International or Transnational? Continuities or Ruptures? Introduction to the Special Issue on Nordic Women and the Transnational Networks during the Cold War

Abstract

In the field of women’s and gender history in the Nordic countries, this geographic region has served as an important contact point for scholars since the interest in women’s history awakened in the 1970s. The Nordic point of view was placed at the centre when the first biannual Nordic women’s history conference was organized in 1983. The exchange of ideas has flourished since then, following the research trends within the field in the Anglophone world (e.g. Blažević, 2015; Kurvinen & Matilainen, 2021). Despite the longstanding research networks on Nordic women’s and gender history, research has mostly been based on national case studies whereas comparative or border-crossing projects have been a rarity. This reflects the organization of historical research that necessitates archives as well as language and cultural knowledge to be performed. Nevertheless, national case studies have made an important contribution in increasing our knowledge of the variety of ways gender has affected the history of the Nordic countries. For example, previous scholarship has shown the differences in the history of Nordic women’s ways of organizing as well as their understandings of feminism, even though the Nordic countries—as a single entity—are often portrayed, in popular speech, as the leaders of gender equality in the world. The more multifaceted image of Nordic gender history is partly a result of the transnational turn that has taken place in history as well as other humanities and social sciences during the 2000s (e.g. Kurvinen & Yoken et al., forthcoming; Seigel, 2005; Yoken, 2020). Among other things, it has led scholars to trace the histories of the transnational organization of social movements and it is this scholarship, in particular, to which this special issue is connected. The idea for the special issue was born as part of the workshop that took place at Stockholm University, Department of History, in February 2021. The workshop brought together about 15 researchers from several Nordic and European countries and dealt with transnational women’s rights activism during the Cold War period in the Nordic countries and beyond. The papers published in this special issue, however, were selected based on a specific Call for Papers. Some of the articles are further developed versions of the workshop presentations whereas others came from outside of the original circle. All papers touch upon multiple aspects of transnational activism, but they cannot cover all the topics and problems connected to women’s rights, feminism and transnationalism in the Nordic countries. Thus, the aim of this introduction is to place the articles in their historical context and to show some points of interconnection.