Author Description

This book is the first comprehensive account of developments in legal equality in Finland from the late 19th through the early 21st century. The book demonstrates that equality is never a status or a state of affairs that either exists or does not exist. It is rather a continuous and controversial process of creating meanings that are bound to time and place. By exploring legal discourses, the book shows how in Finnish legal history, the formal and symmetrical understanding of equality has been dominant. However, this understanding has been informed by utilitarian arguments rather than the true protection of women as individuals. The assimilation of women into the male model of equality has been the powerful thread of equality policies and the law, but the gendered understandings of legal personality have imbued the formal and neutral law. The book will be of interest to legal historians, historians, and feminist scholars of law and social sciences.