From Humiliation to Compensation? Experiencing Poverty and Welfare Institutions Among Red Widows from the Civil War, 1918–1945

Abstract

After the Great War, various pension schemes were created in Europe to assist war widows and orphans. Compared with the general European response, the Finnish Civil War of 1918 resulted in two different groups of widows and orphans and divergent practices of aid. The families of the White Army soldiers were assisted by national pensions. The widows and orphans of the Reds were stigmatized as the rebellious, defeated side of the war. The chapter focuses on the Red Widows’ encounters with the Finnish social welfare institution in 1918–1945 to answer the following questions: How did these widows interpret the measures the social welfare system directed to them? What kind of experiences of society did these measures create? How did the two-way social relationship affect the dense community of these widows? The analysis uses the concepts of emotional community and collective experience. The source material consists of the letters of complaint the widows wrote to the Ministry of Social Affairs from 1919 until the middle of the 1940s. The article proceeds via the concepts of humiliation, resistance, compensation, and wounded confidence. The letters describe the process of the experience in the life course of the Red widows, and the concepts serve as tools in the analysis.

Introduction

During the Great War in Europe, the number of women wearing black increased year by year. In both France and Germany, 600,000 women lost their husbands, and in Italy and Great Britain, the number of widows increased by 200,000.¹ In Finland, the Civil War of 1918 between the White Army and rebellious Red Guards left approximately 13,500 war widows. However, a total of 11,500, or about 85 per cent, were widows on the losing Red side.²

In Europe, various grant and pension schemes were created to assist war widows and war orphans.³ In Finland, the Civil War had divided the whole nation and resulted in two divergent practices of aid and cultures of remembering. Only the widows and orphans of the White army soldiers were assisted by national pensions and honored for their self-sacrifice to the nation. The Red widows and orphans were stigmatized as the rebellious, defeated side of the war. They had to turn to the Finnish social welfare institution to survive. In practice, this meant poor relief.

In this chapter, I focus on the Red widows’ encounters with poor relief from 1918 to 1945. The statistical accounts of the circumstances of the Red families proved that about 90 per cent were so poor that they needed support to survive. Unskilled workers formed the largest group among the male breadwinners on the defeated side, making up around 40 per cent. Skilled and industrial workers were together likewise, almost 40 per cent. I analyze the encounters of Red widowed mothers with social welfare institutions from three interlinked perspectives: first, how the widows understood and interpreted the measures the social welfare system directed to them; second, what kind of experiences of society these measures created; and third, how the two-way societal relationship affected the dense community of these widows. I mainly concentrate on the Tampere region. Tampere was a major industrial city in Finland where the consequences of the Civil War were felt heavily until the 1930s, being home to 150 Red widows and about 500 Red orphans.

In my analysis, I use the concepts of emotional community and collective experience. I suggest, first, that the Red widows formed an emotional community and that they shared a collective experience. As Barbara Rosenwein has defined it, “an emotional community is ‘a system of feeling’ based on a ‘social community’, when i.e. a relational group of people share the same economic, social, political interests. This community could be socially diverse and was not exclusive.”⁴ The widows lived with their children in the densely populated working-class areas where people knew each other and shared the same kind of living circumstances. The widows could even share a place of work, as many of them managed to find work in textile factories in the 1920s. Second, I suggest that the widows’ negotiations with poor relief institutions had an influence on how the women understood Finnish society. Over time, their interaction with society formed a collective experience that defined their lives and their agencies.⁵

I will also look at how the local and state authorities handled the circumstances of Red families when many of them lived on the poverty line, and how the authorities understood the distressed state of the Red widows. Stearns and Stearns have created the concept of emotionology, which refers to “the attitude or standards that a society, or a definable group within society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression and ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct.”⁶ Their aim is to propose emotionology as a useful term with which to distinguish the collective emotional standards of a society from the emotional experiences of individuals and groups. In the case of the Red widows, this could mean how the local and state authorities expected the Red widows to behave: not as grieving widows and mothers but instead as humble, hardworking patriotic women who would campaign to get a livelihood for their children and to raise them as decent citizens.

