Constructions of nation, family and gender

Abstract

The article investigates the collective nature of stories of war and the constructions of nationality embedded in these narratives. The material comes from a larger study, `Gender and Nationality in the Finnish Language Secondary School', and consists of 17 life stories of women who studied in secondary school in eastern Finland between 1927 and 1970. For the women, nationality — being a Finn — appears as a self-evident context of living, but stories about Karelia and the war form a theme with the help of which the banal nature of nationality is put to question. Narratives about the war are thus a part of the collective living tradition through which belonging to a (national) community can be constructed. What is crucial, however, is that the women use the concept of the family to reflect on their sense of belonging to a national community. The narrators equate Finns or Karelians with the extended family, a unit based both on familiar sentiments, such as loyalty, and hierarchies of gender and age. The article consequently examines two intertwined themes: 1) the collective nature of stories by Karelian evacuees, of whom there were about 420,000 after the wars between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939—40 and 1941—44; and 2) the construction of abstract nationality with the help of the image of the family and the gendered construction of family loyalty. The article explores how the boundaries of nationality and the integrity of the community are conveyed and constructed by the metaphors of kinship, family and gender.