Equality on Male Terms or Reconstruction of Gender Roles? Association 9 and the Finnish Sex Role Ideology of the 1960s

Abstract

The public and political discussion on women’s position in society and gender equality was initiated in the Nordic countries in the 1960s in the form of the so-called sex role debate. Previous studies have characterized sex role ideology as narrower in its goals than the radical feminist ideology of the late 1960s and 1970s. Sex role ideology has also been criticized for understanding equality on male terms, whereas feminist ideology has been thought to aim at radically reform gender roles and society. In this article, I argue that the Finnish sex role association called Association 9 had a much broader vision of gender equality than has been previously claimed. The starting point of the sex role ideology that the Association 9 represented and aimed at to promote was, similarly to feminist ideology, to reconstruct society by re-evaluating gender roles, particularly by demonstrating that they are socially constructed. In addition, they both aimed to deconstruct the gendered division of society into the masculine public sphere and the feminine private sphere.