The main body of the source material for this chapter consists of the letters of complaint the Red widows wrote to the chief inspector of the Ministry of Social Affairs from 1919 until the mid-1920s. If the mother was unable to earn her own and her children’s living through her own work, she had to ask for support from municipal poor relief. As the local authorities were in certain circumstances reluctant to assist, the widowed mothers wrote letters of complaint to the Ministry.

In addition, I use the letters of complaint and pension applications of Tampere-based widows written in the 1940s. At this point, the status of the Red widows had changed, following the 1943 decision of the Finnish Government on allowances⁷ for the widows of the Civil War of 1918—hereafter named pensions for the Red widows. In the pension applications, the widows had to give detailed accounts of their living conditions from the Civil War until the 1940s. The material from this group of women, who had gone through a complete crisis and collapse and had to interpret their own lives almost a quarter of a century later, offers an opportunity to analyze the widows’ experiences of long-term interaction with social institutions. I am interested in how these women with a working-class background and little education managed to organize their lives and to get support from the poor relief. Moreover, I utilize official documents on the Red widows’ dealings with the Tampere poor relief and child welfare boards as well as parliamentary discussions concerning the social aid for the Red families.

In this chapter, I argue the Red widows formed an emotional community in which certain collective experiences were constituted via humiliation, resistance, compensation, and wounded confidence. These concepts describe the process of experience in the life course of the Red widows, and, as such, they structure my analysis.

Humiliation

The Civil War was something that happened to the Red widows and changed their life. It condemned them to poverty and to a struggle to survive for the rest of their lives.⁸ Half of the Red widows were, in 1918, between the ages of 30 and 40, and the average widow had three underage children. Statistics proved that living without a breadwinner’s income was impossible for widowed mothers.⁹ Red widows were not seen as mourning wives and mothers, and they did not have the opportunity for the official remembrance of lost husbands and family members, relatives, and friends.¹⁰ Moreover, they did not enjoy the status of war widow. Instead, in the middle of their sorrow, they had to battle against accusations, hunger, cold, and uncertainty for the future.

Public opinion had a great influence immediately after the war on the attitudes towards the Red widows and the families of the Reds. Accusations towards widowed mothers were presented in newspapers and magazines. According to the accusers, these women had betrayed the Finnish nation, and their status as mothers was questioned. They had failed to raise their children to become law-abiding citizens. Instead, this generation had started a revolt. Kotimaa, the magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and Köyhäinhoitolehti, the poor relief magazine,¹¹ described Red widows as a social hazard from which children had to be rescued. The children had to be raised to be decent citizens of White Finland, and they had to be taught to forget their fathers’ legacy.¹²

Humiliation can be seen as an act, an emotion, or both. It has also been defined as “the experience of some form of ridicule, scorn, contempt, or other degrading treatment at the hands of others.”¹³ Moreover, humiliation can be defined as something that is actively done by one person to another. In the case of the Red widows, humiliation was exercised through institutions and directed at this particular group in society.¹⁴

The Poor Relief Act of 1879 stipulated the principles of poor relief, but local authorities—municipal boards or poor relief boards—had great discretionary power to decide on the form of the support. Especially in the countryside, the local poor relief boards were often dominated by White landowners.¹⁵ The humiliation the Red widows experienced on the local authorities’ part was both concrete and mental—and as such, it was an act experienced very differently than, for example, mere bureaucratic procedures.¹⁶ Deciding on the support for the Red widows, both the state and the local authorities exercised power over the widows. As power is central to humiliation, the victim of an act of humiliation can be described not as feeling but as being humiliated—the victim of an act of power.

The humiliating experience of the Red widows was compounded by the fact that the poor relief authorities had the right to exercise power in organizing the livelihood of the Reds’ families. This right gave them power over the mother. The widowed mothers experienced their conditions as mistreatment, as one mother wrote: “We have suffered so much all kinds of subjections that our nerves are polluted and we will lose the balance, both corporeal and mental, those who have it anymore. Health is not cared about.”¹⁷

The support the local poor relief authorities gave could be granted as financial support, firewood, or a place in a foster home or orphanage. This meant that special statutes (decrees) were not needed if the childcare authorities wanted to move the children from their own home. In some cases, the mothers were obliged to give children up to a foster home because it was the only assistance the local poor relief board offered, and for the mother, this was the only possibility when she had to earn her living or find work.¹⁸

