly 2,000
women soldiers (Lähteenmäki 81, Hakala 78).
The founding of the women guards was not easy, since public opinion was
against the idea of women soldiers. The Social Democratic Union of Women
in Finland had discussed the matter of women taking up arms during the
General Strike of 1905 and was initially against the idea of women
fighting on the front (Lähteenmäki 80, Hakala 31). However, the Union's
opinion became a little more tolerant in the autumn of 1917 when some of
its members who had strongly opposed the idea of women soldiers left the
Union. Even though the Union's opinion towards the Women Guards had become
a little more tolerant, the Union did not encourage women to join the
Guards. Instead of joining the Guards, the Union recommended the working
class women to join workers' associations and other organizations for the
working class people (Hakala 31, Lähteenmäki 77-78).
The leaders of the Red Guards on the national level also did not like
the idea of women fighting (Hoppu 61). The Main Council of Finnish Workers
banned the creation of women guards totally at first, but they eventually
reached a compromise with the People's Delegation, which was in charge of
military activity of the Reds. The decision was that the women guards
already in action could continue, but no new women guards were to be
founded. The attitudes towards the women guards and women fighting in
general varied a lot among the Red leaders, because the idea of women
fighting and being politically active was something new and peculiar to
the people of the era (Hakala 36-37).
Not all politically active women who supported the socialist ideology
became soldiers; they had other ways of contributing to the revolution:
they could be cooks and nurses, usually through the Red Cross
organisation. Most of the women in Tampere who worked for the Guards as
nurses through the Red Cross had started working before the beginning of
the war, whereas the Women Guards were founded as late as March
(Klemettilä 234).
The White women of Ostrobothnia and Oulu, a city in Northern Finland,
also wanted to found their own women guards, but the Whites did not
tolerate this at all. The White, conservative ideology was much more
against the idea of women soldiers than the socialist ideology of the
Reds, as one of the main ideas of socialism was equality. The Whites based
their arguments against women soldiers on the natural differences between
men and women; it was a woman's duty to stay at home, just as it was a
man's duty to go and fight. The Whites saw women soldiers as something
condemnable and wrong, since it was not their place, not their duty. This
was why there were never White women soldiers in the Finnish Civil War
(Hakala 124-125).
What Kind of Women Joined the Guards?
Like most soldiers in any war, the Red women soldiers were mainly young
and unwed. The young age of the soldiers is understandable, because the
young women did not have children or families as the older women did
(Hakala 63). According to a study conducted in 1995 by Marja
Piiroinen-Honkanen, a scholar who has studied the Finnish Women Guards,
97% of the women who were in the Finnish Red women guards were not married
(in Hoppu 84). Most women who joined the women guards in Finland were
20-24 years old (Piiroinen-Honkanen in Hakala 63). In the first troop of
the Tampere women guards, which was founded in 11 March 1918, the average
age of the soldiers was 22.1 years, in line with the national average age.
The youngest five girls who joined the Guards were only fifteen years old,
but there were also about twenty women who were in their thirties (Hoppu
83). In the Maaria women guards the situation was a little different:
under-twenty-year-olds made up half of the whole troop (Hakala 63).
Marja Piiroinen-Honkanen claims in her study that 46% of all the women
who fought in Finland were servants (in Hoppu 87-88, in Hakala 58) and 35%
worked in factories (in Hakala 58). This might have been the case in
Finland all in all, but these results differ significantly from the
results of Tuomas Hoppu's research on the Tampere women Guards and Anu
Hakala's research on the Maaria women Guards. Both Tampere and Turku, the
large city near Maaria, were cities where factories were very important
employers for the working class. In Maaria, over half of the women worked
in factories (Hakala 58) and in Tampere the percentage was 74.8% (Hoppu
87). Even though women soldiers from other cities were usually servants,
the ones from Tampere and Maaria were mostly factory workers, because of
the industrialisation of these two cities.
Why Did Women Join the Guards?
Finnish women took their example of the women guards from the Russian
women who fought in the Bolshevik Revolution (Hoppu 69), but the women's
own enthusiasm to fight alongside the men was the main reason for the
founding of the women guards (Hoppu 73, Hakala 77). Men taught the women
guards how to use weapons and how to act properly as soldiers (Hoppu 69),
but they did not force the women to join the guards. This can be seen also
from the Red leaders' negative attitudes towards the women guards (Hoppu
61).
