Kristin Mattsson

The project I am presenting in this paper is a collection of autobiographical lifestories, carried out at the Institute of Women's Studies at Åbo Akademi University in the year 1995. The project, "women's lives in Swedish-speaking Finland", is the first nation-wide collection of women's life stories among the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. The collection was intended to all women who felt they were connected with the Swedish-speaking minority. The institute received 130 stories, approximately 2500 pages. Information about the project was given by the radio, newspapers, libraries and some institutions and organisations. On initiating the collection, the project decided that no evaluation would be done. The invitation to participate, and the directions for writing were very broad and unrestrictive.

Most part of the lifestories are written by Swedish-speaking women who live in Finland or abroad. The largest group abroad is living in Sweden. In spite of the fact that the women were able to write about their lives in any way they found comfortable, the headline - "Women's lives in Swedish Finland" - , the invitation to a specific group of people and the initiators of the collection might all have had an influence on the space they gave to the issue of Swedish-speaking Finns. The Swedish-speaking minority makes up only 6% (about 300 000 individuals) of the entire population of Finland. The risk of recognition would be an inhibitory for contributing one's life story, unless there is an assurance of total anonymity and discretion.

My aim is to study constructions of ethnicity in the women's lifestories. Expressions of ethnicity and ethnic relationships are studied. This will be done through, among other things, my understanding of gender and feminist theories. How is the construction of identity through intersection of gender, ethnicity and nationality rendered in women's writing? My method is a qualitative and narrative study of women's lifestories.

I conceive of ethnicity as something relational and not a permanent quality for a group (c.f. Banks 1996; Eriksen 1993; Gilroy 1997). Boarders and contacts where the ethnicity is questioned and visible have an influence on people's experiences of ethnicity. I have a social constructivist approach in analysing the phenomena I am studying. I think that knowledge of gender can contribute to a broader understanding of ethnicity because. The feminist discussions on ethnicity in the 1990s (Brah 1996, Braidotti 1994, Temple 1999; Gullestad 1996) have stressed the close relationship between gender and ethnicity and developed further the understanding of ethnicity. In these theories women's identities¹ are flexible, diasporic and fluid. One hypothesis is that ethnicity as well as gender are shaped in the meetings with the other. Gender and ethnicity are both seen as relational, important parts in the formation of identities, while they at the same time can be marginalising. The development of ethnic identity is a dynamic process, interwoven with class, gender and race (Ålund 1999, Anthias & Yuval-Davis 1983, Hall 1992). Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1983) have criticised the common understanding of black working-class women as three times oppressed. They mean that this is a simplification because ethnicity, gender and class can not mechanically be added together and give the sum of the oppression in social relations. These variables are intertwined and produce complex patterns. Feminist theorists (among others Braidotti 1996) mean that experiences and expressions of identities and ethnicity not only vary between but also within women. Ethnicity has different meanings to a woman in different situations. Belonging to the group of Swedish-speaking Finns has according to this view different meanings to a woman depending on time and space, it is changeable and situational.

Alexandra Ålund (1998) points out that ideas and cultural views of what is masculine and feminine play an important role in forming the ethnic identity. Gender relations seem to be central for how people relate themselves to ethnic borders, crossings and distinctions (Ålund 1998). Experiences related to social positions - in terms of gender, class and age - are mediated through cultural representations.

The fact that there were no specific instructions on how to write one's life history in the invitation, has resulted in a diverse and rich material, in various descriptions of and by Swedish-speaking women. I think that the Swedish-speaking minority manifests itself as a collective, imagined community (see Anderson 1992 about "the imagined community"). The Swedish-speaking identity is not something simple and static. It is rather a network consisting of many parts where class, gender and generation are included. According to Åström (1994), one characteristica of Swedish-speaking Finns is an awareness of the linguistic group as a heterogeneous entity. There is also an inner pressure towards something that is understood to be genuinely Swedish-speaking. The undefined demand for uniformity can result in a feeling of marginality: in a sense of belonging, which is not genuine.

Little attentions has been paid to women's life histories, and gender specific differences in writing and expressing the story of one's life haven't always been taken into consideration (Fahlgren 1987). That men's stories have been considered logical and organised, have automatically rendered women's stories as illogical and fragmentary (Kosonen 1993).Women are more likely to write diaries and notebooks, whereas men are more likely to write autobiographies in the real sense. Women's writing has been generalised as more detailed than men's and the central themes in women's stories is not the development of the writer, rather the family, close relationships and other persons. Men's stories have been categorised as stories told from the outside. Their stories are said to be concentrating more on the writer and tell more about great lines and peculiar events in a logical order. Kosonen (1993) argues that the other is also present in men's stories.

The women taking part in the "Women's Lives"-collection were not writing with the intent of publication, although they knew the material would be used for research, and thus could be read by someone. Most women showed a familiarity with the life history genre. The material in the collection is similar to that of other recent life story collections in Finland. The majority of the women are in their 50s and 60s. Most are, or have been married, and have children. Many have written before, which is not uncommon in Finland.