At the end of 1918 and in 1919, the Ministry of Social Affairs planned extensive child transfers because the abilities of the Red widows as caregivers were not believed in and trusted. The authorities wanted to take the children away from the Red mothers and place them in living conditions where they would receive a patriotic religious upbringing, and, in addition, the food situation in the rural areas would be better. Southern Finland and large cities suffered from food shortages after the war. However, the child transfers did not succeed to the planned extent.¹⁹

The widows toiled hard, and many of them worked shifts and at night. At the same time, they were overwhelmed with worries about how the children were doing at home. They struggled with health problems and suffered particularly from heart and lung disease. When the emergency was at its greatest and the local authorities did not assist, the widows tried themselves to write to the state authorities or asked other people who had the ability to write to people in high places.

I, widow Hilta Räsänen, ask for information about those orphans’ papers I sent—have the papers arrived and have you dealt with the papers officially. I sent the papers this month to Helsinki. Soon the children’s school will begin and I don’t know from where I can get support. I ask you to send me a message if anything is missing from the papers. You have not answered my letter, so I ask that action be taken as soon as possible that I know what I must do with my children’s schooling. From here I can’t get help and I am in need with respect. Hilta Räsänen.²⁰

Regarding the Red widows’ difficulty in getting help and making their voices heard, one mother asked an elementary school teacher to contact a Social Democrat MP, hoping the MP could influence the widow’s grants. According to the letter, the widow was in an unfortunate condition and asked someone for help through the teacher. The widow and her children had survived on their own for more than a year, but then their means had run out. The elementary school teacher wrote that the municipal poor care authorities were indifferent to the widow’s circumstances.²¹ Another widow, Hilma Savander, wrote a request for assistance directly to the Ministry, addressing it to “honorable gentlemen.” Hilma explained that she had a small cottage where she lived with her five children. The cottage was in poor condition, and the roof was leaking. She had asked the local poor relief board for a grant, but the decision-makers refused to give a grant or a loan. Hilma Savander wrote to the Department of Social Affairs: “Gentlemen, please take note of my writing.”²²

The Ministry of Social Affairs had received alarming information about the conditions of the Red families across Finland, and the state authorities understood that the families had become a great financial burden for the local government. The Ministry of Social Affairs began in 1919 to pay subsidies to the municipalities for the poor relief costs of these families. This decision can be seen as a compromise where the municipalities and the state divided the poor relief costs of the Reds’ children, and the Finnish state saw it as an obligation to help the Red families. When the municipality received the state subsidy, it meant the control by the Ministry of Social Affairs both for the local poor relief authorities and the Red widows. The financial assistance was directed primarily to children, not to mothers. Childcare had to meet certain quality standards defined by the Ministry. However, not all municipalities were willing to accept the state subsidy because it would have meant tighter state control of the local poor relief board and authorities.

The Ministry of Social Affairs drew up written instructions for the use of the state subsidy, and these instructions formed the relationship between the mother, the local poor relief board, and the Ministry of Social Affairs. The state subsidy program gave the Ministry of Social Affairs and municipal poor relief authorities the possibility to use power over the widowed mother. By signing the contract, the mother lost some of her custody rights. There was a threat that if she did not follow the contract, her children could be taken away from her.²³

The contract included several obligations for the mother. She had to keep her home and children clean, control the children’s free time and education, and tend to the children’s health. The morals of the widowed mother came under special surveillance. The children’s upbringing was the most important task of the widowed mother. The authorities were suspicious whether the mothers would be able to teach a love of the fatherland to their children.²⁴ The sexual behavior of mothers was under special control. The Red widow’s position as a woman without a husband in the household was seen as a potential threat to the moral stability of the nation. Angela Smith notes in her study on the widows of the First World War that women were subjected to a great deal of distrust regarding their morality. If a war widow did not behave in the expected way, her pension could be stopped. An illegitimate child could be another reason for suspending the pension. The war widow was seen as an unruly widow and an unfit mother.²⁵

