Finnish population policy: from bourgeois defence strategy to welfare state? (1940s–1960s)
Post-doc project, 2019–2020
Part of the project “Politics of reproduction, sexual health professionals and individual experiences in post-war Finland”
PI: university lecturer Hanna Kuusi, University of Helsinki
Funded by Kone Foundation
Summary
Drawing from my PhD research, I want to further explore the idea of bourgeois social reformism in Finland, now within population policy. Population policy is a deliberately vague and broad historical and analytical framework; it refers to the governing of the population in accordance with specific ideas and objectives. In other words, bourgeois population policy seeks to engineer the population in accordance with bourgeois values. It is not a clear-cut policy field, but encompasses measures within social, health, family and housing policy, among others.
Like in my PhD project, my study subjects consist of non-governmental organisations in the field of social and health policy. The studied organisations are Väestöliitto (the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League), Mannerheimin Lastensuojeluliitto (General Mannerheim League for Child Welfare), the Finland-Swedish Samfundet Folkhälsan (the Public Health Association of Swedish Finland) and Svenska Befolkningsförbundet (the Swedish Population League in Finland), as well as the Finnish and Swedish Martha organisations, Marttaliitto and Marthaförbundet. Väestöliitto and Folkhälsan are already familiar to me from my previous research. Befolkningsförbundet, for its part, has not been researched at all, to my knowledge.
My hypothesis, based on my PhD research, is that the population policy that these organisations promoted was fuelled by a number of threat scenarios. They were related to the actors’ antagonistic relationship with, for example, the working class and the left, the Soviet Union, the Finnish-speaking majority, or urbanisation and modernisation. Sculpting the population into a uniform whole that adhered to middle-class and bourgeois values and goals presented itself as a way to mitigate these perceived threats. This idea manifested itself as the promotion of a family-centred and smallholder-agrarian lifestyle, as well as the furthering of various social reforms, such as the child allowance, prenatal and maternal care as well as child welfare. Control and help were thus intertwined ideas and objectives.
I further hypothesise that models were often adopted from Sweden, where Social Democrats promoted and implemented progressive policies. However, the Finnish actors applied these modern models with a conservative logic: in order to normalise traditional family and gender models and to harness the population as a nationalist tool and productive resource. Nonetheless, during the next decades, the policies developed into quintessential characteristics of the so-called Nordic welfare state: a part of universal social policy promoting social equality.