Despite the leaders' negative attitudes towards women soldiers, one
main reason for the women to join was their own enthusiasm. The women
might have gotten the example for the enthusiasm from their families; many
of those who joined the Guards had other members of their families
actively participating in the actions of the Red Guards, both in Maaria
(Hakala 69) and in Tampere (Hoppu 73-74). It was an important example to
have a brother, a father or maybe a future husband in the Guards (Hoppu
73, Hakala 71). Families did not always encourage women to join the
Guards. At least in one case in Tampere and another in Maaria a woman had
joined the Guards even though her parents or other family members had
objected to the idea (Hoppu 75-76, Hakala 71).
Worker's unions and local trade unions of the factories did not force
women to take up arms (Hoppu 29) even though nationwide 85% of the Red
women soldiers were also members of the workers' unions (Hakala 58). Women
gained knowledge of socialist ideology through their participation in
workers' union and other organisations, but it was usual for women not to
be involved in the actual organisation, but "only" in some of its
sub-branches, like reading or knitting circles, or the union's theatre
group. It was also a lot easier to join one of these sub-branches than the
actual organisation, which was dominated by men (Hakala 56-57).
After the war, when the White troops interrogated the women who
belonged to the Maaria Guards, many women said the lack of money and food
was the reason why they had joined the Guards (Hakala 97). In Tampere,
this was not the case in early March. Though the money might have been a
good bonus when joining the Guards, as the women were promised a salary of
ten Finnish Marks per day, it probably was not the only reason. Money
clearly was not the reason to join for the women who left their jobs at
the factories to be able to participate in the Guards (Hoppu 76). However,
the situation in Tampere had changed a lot during March, and so, the women
who joined in late-March were probably in need of money and food. All the
factories in Tampere, except for one, were closed on 20 March 1918, and
that left a lot of people without jobs. In late-March, when the city was
surrounded by White troops, money must have been a more important reason
to join the Guards, for men as well as for women (Hoppu 78).
Documents also show that the Tampere Women Guards did not get their ten
Finnish Marks per day, as was promised, but only five Marks from the whole
stay, nearly a month, in the Guards. Despite this, women did not leave the
Guards, so the salary clearly was not their only motive to join (Hoppu
95-96). When the women soldiers told their motives in the interrogations
of the Whites after the war, they mentioned, for example, joining the
Guards as a volunteer (Hakala 107, Hoppu 82) and following the example of
others, such as family members or friends (Hakala 114, Hoppu 75).
On and Behind the Front
Usually the women soldiers were more thoroughly trained than the male
soldiers before being sent to the front (Piiroinen-Honkanen in Hakala 81).
The reason for this might have been that the Red male soldiers and leaders
believed that fighting was a man's job and therefore women needed more
training for that. The Red men also might have felt that they did not want
to be responsible for the deaths of the women caused by the lack of
training. In the Tampere Guards the women soldiers practised gun handling
and shooting for two weeks (Hoppu 67), whereas the men only received a one
day of training. The training was led by the commander of the third
platoon of the Red Guards of Tampere, a bricklayer turned soldier, Kalle
Halme (Hoppu 67). Later on also women, who were chosen by the other women
served as commanders of the company. The thorough training implies that
the women guards were created for actual fighting in the front, not only
for surveillance and home safety-missions (Hoppu 92-93).
However, the claim that women were more thoroughly trained than men
does not apply when looking at the Maaria women Guards. The women of
Maaria, like the men of Maaria, trained only for a few days before heading
for the front, not for a few weeks like in Tampere (Hakala 81, Hoppu 92).
Both units of Women Guards fought in the civil war; the Maaria Guards
travelled from Maaria to fight on the Northern Front (Hakala 82),
approximately 50 kilometres north of Tampere, and the Tampere Guards
fought during the conquest of Tampere between 15 March and 6 April 1918
(Hoppu 98, 156; Kurkinen). The battle of Tampere was a crucial point in
the war; when the Reds lost control of Tampere, in practice they had lost
the war, even though the fighting still continued in some places until
mid-May.
