Vol. 15 No.1 (January 2005), pp.71-73

NORDIC EQUALITY AT A CROSSROADS. FEMINIST LEGAL STUDIES COPING WITH DIFFERENCE, by Eva-Maria Svensson, Anu Pylkkänen, Johanna Niemi-Kiesiläinen (eds).  Burlington: Ashgate, 2004.  262pp. Hardback.  $99.95 /£55.00.  ISBN: 0754624080.

Reviwed by Adelaide H. Villmoare, Department of Political Science, Vassar College. E-mail: villmoare@vassar.edu .

This volume invites Anglo-American readers, especially those from the US, into a different political environment where a commitment on the part of state and civil society to political and economic equality is the norm.  The dedication to equality in Nordic countries can be seen, for instance, in the commitment to “the independent economy of each individual, irrespective of family states, [which] lies at the core of all legislation” (p.135).  While neo-liberal globalization is impinging on Nordic societies, its anti-equality norms have not penetrated their cultures to the degree they have in the US and Great Britain. How feminists negotiate equality in more diverse, global, and neo-liberal circumstances is open to discussion here, but the value of equality is not. 

While the various chapters of this reader emphasize the existence of gender hierarchies, they also demonstrate that Nordic societies value “distributive justice and a substantive notion of equality” (p.17).  For example, in Finland “there seems to be good-will towards equality among employers -- the issue is how to motivate them to action” (p.85).  In Norway, where care is treated seriously as a policy issue, “a constant development towards more extensive social compensation schemes for care in the home has taken place in the 1990s” (p.103), and attention to the “just divisions of caring responsibilities” plays out in mainstream political discourse (p.129).

The book opens with a fascinating look at the crossroads the editors have in mind.  Three major challenges present themselves in:  1) the feminist recognition of the failure to achieve substantive equality; 2) the diminishment of the sovereignty of the nation state; and 3) increased ethnic diversity in traditionally fairly homogeneous nations.  Nordic feminists question the sufficiency of reliance on state policies in the face of new pressures from “privatization, globalization and multiculturalism” (p.2).  The story of Fadime Sahindal frames these challenges and the book itself.  She was a Kurdish woman well integrated into Swedish society who had publicly called attention to her vulnerability before she was murdered by her father for planning to marry a Swedish man.  Her murder and the inability of the state in the end to protect her broke open debate among Nordic feminists.  But, oddly, ethnic diversity and the impact of Fadime’s story do not figure in most of the essays; these concerns serve more as book ends than as a pivotal force in the reflections on Nordic legal feminism. [*72]


The articles range from an overview of Nordic feminist legal studies interested in analytic and practical political discourse to discussions on equality and employment, care, and sex crimes.  The reader learns that in Sweden women are less likely than men to strike and that equal pay for equal work is a firm legal principle.  Despite a formal legal commitment to gender equality in the workplace, little progress toward that end has been accomplished, however.  In Norway a divide between the value of wage labor and home care work continues alongside a social welfare system dedicated to economic independence of individuals.  There is a “large gap between the law and the progressive aims of sex equality politics” such that “the vision of the women-friendly Nordic welfare state is now fading” (pp.138-139).  Feminists press ahead, nonetheless, as they have in Finland where consideration of sex crimes moves beyond the liberal neutrality and protection of sexual self-determination to a project that fully grasps the gendered abuse of power (pp.188-189).  Authors explore equality and rights as changing ideas, fostered within Nordic countries by distributive justice and notions of community rather than liberal individualism (pp.212, 225, 228).  Nordic feminism is beginning to offer its understandings of distributive justice to human rights work.


This book reflects on the political successes and failures of Nordic legal feminism and offers insights from struggles in countries with commitments to social justice and interest in human rights and cross cultural discourses.  The last chapters discuss both as the authors reconsider the debate about the murder of Fadime Sahindal and describe the Erasmus program where students from many countries and religious backgrounds attend classes in Denmark (p.236).  Here the reader gains insight into the challenges and opportunities ethnic diversity pose for Nordic legal feminists.  The book ends on a pluralistic note attentive to “global injustices and their gendered . . . implications” (p.243).

Two especially interesting insights from this book speak about the discourse of rights in a communitarian (as distinguished from liberal) framework and about the diminished role of the nation state.  Nordic rights, based on “ideals of mutual solidarity and mutual responsibility” that derive principles from mothering and caring rather than from principles (of competition and individualism) from the market, provide a good model for society (p.159).  While Anglo-American feminists (e.g. Martha Fineman, Mona Harrington) have long argued for the merit of such principles, the principles appear to have more political purchases in Nordic cultures than they have in the US.  Because the state has occupied a central position in distributive justice (and the politics of responsibility), its reduced role in light of globalization and the EU is moving Nordic feminists to reach beyond national and European intellectual, activist borders to human rights and “inter-human” law with its “downplaying the European legacy and male bias in international human rights law” (p.220).

From the perspective of US feminism it is heartening in this book to see politics grounded in the presumption of social justice and animated by issues of childcare, equity in pay, and women’s rights as human rights.  The very [*73] question “Is there any public or governmental responsibility to support the choices made by families either directly via allowance payments or indirectly, by providing subsidized services” (p.129) being posed in Norway and Finland demonstrates that opening up political agendas to such feminist concerns is not the uphill battle it is in the US. 

At the same time Nordic feminism is just beginning to come to terms with issues of diversity that have driven so much of Anglo-American feminism since the 1980s, although these issues do not present themselves precisely as they have in Anglo-American societies.  But the Nordic “communitarian ethos” (p.13) fostered by state and civil society is coming up against the limits of its commitment to all sorts of different women.  The conditions for dynamic development are definitely in place among Nordic feminists, as this book so clearly demonstrates.

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Adelaide H. Villmoare