ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 4 (April 2002) pp. 162-163.
RESPONSIBLE SELVES: WOMEN IN THE NORDIC LEGAL CULTURE by Kevat Nousianinen, Asa Gunnarsson, Karin Lundstrom,
and Johanna Niemi-Kiesilainen (Editors). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2001. 373 pp. Cloth $99.95. ISBN:
0-7546-2160-X.
Reviewed by Nancy Maveety, Department of Political Science, Tulane University.
Because of the way it complicates what is probably most liberal feminists' somewhat uncomplicated understanding
of "Scandinavian" gender egalitarianism, this is a very interesting collection of essays. Academically,
it will appeal particularly to scholars of law and society, feminist legal studies, and comparative law and policy.
However, I would also recommend it to anyone who teaches or thinks about women's studies, sameness versus difference
debates regarding gender equality, and liberal individualist versus social democratic visions of legal equality.
The fifteen chapters, including an overview introduction, examine the relationship between law and gender equality
in the Nordic countries. In sections entitled "Constructing Equality and Identity," "Welfare and
Care," "Constructions of Gender in Labour Law," and "Integrity and its Violations," the
co-editors and other contributors provide an excellent account of both the Nordic tradition of "state feminism"
and the policies in pursuit of gender equality in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. (Norway and Iceland are mentioned
in certain discussions, and scholars from these countries participated in the volume's project, but the shared
cultural and legal tradition of the Nordic region is presented through detailed analysis of the first three, aforementioned
countries.) In their useful introduction, Nousianinen and Niemi-Kiesilainen identify the central element of Nordic
gender equality: it "is less the achievement of a resolute equality policy and legal reform than a result
of extensive welfare policies . aiming at the reduction of differences and social inequalities" (p. 2). In
other words, the high gender equality that Nordic women enjoy in the economic and social spheres is the product
of a more general equality politics connected to the region's welfare ideology. Highlighting a theme developed
by other authors in the collection, Nousianinen and Niemi-Kiesilainen also stress the importance of the social
egalitarianism and "myth of a strong woman" in traditional Nordic culture--the lack of a deeply dualistic
theory of gender difference affecting gender roles--to the contemporary gender discourse. The result of these
interrelated factors is that women's issues, particularly those concerned with reproductive health and childcare,
have been incorporated into state politics as part of the national project. Simply put, women, and feminists,
are oriented toward the welfare state as a partner.
The complication, according to the authors, is that women's issues have been served by being articulated as universal
and gender neutral issues--as welfare reforms, rather than as issues of gender-specific rights or discrimination.
Although "general welfare reforms and politics tend to improve women's position and give a basis for emancipation,"
they do not prioritize women's issues AS SUCH "and may even
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make discriminatory practices more difficult to recognize" (p. 16). Gender inequalities that become more difficult
to assess concern sex discrimination in the workplace, and sexual harassment, and violence against women. Thus,
there is, in the Nordic countries, a "myth of equality" whereby the reality that Nordic women are not
equal to men in terms of income, power, protection of integrity and value, is hidden by an assumption that gender
equality is an already existing state of affairs.
The various chapters of this collection set out to examine this myth and to address the ways that sex-based discrimination
might be alleviated within the Nordic legal context. Because this context is not sensitive to difference, nor
to sex/gender difference arguments specifically, the task is to develop a women's rights discourse within a legal
model that is not oriented toward liberal, rights-based rhetoric and where the principal safeguard of gender equality
has been formal legal gender neutrality. The goal of the Nordic feminist legal scholars represented in this collection
is to convey that the aim of gender equality must be understood as requiring
SOME measures that are gender-specific. The challenge is to convey this within the tradition of the strong female
self and without jeopardizing the positive link between women's interests and state social policies.
I would be doing a disservice to the detailed content and sophisticated argumentation of many of the chapters in
RESPONSIBLE SELVES were I to attempt to summarize all of them. Suffice it to say that the volume's contributors
deal with the above themes and with the challenge "inclusive similarity" poses for Nordic women seeking
remedies for structural discrimination of women in employment, domestic abuse, and rape. Of special interest to
scholars of comparative courts will be two chapters: Nielsen's, on the conflict between European Union sex discrimination
law, and its individual right of effective judicial protection, and the traditional Nordic labor relations model,
strongly based on collective agreements; and Lundstrom's, on the way that the liberal legal reasoning of the European
Court of Justice
constructs gendered subjects before the law. On the interaction of social norms and legal rules, I found Ruuskanen's
chapter on the "good battered woman" in the Finnish justice system to be particularly thought-provoking.
Most useful, as a general discussion of feminist jurisprudence in the Nordic context, is Svensson's chapter, which
focuses on Sweden.
American feminists often decry "equality as sameness" for it limitations in addressing gender-based inequality,
associating these limitations with its liberal legal point of view. Ironically, a sameness-based equality has
been the principal impetus for the gender equality enjoyed by Nordic women--a level of social equality many American
feminists would envy. Yet the very comprehensive social policies on behalf of social equality, that have so promoted
Nordic women's rights as workers and mothers, are not as well-attuned to rights and violations that concern women
as women. RESPONSIBLE SELVES suggests that while the Nordic countries' pursuit of women's issues through both political
decision-making and administrative structures has certainly empowered Nordic women, it is an approach with
conceptual and practical limitations of its own.
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Copyright 2002 by the author, Nancy Maveety.