The women in my material apologise for not having written a "proper story", the kind of story they suppose the researchers would have wanted. This apology serves a rhetorical function, implying that the reader should not expect too much of the writer. Apologising seems to be a female characteristic, as it occurs frequently in other life story collections or autobiographies written by women (c.f. Fahlgren 1987; Makkonen 1993). In the women's greetings to the initiator of the project they also mention the therapeutic function of writing and their expectations of being useful for the research. There are two main motives in women's participating in the collection: they want to do something for themselves through explaining and structuring a story, and they want to tell something to other people. It is important to remember that the women in my material have written without knowing what themes will be studied and analysed.

Many women write as representatives of a collective past. They use the words we and one (the Swedish word "man") when they tell about the past. By using the we-form the writer's I is in the shadow and the gender is hidden behind the text (c.f. Östman 1998). One aim is maybe to tell the reader how it was to live during a certain time. A woman who does not write in an I-form can be seen as a mediator for many others during the same situation and period. The we-form gives the story a collective and convincing character. The older women write less in an I-form than the younger ones.

The autobiography and life story as material and method have over the years initiated different questions, questions about the representativity of the story and the relation between fiction and reality. I think that all life stories can be seen as both choices of selfdescriptions and a kind of cultural representations. However, unstructured lifestories may have blanks in those questions or themes that the researcher is interested in. The researcher is not present when the life story is written down and is therefore not able to ask questions in the same way as in oral interviews. Nevertheless, the imagined reader influences the writers when they are writing their texts.

A life story is shaped by the material facts of social existence, by deeply embedded notions and expectations about what constitutes a culturally normal life, and by conscious and unconscious conceptions about what constitutes a good story. Gullestad (1996) points out that the modern self includes and expresses multiple identities. These identities are not timeless and fixed, they are simultaneous and situational. The identities vary depending on socially structured categories such gender, age, ethnicity and class. People's lifestories are according to this view texts about identities in more than one way. Many researchers that use lifestories emphasise that telling ones life is not something static, in similarity to the life itself (c.f. Nilssen 1996). It is a process that is taking form in an interplay between the writer and the society. Research on lifestories calls for a reflexive understanding of how knowledge is produced. A critical examining of the researcher's approaches, positions and interpretations (Silius et.al. 1998) has became more usual among the researchers. A text written by a woman is one interpretation of her life, my analysis of her life story another interpretation etc. I will seek to clarify boundaries and overlap narrative studies and discourse approaches. The aim of this study is not to evaluate the content in the life stories or to describe the Swedish-speaking Finns in an "objective" way but rather to analyse how the minority is expressed and represented in lifestories. Lifestories, whether they are true or not, tell something about the reality in terms of opinions and discourses.

Preliminary analyses of the material

In this very preliminary analysis, I will only provide an overview of my material, not a detailed analysis. I have chosen to analyse the lifestories thematically and focus on one element of the life stories in the collection: how women describe their ethnic identity and linguistic affiliation in writing. I am especially interested in the atypical, in the border positions because I believe that this emphasis can shed light on the identities that exist in practise, even though they do not exist in the mainstream discourse.

The issue of ethnic identity coincides with crucial and important events in life. When meeting a partner, entering the educational system or moving, crossing a language border, one might have to speak another language than one's mothertongue. At work and official places one can be ostracised if one does not speak "the right language". It is at these important points in life that women do question their linguistic and ethnic identity. The stories have been numbered in the order the institute received them.

What collective narratives about the Swedish-speaking Finns are there then in the lifestories? Which are the common narratives, metaphors and symbols? My material shows that being a Swedish-speaking Finn means many different things and a heterogeneous practice. Many of the Swedish-speaking Finns in my material do not square with the picture of a woman who has lived her whole life in a Swedish-speaking area and has an unproblematic Swedish-speaking identity. Many of them are living outside what is called the Swedish countryside (Svenskbygden) or the Swedish Finland as a geographical area. The women do not usually characterise themselves. To be a Swedish-speaking Finn seems for many writers to be a natural part of their lives. It can be easier to find words for something that differs from one's every day life than for what is felt as natural and a norm. Although, the most writers don't talk about themselves as Swedish-speaking Finns some of them have a picture of what is typically for Swedish-speaking Finland. The Swedish-speaking Finland is often described as safe and nice but also as narrow and bourgeois. The Swedish-speaking Finns are seen as prejudiced and bourgeois. The writers talk about the shared community in positive terms but the safety and intimacy is also something that they want to reject. One of these understandings and attitudes is usually chosen in the lifestories but they can also both be represented as two sides of the same coin. To get married to a man from the other side of the language border or to meet someone who does not belong to the Swedish-speaking minority can be felt like a liberation, a movement out from the minority which is felt as very narrow. In other words a man can give a woman a ticket to a new identity.

