El consenso sobre las soluciones: “paz liberal” como instrumento de gobernanza

This chapter will focus on an Eastern Finnish rural district where in 1912 a local folk-school teacher was prosecuted for “using other male persons as his wives”. This twisted case collected together dozens of locals from different social and geographical parts of the locality, whose stories about the teacher and his sexual behavior went back in time even to the late nineteenth century. The case against Juhani, the teacher, was tried twice in the local court (22.3.1912 and 3.10.1912), after which he appealed the decision to the Vyborg Court of Appeal and finally, to the Court of the Tsar’s Finland Senate, which was the highest court at the time of Finnish autonomy. I show the rationality of this rural community. That is, why at one point they wanted to prosecute their village teacher, whose sexual behavior had already been well-known in the previous century. I interpret the changed attitude towards the teacher in the locality in connection to a fast change in the rural society. I trace the mechanisms of control, class issues, and meanings given to same-sex sexual behavior in Finnish rural community. I will also discuss the case of the teacher in relation to other same-sex fornication trials tried in Finnish rural courts during the period of 1894-1924.

Juhani’s story is situated in a rural parish called Tuusniemi in Eastern Finland, in the Kuopio district. Kuopio was a city of 20,000 inhabitants at the time of our case. In 1910, about 7,500 people lived in the Tuusniemi parish, which in fact consisted of many small villages (see map 1.2). Of the 7,500 inhabitants, over 7,000 earned their living from agriculture. This calculation counts whole families, including servants who lived in family households.¹⁶⁵

165 Väestötilasto. Väestö elinkeinon mukaan luokiteltuna.

In the case of Juhani we are dealing with Finnish rural community that was held together by different kinds of social and economic relations. A few words about the overall social structure may help to situate the villagers of the court case within a larger picture of power relations in rural communities. In general, there were three kinds of people in rural communities, all of whom would fall into the above-mentioned category of “living from agriculture”. The groups were rural workers, tenant farmers and landowners.¹⁶⁶ The rural workers formed the biggest group, as more than half of the rural population belonged to this group. The rural workers, or the “movable population” (irtain väestö) as their contemporaries called them, did not cultivate land, but worked for tenant farmers and land-owners. Many of them lived inside these farmers’ households. This group was thus strongly dependent on the landowners.¹⁶⁷ Citing Matti Peltonen, they were “movable” –in other words, “not fastened” to a means of production, to a house or to possibilities of influence.¹⁶⁸ Cottagers (mäkitupalaiset, mökkiläiset), servants (palkoilliset) and parasites (loiset) were more nuanced categories inside the group, of which the parasites were at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The second group, the tenant farmers (lampuodit and torpparit), rented a piece of a land

166 PELTONEN, MATTI. Talolliset ja torpparit, vuosisadan vaihteen maatalouskysymys Suomessa. SHS, Helsinki 1992:266-275

167 PELTONEN 1992:268.

168 PELTONEN 1992:30.

from a landowner for cultivation. The rent of a farm was paid in working days (taksvärkki) to the owner of the land. The third group was the landowners, the rural capitalists. In many cases their everyday life and living standards did not differ from some tenant farmers. However, they owned their land, which gave them stability, and they also wielded power in the community.¹⁶⁹

In the early decades of the twentieth century the social structure in Tuusniemi was in transformation. The population had grown fast: in 1910 the number of people living in the parish was higher than ever before or after in the history of Tuusniemi. This demographic change meant social challenges, as there was not enough land, housing, or jobs for all. In 1920, nearly half of the Tuusniemi population were “parasites.”¹⁷⁰

Together with landowners, tenant farmers, and parasites, in every rural parish there were also craftsmen, a doctor, a vicar, and folk school teachers. In fact, Juhani, the protagonist of the first chapter, was a folk school teacher in Juurikkamäki, which was one of the villages of Tuusniemi parish. Juhani’s father was a landowner, which meant that his upbringing had been relatively comfortable. Juhani had worked as his village’s schoolteacher from the founding of the Juurikkamäki folk-school in 1896.¹⁷¹ This, in fact, was the period when folk-schools were founded in rural villages because of the new basic education law. Folk-school was the first non-religious school system for children, established in Finland from 1856 onwards, when the Senate rather tentatively made it possible for local councils to organize a basic type of education (up till then this had been in the hands of the Church). However, during the first decades after the law not that many schools were established, because they were considered too expensive. Because of this in 1898 a new folk-school law forced municipalities to offer a basic school education in every parish where there were more than thirty children (9 to 16 year-olds) living in a parish. In addition, no child was expected to travel more than five kilometers to school. However, even though society now offered this kind of system, no obligatory education was enforced before 1921. Because of this, only half of the rural children went to school in 1910.¹⁷²

At the time, Juhani did not have a training program for the teacher’s position, a common problem at the time. Consequently, new teacher training institutions were founded around Finland and one also in Kajaani in 1900. Juhani was accepted in the Kajaani training institution in 1902,¹⁷³ and graduated

169 PELTONEN 1992: 272.

170RÄSÄNEN, MATTI. Tuusniemen pitäjän kirja. Tuusniemen kotiseutuyhdistys ry. Pieksämäki 2000: 84.

171 RÄSÄNEN 2000:216.

172 NUMMINEN, JAAKKO. ”Suomen kansanopetuksen historia” in Koko kansan koulu -80 vuotta oppivelvollisuutta.

Suomen kouluhistoriallisen seuran vuosikirja 2001. Gummerus, Jyväskylä 2001. pp. 101-112.

