Kuopio digitises suffrage archive rejected by National Archives

A digitised archive documenting an early campaign for women’s suffrage in Finland will be published online, although the National Archives has declined to take the records, Yle reports.

The Kuopio Women’s Association archive is held in the basement of the Kuopio Economic School, a school that the association helped establish. Its 13 folders contain minutes, speeches, letters and annual reports from 1886 to 1979.

The oldest papers record meetings involving Minna Canth and other influential women in Kuopio, where they established the association. It worked to improve women’s economic and social standing, including by campaigning for the right to vote and promoting women’s education.

Among the documents is a record of a December 1896 meeting at which the association selected three members to meet representatives at the Diet and urge them to propose women’s suffrage. Minutes from the following meeting say the three representatives had promised to make the proposal.

Historian and emerita professor Irma Sulkunen describes the women’s initiative as the starting point for discussion that led to Finnish women gaining the right to vote a few years later. She says the archive shows how the campaign began and was organised locally.

The association also helped establish the Kuopio Pedagogical Cooking School, later renamed the Economic School. The archive remained in the school’s basement after the association was dissolved in 1979.

The Kuopio Economic School Foundation has digitised the documents, which are due to become available online. The foundation offered them to the National Archives, but the institution declined to add them to its collections. Sulkunen says the material should be held there.

The Kuopio Women’s Association was founded 140 years ago.