Women as mobile vendors: petty trade and rural poverty in early twentieth-century Finland

Abstract

ABSTRACT By focusing on poor rural women, this paper offers an exploration of the practices of itinerant trading during an era marked by modernisation and proletarisation. There are few sources regarding small-scale trading practiced on the margins of society, informally or on the fringe of legality. There is also a very limited amount of archival material, such as fiscal and legal sources, concerning these small-scale, informal forms of exchange. In this paper, I examine ethnographic material collected in the 1960s, when the Finnish Heritage Agency circulated questionnaires to collect information about traditional forms of trade among country folk. Such questionnaires were sent to a panel of respondents who regularly participated in enquiries on diverse themes. In their responses to questions on the subject ‘travels for trade’, persons with a rural background depicted customary and local practices of trading. How are female itinerant traders depicted?.