Facing the Consequences
After they had lost in Tampere and Viborg and the Red leaders has escaped
to Saint Petersburg, the Reds surrendered on 15 May 1918. They were
assembled in prison camps to wait for the Whites' decision: what would
happen to the prisoners?
The Tampere women soldiers who were imprisoned were placed in the
prison camps of Tampere and Hämeenlinna, a town south of Tampere which
held one of the biggest prison camps during and after the Civil War. The
conditions in the prison camps were harsh; there was a constant struggle
for food and space. The former Russian army barracks in Tampere had housed
about 1,000 soldiers during the time of autonomy when Russia took care of
Finland's defense, but after the civil war the barracks were turned into a
prison camp of nearly 10,000 Red prisoners.
All the Reds in prison camps were brought to trial and convicted. The
Courts were not always objective, because they did not consist of law
professionals, as it should have been, but mostly of laypersons, many of
whom might have fought in the war on the White side or might have had a
personal history with the accused (Tikka 294, Hakala 131). The Courts of
Justice had much to do during the spring and summer of 1918, so it was not
possible to get enough professionals to work in every village that had a
Court (Hakala 131). The Courts also had to work very quickly: they did not
have time to investigate and examine the cases as thoroughly as in other,
less chaotic, times (Hoppu 211). Because of the lack of time and
professionals in the Courts, the convictions varied a lot between different
courts and places (Hakala 131).
Generally women's convictions were less hard than men's (Klemettilä
236). Of all the women who worked in the Guards in Tampere and were
convicted, including nurses and cooks, 4% got unconditional penal
servitude, whereas the percentage for men was 13% (Klemettilä 236). One
reason that made the women's punishment less severe is the fact that most
women who worked for the Guards were not in fact soldiers but were
actually in the service troops (Hakala 132).
Of all the soldiers and civilians executed by the whites, 4.3% or 364
were women (Paavolainen 200). The women who were executed in Tampere or
died there in battle were mostly 15-19 years old (Klemettilä 236). In
Maaria, the executed women were also under twenty years old, with the
exception of one woman (Hakala 130). It was common in all of Finland that
younger soldiers, both women and men, got punished more often and more
severely than older soldiers (Klemettilä 235). It was probably easier to
punish younger soldiers who did not have families or other
responsibilities, as many of the older people did. The punishment varied
between execution, unconditional penal service and conditional discharge.
In Tampere, only a bit under 50% of the women who were in the Guards
were imprisoned and later convicted. This shows that despite all the anger
the Civil War had caused, the White-minded people of Tampere did not want
to inform the Whites of their former neighbours and employees who had been
in the Red Guards. If a woman who was known to lead a normal and proper
life was in the Guards for only a few days, it was not considered serious
(Hoppu 197). It must be emphasized that this happened in Tampere to the
women who were in the Tampere Guards, because the people who were
convicting them could have known them for many years before the war. It is
also possible that White sympathisers who were not soldiers felt that the
Reds were punished much more severely than needed (Paavolainen 378), and
so they did not want to inform on Red soldiers they knew to the Whites
(Hoppu 197). It probably saved many lives of the Tampere women soldiers
that they only fought in their home town where people knew them and their
backgrounds (Hoppu 197).
Conversely, as the Maaria women guards had fought away from home, most
of the women got their sentences in Hämeenlinna. There were about 60 women
in the Maaria Guards, and 11 of them died during the war. Of the women, 26
were convicted, with 13 of these getting unconditional penal service and
the other 13 a conditional discharge (Hakala 131-132). Several Maaria
women soldiers died in Lahti, but it is impossible to say whether they
were killed in battle or were executed by the White troops or the German
soldiers that supported the Whites (Hakala 86-91). It was easier to
execute soldiers who were not from one's own community. The situation of
the Maaria women soldiers would probably have been much better, and their
punishment less severe, if they had been captured in Maaria or even
somewhere near home, as had been the case with the Red Guard women in
Tampere.