Inspectors from the Ministry of Social Affairs and the local poor relief board made home visits to control the Red widows’ behavior. The Red widows were not expected to honor their husbands’ memory, because it would have been an insult to the values of White Finland. Strict morality and restrained behavior in the relationships with men were expected of the Red widows. These visits revealed that widows had given birth to illegitimate children.²⁶ Among the Tampere-based Red widows, nine per cent (14 women) had become mothers during their widowhood. The Ministry of Social Affairs had made special instructions for inspectors on how to reprimand women who were suspected of immoral behavior:

According to reports received by the Ministry of Social Welfare, there are cases where the mother has given birth outside marriage. In due course, the mother must first be warned in private, and—if this does not help—through the local poor relief board. However, when a warning has to be invoked, it must be carefully assessed. It should not be made on the basis of rumors and complaints. It is also necessary to be able to distinguish an immoral life from a rather permissible relationship leading to a new marriage.²⁷

The instruction was practical. For the poor relief, it was a great benefit if the poor relief costs of the Red families would decrease due to a new breadwinner in the household.

Resistance and the Opportunity for Interaction

In October 1924, 15 Red widows from a small mill community near Tampere sent a joint letter to the Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Social Affairs. This letter proved how the widows understood themselves as an emotional community and how they shared their collective experience of humiliation. With this letter, the widows made an appeal against the local poor relief board and complained of the inappropriate treatment they had received. The newspapers had reported that Parliament would give the state subsidies to the local poor relief boards for grants to Red families, but the widows were disappointed that the local poor relief authorities had not tried to apply for the state subsidy. Through the joint letter, these women tried to get support from the state authorities.²⁸ They wrote:

We are completely unaware if we are getting state aid for our orphans […] We would urge the ministry [Ministry of Social Affairs] to take care of this matter and organize it so that the mothers will get a maintenance contract […] All of our matters are such that for a quick improvement we kindly ask that our matter be taken account of and the Inspection Department will improve our situation. As we think we have been oppressed several years. In this time, several mothers have broken and lost their health, many mothers fight with lung and heart diseases or are else weak because of insufficient subsistence.²⁹

Phil Leask has asked whether humiliation can be refused or rejected by the intended victim, but he found this unlikely because of power relations.³⁰ However, there was resistance among the Red widows, and a few of them began to enforce their rights and to question the principles of the poor relief practices in their domicile.

The mothers had compiled a statistical summary of the support they had received and provided clear justifications for their claims, describing the abusive treatment they had experienced. The detailed report provided information on the children’s circumstances, the poor relief they received, and their rental costs and fixed expenses. The letter was formally polite, detailed, and outlined demands that the widows considered reasonable. They demanded, among other things, that the poor relief board should enter into a contract with them in which the obligations of the parties would be stated. The widows understood that the contract between the local poor relief board, Ministry of Social Affairs, and widowed mother would safeguard their rights as recipients of the benefit to which they were entitled.³¹ They did not understand the maintenance contract as humiliating; instead, they believed that it would be easier to live under the contract.

The loss of the right to vote as a result of receiving poor relief was very humiliating for the Red widows. In the joint letter, the widows wrote that the local government had stolen their right to vote, and they thought that it was against the law. Actually, they had lost the rights of citizenship by losing the right to vote. Both Finnish men and women were granted the right to vote and the right to stand as candidates for the new unicameral parliament in 1906. However, the most democratic representative system in Europe still excluded a number of citizens from suffrage. The exclusion concerned people who had not paid their taxes during the previous two years and people who received regular help from the poor relief. These people had not fulfilled the requirements of economic independence.³² The electoral law gave the local election committees leeway in interpreting who had the right to vote, for example, by how regular or temporary support was defined.³³

This joint letter proves that communication with the authorities in high places was not easy for the women with little formal education. The writer of this letter had basic literacy skills, but the style proves that writing was difficult. The letter included the conventions of the spoken dialect. Even though the writer did not know grammar or how to formulate the official complaint, she was strict and determined in her argumentation. The letter resulted in an inspection from the Ministry of Social Affairs and the inspector’s negotiations with the local poor relief board. The widows were given promises of better support.³⁴

However, as the correspondence continued, the local poor relief board did not keep its promises and it had a contradictory interpretation of the Ministry’s instructions. In the next letter, the widows wrote a more detailed description about several grievances and the exceptionally difficult conditions of some mothers and children, poverty, diseases such as lung disease, and unhealthy living conditions:

Hilda Virtanen’s family is homeless [mother and children living with grandparents] all in the one room and the eldest son suffers from tuberculosis, he has now tried to be at school and then has four more children and a father in prison. The family received a grant of FIM 100 a month if the old mother did not take care of the children, it would have been dead and bad with such a grant and miserable it is when the mother try to earn from the world for to stay alive and that children will survive and always wait for her husband to get out of jail, how the miserable society bullies the father as well as mother and innocent children get to suffer. Mothers will break down, those grant amounts must be maximized, mothers will not be able to work hard anymore, age will be for many and enough.³⁵

This episode describes the possibility of interaction with the authorities and trust in the Ministry, even though the Red widows criticized the way society had treated them.³⁶ Widow Beda Suojanen continued the correspondence with the Ministry the following year. She wrote that she was a seamstress but unable to work regularly on a daily basis because of illnesses. Additionally, there were no working opportunities during winter. She again requested maintenance contracts for the orphans, writing:

Because of the circumstances, I must turn to You and ask for Your favored contribution, help, and advice. As the Mr. Inspector saw and heard, we mothers and orphans are not here in Kyröskoski of Hämeenkyrö in an enviable position. In spite of the past years, the authorities of the municipality did not ask for the state grant under the law to our children and now that we were forced to ask for it again and again, when we had exhausted our strength and sickness and lack did not leave our homes for a moment. […] We have asked the chairman of the Poor Relief Board for maintenance contracts for our orphans, but he has replied that the municipality has not used them. We would ask the Lord Inspector to send them here to the foolish people, too, and let us know, because when they arrive, we can go and get them.³⁷

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Finnish Parliament discussed every year the amount of the state subsidy given to the municipalities for the subsistence of the Red families. Especially the left-wing MPs made initiatives for the pensions of the Red widows and children. However, these propositions did not yield results.³⁸

Compensation: The Right to a Pension

We widows of the Reds have otherwise suffered all kinds of ridicule, in addition to our other sufferings. The chance of living is so hard.³⁹

During the Second World War, the attitudes towards Red veterans and Red widows changed. In the middle of the crisis, it was important to seek national unity and to bind the defeated side to the fatherland. White widows, orphans, and injured war veterans had already received pensions in 1918. In 1941, disabled Red war veterans began to get payments. The Finnish Parliament appointed a committee to investigate the possibility of beginning to pay pensions to Red widows as well. It was the last chance for the Finnish state to offer formal compensation to these women when they were of retirement age or approaching it. In 1943, the average age of these women was slightly over sixty. Among Tampere widows, 58 per cent had reached the age of sixty (Table 7.1).

Table 7.1 The age of Tampere red widows in 1943

The Finnish Cabinet made the final decision on pensions for Red widows on 28 January 1943.⁴⁰ The widows received the information about the pensions from the newspapers, radio, and public announcements.⁴¹ More than 6000 pension applicants were registered in 1942 and 1943. The application process was complicated for people who were unaccustomed to completing a form including 32 questions. The widows had difficulties dealing with so many officials, and they did not understand the role of all these questions in the application process. For many older widows, writing was difficult. They were asked to fill in the form conscientiously and clearly, and they were advised to ask for help from another person if their ability to write was poor.

The application required several certifications, like a certificate of good conduct (meaning that the applicant had not lost her civil rights), a doctor’s certificate, and a pay statement. Additionally, local poor relief authorities made an estimation of the widow’s financial status. A certificate informing of the dead husband’s duties in the Red Guard during the war had to be included. The pension was not universal, and many rejections were made, especially in 1942 during the committee work and in 1943.⁴² If the husband had participated in murders and killings, the widow did not have the right to the pension.⁴³ The pension was not granted if the widow had remarried. In the first stage, only the poorest widows received the pension, not those with satisfactory living conditions. In addition, if they had sons fighting in the war, the wartime allowances influenced the widowed mother’s pension decisions.

