Women’s organizations played a crucial role in assisting the Finnish Defense Forces during the 105 days of warfare that constituted the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. Finnish women were not allowed to take part in combat, but in addition to their extensive home-front tasks, they did assume many ancillary battlefield duties. Forty-nine women auxiliaries were nevertheless killed in battle during the war. This mass voluntary participation in the war effort by women from all social groups contributed to the legendary spirit of the Winter War in which a nation was exceptionally unified and determined against a much more powerful invader.
The most significant contribution of Finnish women to the war effort was by the Lotta Svard organization, a legally constituted women’s auxiliary corps that was affiliated with the Finnish reserve, the Civil Guards. Among other tasks, the Lotta Svard members operated field hospitals; oversaw the production, supply, and maintenance of military clothes and other equipment; allocated relief to fatherless families and evacuees; and participated in air raid and naval defense.
On the home front, the Lotta Svard’s activities were supplemented by those of various women’s societies in the churches, in business, and in agriculture as well as in the cooperative movement, the labor unions, and the socialist political organizations. Until the outbreak of the war, the latter had viewed the right-wing Lotta organization with deep suspicion, but animosities were put aside for the duration of the war, and these widely different groups cooperated in running most local bomb shelters and home guard units. They also set up joint advisory centers for those dislocated, impoverished, or otherwise injured by the war. During the war, all state assistance to war widows, orphans, and evacuees was channeled through these joint women’s organizations. Few foreign imports of foodstuff or other necessities reached Finland during the war, and it further devolved on the women’s groups to teach methods of conserving foodstuff using substitutes, and enhancing agricultural production. A joint agency for recruiting and allocating women for industrial work was created by thirty-six of these groups, and the agency successfully filled a large part of jobs previously held by men in the armaments industry, hospitals, and the postal services.
It has been estimated that the activities of the women’s volunteer groups made it possible during the Winter War for at least a division worth of men who would otherwise have been needed in the industries and in municipal services on the home front to go to the battlefield. In view of the massive superiority in manpower that the Soviet armies enjoyed, this service of Finnish women was of material importance to the persistence of the Finnish war effort. It was also a turning point in the role that women were to play in Finnish society, for although they had enjoyed full and equal political rights since 1905, it was only through their industrial and municipal activities during the Winter War that Finnish women established themselves in all areas of the social, economic, and industrial life of the nation. Their services were applauded as crucial by the commander in chief, Field-Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim and were deeply appreciated by the nation at large, thus providing Finnish women with that new moral authority that sustained their presence, in unprecedented numbers, in postwar politics.