Propaganda on Both Sides
The Reds liked to depict their women soldiers as the heroines of the
revolution to keep up their troops' morale. The tales of the Maaria women
guards fighting in Karkku give an example of this, as showed by this
extract from a text written by Paavo Rautaruusu, a red soldier who also
fought there:
"In these battles I saw women fighting for the first
time and I had to marvel at the women's fanatic contempt for death. In
this battle in Karkku they really gave their all against the white
butchers; the women fought until the last cartridge." (in Hakala
87)
The legend of the Onkiniemi battle in Tampere tells that women soldiers
of Tampere, Maaria and Pispala (then a neighbouring municipality of
Tampere) Guards fought off an attempt by White troops to enter the city
across the iced lake Näsijärvi near the neighbourhood of Onkiniemi. No
matter how good the legend sounds, however, it has been proved to have
been invented by socialist-minded writers after the war. The women guards
in question were elsewhere at the time of the alleged battle, and there is
no mention of the battle itself in the White literature or the memoirs of
the White soldiers who took part in the conquest of Tampere (Hoppu
105-107). As said, the Reds liked to emphasise the women soldiers' courage
even with lies, as this example shows.
While the Reds depicted the woman as their bravest soldiers, the White
side saw them as "savage she-beasts" (Hoppu 181). The newspaper
Keskisuomalainen published an article by Ilmari Kianto, a famous
Finnish author, that discussed the problem of punishing the Reds. The
writing may not reflect the ideas of all the White side, but it still
tells something of their attitude towards the Red women, not only the
soldiers but also the red soldiers' wives, mothers and daughters who never
took up arms (Hakala 123). The headline of the piece about how the rebels
should be punished was Of the Tactic of Conviction:
"[--] why does the war spare those women who are seen
and known to be the most barbarous element of the civil war? Is it only
because they are women that the war spares them? [--] When hunting wolves
a female wolf is an even better target than a male, because the hunter
knows the female wolf will give birth to cubs as evil as their mother and
those cubs will always be in opposition. It has been proved that in the
Finnish civil war the soldiers of the Red Guards have been beasts, many of
their women female wolves, even tigresses. Isn't it madness not to kill
the beasts who are harassing us?" (in Hakala 123)
Tales of the wild fighting and behaviour of the Maaria women guards who
took part in the battle of Karkku on the Northern Front in April 1918 were
told long after the war (Hakala 86). Probably these stories originated
partially from the Reds and Whites' different attitude towards the Finnish
Evangelical Lutheran Church, to which nearly every Finn belonged at the
time; the Whites were supported by the clergy, whereas the Reds and the
whole communist ideology were against religion. In Karkku the Maaria women
Guards camped in the local church: to the Whites this was blasphemy
(Hakala 88-89). These kinds of actions that the Whites saw as being
offensive were presumably one reason for the wild reputation of the Red
women soldiers among the Whites.
Most of the Women Guards Were Simple Factory Girls, Motivated by
Socialist Ideology
Even though the reputation of the women soldiers was exaggerated after the
war, the soldiers were ordinary women. The women and girls who joined the
Guards were mostly young, unwed factory workers in Tampere and Maaria.
They probably had a brother or a father in the Guards, and they had been
taught the socialist ideology since they were little.
Most of the women joined the Guards because of enthusiasm and ideology,
but some came only for the money and food, especially the ones who joined
when the military situation of the Reds had critically deteriorated. When
the factories were shut down in Tampere and the workers were no longer
able to earn salaries, the Guards could have been the women's only chance
to get food, since the Guards fed all their soldiers. The soldiers of the
women Guards were also promised a salary of 10 Finnish Marks per day, so
some women joined the Guards to earn money, as well as food. Desperation
as well as enthusiasm drove women to the Guards. Few women soldiers were
killed in battle or later executed; most of them continued their lives one
day at a time.
The attitudes towards the women soldiers were mostly negative: not even
the Communists, whose ideology is based on equality, supported the idea of
women fighting. The leaders of the war, both Red and White, felt that the
front was not the place for a woman, since it was a man's job to protect
the country and the ideology. The Whites succeeded in that, and no women
guards were founded on the White side; but the Reds let their women fight,
probably because equality was the basis of their ideology: women and men
had to be treated the same.
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[Quotations translated by Laura Liimatainen]
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