Bourgeois Women and the Question of Divorce in Finland in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

This article explores perceptions and actions of Finnish upper-middle-class women with regard to divorce in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Divorce was discussed in the periodicals of bourgeois women’s associations and later in Finnish Parliament, in which several leading figures of the bourgeois women’s associations were elected as members from 1907 onwards. Compared to other issues related to marriage and its legislation, divorce was not an especially important question for bourgeois women, but a tool to promote other issues. Women writers demanded drunkenness and violence as new grounds for divorce, and proposed that loveless marriages should be made possible to dissolve. Moreover, writers were concerned about mothers’ custodian rights over their children, and demanded that mothers should be given the primary right to guardianship after divorce. Even though upper-middle-class women presented straight opinions about divorce in their periodicals, women parliamentarians brought out their claims only indirectly in their bills. Nevertheless, most of their objectives were realized when the new Marriage Act was approved in 1929.