173KÄÄRIÄINEN, Fr. (ed.) Kajaanin seminaari 1900-1950, muistojulkaisu. Helsinki, 1950:258.

from there in 1906. ¹⁷⁴ The seminar was for men only and initially the students were apparently fairly old, as was Juhani too, already 35 years-old when enrolling in the course. Teacher training also started relatively late in Finland. Whereas in other Scandinavian countries and Germany teacher training had been introduced in the early nineteenth century, in Finland the first teacher training establishment was founded in 1866 in Jyväskylä. Because of the fast population growth of the nineteenth century and because, at the same time folk education became topical, the rural schools were for many years short of educated teachers. However, well-educated teachers were seen to be the foundation of good-quality schools and therefore new training institutions were established all over Finland at the turn of the century.¹⁷⁵

The Juurikkamäki folk-school seemed to having been the mission of Juhani’s life. Juhani had been the first and only teacher of the school, whereas Juhani’s wife taught handicrafts for girls. Although his wife had worked there are a girls’ handicrafts teacher. Juhani had also been one of the founding fathers of the school, present in the first assembly of the school in 1896 and had fought for economic support for the school from the Tuusniemi commune.¹⁷⁶ In addition, in the first years before the construction of a school building, the school was held in Juhani’s house in Juurikkamäki.¹⁷⁷

Juhani was definitely different from the socialist and poor population of the village. He had some property, as we know that many villagers worked as his farm-hands throughout the years. He had inherited half of his childhood’s farm and bought another part of it from his paternal uncle. The deal was important enough to be mentioned in the biggest newspaper of the region Savon Sanomat.¹⁷⁸ Juhani was the founder of the local cooperative shop organization and active in many other fields too.¹⁷⁹ He had, for instance, held summer-schools for people of the region, who wanted to prepare themselves for higher education.¹⁸⁰ Juhani was, indeed, a well-known person in his village and in the whole Tuusniemi parish.

While everything should have been straightforward in Juhani’s life with regard to his property and respect for him in the village, some gossip did circulate about him. He was said to be ‘immoral’ and

174 Names of the graduated were mentioned in newspaper Otava 14.6.1906.

175 HEIKKINEN, REIJO (ed.) Kasvatusta ja koulutusta korven kaupungissa. Kajaanin opettajankoulutuslaitos 90 vuotta. University of Oulu, 1990:3-4.

176 As the commune did not want to invest on the school’s fountain and cellar constructions, Juhani appealed the issue to the governor. As a result, Tuusniemi commune had to build new fountains and cellars to the school. In Savon Työmies 24.8.1909.

177 RÄSÄNEN 2000:216.

178 In Savon Sanomat 20.10.1909.

179 In Otava 3.6.1909

180 In Savon Työmies 15.4.1909

that he ‘used other men as his wives’. The issue had popped up now and then throughout the years, but had each time largely calmed down. However, now, in 1912, the rumors around Juhani started to accumulate thick and fast. This was because two local brothers, who were angry with their former teacher, had begun to speak openly about their old teacher’s sexual behavior. Juhani’s sexual taste and behavior had been common knowledge to all the locals, but it had previously been tolerated, or at least not spoken about openly in the community.

The whole issue became official after two men reported the teacher to their local police officer.

These were not the men who had started the gossip about Juhani, but their friends. The men were from the same village as Juhani. One of them was a shoe-maker and the other was a “parasite”.

They informed the village police officer that the teacher had “already for a longtime”¹⁸¹ “used other male persons as his wives”¹⁸². In addition, about the same time “the local clergy”¹⁸³ had indicated

“some worry” over the situation; consequently, the local police officer brought the case against the teacher. The police started to collect the information from other villagers for their parish’s¹⁸⁴ following winter courts.¹⁸⁵ No police interrogation documents were written beforehand, but instead, the issue was officially discussed for the first time in the trial, which was held in the center of Tuusniemi parish on March 22, 1912.¹⁸⁶

181 In Finnish: ”on jo pidemmän aikaa”.

182 In Finnish: ”käyttänyt miespuolisia henkilöitä vaimonaan”.

183 The vicar of the Tuusniemi church was August Laaksonen. He had been in his position from the year 1908, and in Tuusniemi from 1.5.1907. He had born in 1852 in Paimio, South-West Finland, but worked around the country. In Tuusniemi church there were no other clergy than the vicar. In GODENHJELM, HUGO. Suomen Evankelis-Luterilaisen Papiston Matrikkeli. Sortavala 1927:86, 226.

184 Tuusniemi parish.

185 Autumn courts 1912.

186 Tuusniemi winter court 1912. 22.3. §52.

At the beginning of the twentieth-century, the Finnish rural courts (käräjät) assembled only twice a year (in winter and autumn). In some special cases, the trials were also held in-between these two periods, in so-called extra-courts (välikäräjät). The country was divided into nearly three hundred independent courting regions. As it would have been impossible to have an educated judge in each of them, the judges travelled around on a bigger circuit in order to hold the required two courts in each region. These trained judges made the decisions in rural courts together with lay judges, who were some respected locals, and whose purpose was to give a local perspective on the judgments.

Juhani’s case was tried twice in the rural court, after which it was sent to the Court of Appeal and in the end to the Highest Court. All these four levels opened up new aspects to sexual relationships between Juhani and his locality. As a consequence, I will divide the case into three parts in which one level of the legal proceeding per part. The themes are sexual relations with minors, class juxtaposition, and male-bonding.