“Men Are People Too!” Men’s Wellbeing as a Question of Gender Equality in Finland in the 1960s

Arja Turunen, University of Jyväskylä

"Men are people too!" declared the Association 9 that represented the so-called sex role movement in Finland in the 1960s. In my paper, I will discuss how the Association 9 aimed to promote gender equality by highlighting problems that men faced in the contemporary society on the basis of their gender. The Nordic sex role movement of the 1960s was based on the radical sex role ideology, and it argued that in order to promote gender equality, both women’s and men’s social roles needed to be problematized. Previous analysis of the Nordic sex role movement has focused on analyzing how it aimed to improve women’s position in the labor market, but in my paper, I will demonstrate that the Finnish sex role association — Association 9 — did bring up the “man question” as well. It argued that improvement of men’s wellbeing was an important part of advancing gender equality. It suggested, for example, the introduction of a paternal leave. Association 9 demanded that both women and men should play two roles – breadwinner and parent – and that both sexes should have equal rights, opportunities, and responsibilities at work, at home, in the family, and in sexuality. Association 9 argued that the traditional beliefs of gender roles that pressured men to be socially and economically successful and to hide their vulnerable emotions made men’s lives more stressful than women’s lives. Statistics analyzed by the Association 9 also showed that men died younger and suffered more from physical and mental illnesses than women. In my paper, building on archival sources, I scrutinize how the Association 9 addressed the “man question”, how men’s new role was discussed in the media, and what happened to its goals as the sex role ideology was replaced by feminist ideology in the early 1970s.

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 Presented in Session 47. Gender Roles