Construction of Gendered Legal Personhood in the History of Finnish Law

Abstract

In common law, women were not classified as legal persons until 1930. In the Ger-man legal tradition, the territories influenced by Roman Law, ius commune, had recognized women as legal persons already in the early 19th century, but this development was later slowed down by the regulation of marital authority and of the husband’s right over the wife’s person in the German Civil Code, BGB, in 1896. In Finland, unmarried women gained legal independence in 1864, when the guardianship of women under 25 was abolished. But it was only by the 1929 Marriage Act that married women were given full legal personhood, much later than they received political rights, universal franchise and eligibility, which had hap-pened already in 1906. The egalitarian ethos of legal modernization did indeed contain also deeply rooted patriarchal undercurrents, and thus it was not without tension such develop-ments took place. In order to understand some of the contemporary problems linked with full implementation of equality, it can be useful to look at the modern person construction when it was first developed.