Feminist Organising and Gender Anxiety in the Press, 1968–1985

This chapter will focus on encounters between journalists and feminist activists as the media visibility of local groups gradually increased during the late 1970s. The chapter will begin with an analysis of the Finnish print media’s adoption of transnational feminist stereotypes at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s and its usage of those stereotypes thereafter. After this I will discuss the increasing visibility of local feminist organising by focusing on journalism content that framed the movement with negative meanings. The chapter argues that the greater public presence of the local women’s organising caused anxiety among some journalists who presented polemical views of feminism, creating a Finnish stereotype of women’s liberationists as ‘feminist pigs’ in 1978. They also used the idea that feminism was foreign-born to undermine the movement’s role in Finland. As the chapter suggests, the critique came from all points along the political spectrum, from the radical left to the bourgeois right, and feminism consequently became a difficult topic from which the majority of Finnish women kept their distance during subsequent decades.