The Red widows’ pension was a first remarkable gesture of goodwill from the Finnish state to women who had lived in poverty, worked hard, and brought up their children.⁴⁴ The common experience of the Red widows in 1943 and 1944 was that they had not received any assistance from society after the Civil War and during the 1920s and the 1930s, as Hilda Mänty wrote:

In my conscience, I have made the most of my talents as any other Finnish woman. After my husband was killed, I was left with a 12-day-old boy and only 60 marks of money and no other property, our home was only at the beginning of establishment. There was no shelter from poor relatives or society, only later did I get FIM 50 a month from child protection. I received no security from society, but society takes a lot from me.⁴⁵

After more than 20 years, it was difficult to get information about the husband’s duties during the Civil War. For the widows, it might have been difficult to return in their minds to the tragic circumstances of 1918. Fanny Kivistö tried in her letter to the Social Minister to report her husband’s fate:

I am 54 years old and I would hope that I would not be ousted any more. I have honorably raised four children alone and I have not received any support and it feels bitter to so late apply for this kind of allowance when the war widows now can receive their pensions without question, and the Rebels had some part to our great independence and my husband Heikki Kivistö was a very respectable working man in the company of all his friends and however he was shot when he was keeping guard over civilians, and it feels very sad to think that my son is at war and is devoted to guard our borders there far away. I can’t write more but I hope that you will not forget me anymore.⁴⁶

Vilhelmiina Kauppinen wrote herself on the pension form about her husband’s fate and the problems she had with the certificate: “In 1918 2 April 20.30 my husband was picked up from home and I haven’t seen him since. The men who have seen him fallen are dead, so I have not been able to claim [he is] verifiably dead.”⁴⁷

The widows did not understand or did not remember the state’s role and state grants organized by the Ministry of Social Affairs after the Civil War and during the 1920s and 1930s. The common experience was that they had lived alone without any societal aid. Now they had to prove that they needed the pension, and they wanted to highlight their struggles after the Civil War. Even those women who had written on the pension form that they had received support from the local poor relief board or child welfare board had the experience that they had not received any assistance from society. The poor relief they had received had left them with the experience of humiliation and ostracism.

Wounded Confidence

There were 102 Red widows in Tampere who had the opportunity to send in a pension application. In all, one third of these women made an application and received the pension. Weakened health, reduced working capacity, and poverty were common for all those widows to whom the pension was granted. Despite their health problems, they were still trying to work or at least take care of their children’s household. Many statements written by the Tampere poor relief board included comments on the destitute conditions. The property of the Red widows consisted of nothing more than clothes and modest home furnishings. However, some of them had to submit the application twice. These women understood the pension as compensation, but their trust in the institution decreased because of the very complicated application process and the rejected applications. Additionally, the Ministry of Social Affairs changed the rules several times, and this caused embarrassment among the applicants.⁴⁸

Maria Matilda Vilander’s letter is a typical description of the widow’s circumstances. It proves how, for an elderly person, it was difficult to understand the bureaucracy between authorities like the Ministry and the municipal poor relief board and to know who was deciding on her pension.

Thus, I humbly ask whether I will receive that 1918 Rebel Widow’s Pension. I sent those papers back in the day there and I have waited very long. I went some time ago to the municipal poor relief board, asking about it, but they answered that they don’t know anything about it. They encouraged me to approach the honored ministry. Since I lost my husband I have lived in poverty and in need. Three children, one girl and two boys left young, and for them I have worked night and day until they reached the age to go to earn. Then I lost my health and cancer came and I have had five operations and after that I have not been healthy anymore. My other diseases include heart disease and gallstones. Since 1939, I have been incapable of work […] I have not been able to pay my rent for four months. And I don’t know how to get by this winter. So I humbly ask you to lend your helping hand by granting me a small pension.⁴⁹

The decision of the Ministry of Social Affairs was in many cases inconsistent with the widows’ own sense of justice. These women wrote themselves to the Ministry complaining about the decision that they thought of as unfair. The rejection of an application was a severe disappointment because they had understood that the time for compensation had come. Obviously, one of the reasons for the activation of the Red widows’ pension was the ongoing war. Not only that, at a time when unanimity was required of the nation, it was appropriate to include the part that had lost in the 1918 Civil War. In addition, municipal welfare and social assistance authorities understood that wartime meant low incomes for elderly widows. In many cases, their children had helped them with living costs, and now the young men were undertaking military service.