Tuula Gordon and Elina Lahelma (1998) have studied how ethnicity, nationality and gender are embedded in each other and how they are made banal. According to them national identity is masculine and the stereotypical Finnish citizen is described as a man with traditional masculine attributes. The men represent the nation. I can also see this pattern in my material where the Swedish-speaking culture is described in masculine terms. Masculine metaphors like "daddy's cars " and "lacoste-shirts", exemplify and give visibility to a male-dominated Swedish-speaking Finland. The bourgeois or middle-class Swedish-speaking community is also expressed by some surnames that are known for the most Swedish-speaking Finns. Surnames make a gendered ethnicity visible because it is men that traditionally carry the surnames forward. These are also less personal than people's first names and therefore get the position of representing an official Swedish-speaking minority. Norsen [a school], Grani [a town] and Westend [a part of the capital] are places that are associated with the Swedish-speaking bourgeoisie. These places can be said to be rooms or fields of where Swedish practises are acted out (c.f. Bourdieu). A woman says in her story that characteristic behaviour in the Swedish-speaking middle class is to distance oneself from other people: "It is typical not to talk about failures, to speak thoughtfully and silently, and be sympathetic". The Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland are described by masculine and official signs. Even if the most part of the Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland live on the cost areas and many of them on the country side the images of the Swedish-speaking Finns seem to be homogeneous. The stereotypical Swedish-speaking Finn is a rich middle class-person who lives in a town, a so called "yuppie". The statistic truth is nevertheless that Swedish-speaking Finns in the highest degree mirror the Finnish-speaking population.

There is a quite unilingual group within the Swedish-speaking minority, who live in communities where Swedish is the dominant language and their future depends on the existence of certain Swedish-speaking institutions. The pressure for uniformity is maybe strongest within this group. There are also women who regard themselves as bilinguals. Bilingualism is nowadays considered a resource and as natural as the unilingualism is in the more homogeneous Swedish-speaking areas.

In my material this category of bilinguals is represented almost by secondary school girls. They are typically daughters of one Swedish-speaking and one Finnish-speaking parent. They represent a new generation of people who have been raised to become bilinguals.

In most of the lifestories the woman's ethnicity comes to the surface in one way or another but there are also women who do not mention it. Is not the Swedish-speaking culture important to them? Or is it so evident and elementary for their selves that it is not necessary to write about it? Is the life as a Swedish-speaking Finn so habitual and natural to them?

I have found many different representations of ethnic identities which do not fit the mainstream, stereotypical images of Swedish-speaking Finns. One of these unexpected positions could be the unilingual Swedish-speakers, who live permanently in a Finnish-speaking community. They often lack everyday contact with other Swedish-speaking Finns.

The Finnish is sometimes referred to as something unfamiliar and even frightening, a tough world (see the first quotation above). In many texts the Swedish-speaking community gets a high cultural value, in some texts higher than the Finnish majority. There are implicit narratives of developments in some stories of the other - the more civilised own group is contrasted against the more primitive others. Other ethnic groups are described in an exotic manner by using typical ethnic signs, symbols and traditions which are connected to them. Finnish-speaking Finland is for example described by the folkdance tango, mysticism and the smoke-sauna. One woman says that it is like "an old museum". The atypical, the non-present is contrasted to the Finnish. In this "mirror" the function of the description of the Finnish is to disclose similarities with the Finland-Swedishness and explain what is unfamiliar and done in another way than in Swedish- speaking Finland. Exotic and dramatic stories can also be a part of a conscious style of storytelling. They are used in order to make a story interesting. The other are often described through customs and ceremonies. The descriptions of the Finnish contain such behaviour and things that are different from the Swedish Finland.

The feeling of being an outsider is common among Swedish-speaking Finns who have moved to Sweden. They share the language and the cultural, literary elements which are connected to the Swedish in Sweden but they aren't automatically involved in the Swedish culture. They speak Swedish but they are often seen as foreigners in Sweden, because of their strange pronunciation.

Here is an example of an older Swedish-speaking person. The quotation describes very well the everyday life of many Swedish-speaking Finns in Finland who do not live in Swedish areas and who speak two languages depending on situations:

My conclusion is that it is a simplification to talk about a Swedish-speaking identity. Ethnicity is expressed in many ways and as attitudes to already constructed, collective opinions on and ideas of what and who a Swedish-speaking Finn is. Dissociation, feelings of being outside, ambivalence, conflicts but also multidimensional and unproblematic identities show that Swedish-speaking Finns are not a heterogeneous group. Meetings with the other are often described as situations where the woman in eyes of the other has an ethnic belonging which she does not herself feel that she has. There is sometimes a surprising voice in the texts when telling about being threatened as a representative for a group that the woman does not "understand" that she belongs to. Those who live in Sweden write about feelings of being an outsider and the easiness of and possibilities in living their lives in their own mother tongue. The pronunciation is a strong reason why many feel like outsiders.

There is a need to challenge the inflexible discourse, that categorise people as either minority or majority, and allows for nothing out of the ordinary. Many of the women contributing to our research project definitely prove that the allotted space for the identity of Swedish-speaking Finns is far too restrained.