In the application form, the widow had to declare, in addition to her own income, all the assistance she received from her children. According to the Poor Law (1922), adult children had a conditional maintenance obligation to their parents. This meant that an adult child had to give financial support to parents in need if the child had the means to do so.

The local poor relief board held the view that children had a duty to support parents, and they estimated the income level of daughters and sons. It was self-evident that the children living in the same household with their mother shared the living costs. In many cases, the Tampere poor relief authorities wrote on the widow’s pension form that widow’s livelihood was entirely dependent on her son’s income and “the standard of living is very modest although not deficient.”⁵⁰ The situation was more complicated when the children had their own families, however; the social authorities estimated the incomes of married children as well as their spouses’ income and then drew a conclusion regarding the widowed mother’s economic status.

In March 1943, the newspaper Kansan Lehti wrote that all applicants could not get the allowance that year because the grant for the pensions was not sufficient.⁵¹ The Red widows had seen themselves as a uniform group who had gone through the same trials and had suffered humiliation and ridicule. As an emotional community, they worked in the same factories, and they knew each other’s circumstances. There was a great confusion among the widows when some received a higher pension than others, and a great anger arose if no pension had been granted at all. This caused distrust toward society and doubts and envy among the widows. The pension scheme was breaking the collective experience and the widows’ sense of solidarity with each other. The letters of complaint addressed to the Ministry tell of the wounded trust towards society.⁵²

Widow Vilhelmiina Mänty wrote:

I hope that my application will not be rejected because of what I now earn, because my age-weakened eyes I don’t see to do my work and when as an old person you must change line of work it is difficult and without society’s aid I became a burden for my son if he comes back healthy from the war for he is much more conscientious soldier than many of those fallen soldiers on the White side 1918 and whose mothers society has all the time cared for.⁵³

The war time caused many problems for these women. Many mothers lost sons who had been their only support and had brought security to their lives. Anna Lydia Malm wrote how she was a mother who had undergone several trials. Her son had died in the Winter War and her other son was away at war, as were her daughters’ husbands. As her children had their own families, they could not support their mother. Another widow had lost the income she received because her son was away at war, but as the son had married, the conscript’s allowance instead went to his young wife.⁵⁴

Ilmi Vesanen wrote that “should I be as entitled to get from that desk (public funds) as those others, who had better livings. I should not ask if I were healthy. I must always get debt and pay it back when I am able to work, it is impossible to get further.”⁵⁵ Wilhelmiina Mänty could not understand why all the other Red widows working in the same company as her got the pension and only she was left without it. She wrote that those in power should understand that citizens of the republic should not leave others in the shadows, and she called for equality because she understood that all widows at the factory lived in similar circumstances.

Tuulikki Henriksson was disappointed and wrote two letters of complaint about her mother’s rejected pension applications. The first letter was addressed to the Ministry of Social Affairs, and the second to Minister Eino Kilpi. She wondered why her mother’s application was rejected. Hilma Henriksson was a 60-year-old factory worker and had raised her two children alone without any aid from society. Tuulikki lived with her mother. She argued that many of the Red widows working in the same factory and living in better circumstances had been granted a pension. She even mentioned the names of these women. Tuulikki and her mother did not trust the inspector of Tampere poor relief board who had written the statement on Hilma Henriksson’s pension application. The daughter suspected that the inspector was incompetent because the statement mentioned the pension Hilma would get from the Finlayson company. The inspector had taken into account Hilma’s future pension. Hilma was still working for the Finlayson company, and the inspector was informed of the situation of Hilma and her children. In 1945, a pension was granted to Hilma Henriksson.⁵⁶

Conclusion

The Civil War of 1918 had defined the lives of the Red widows and their children for the years to come. The atmosphere in Finnish society changed during the Second World War: First, the Red veterans received state subsidies, and in 1943, state pensions for widows were introduced. The pension process involving the Ministry of Social Affairs reflects the collective experience of the widows. By filling in the application form, the widows got the opportunity to write and give an interpretation in their own words of their experiences over the last 25 years, and these writings—with their unclear and poor handwriting—shed light on the widows’ experience of society.

The common experience of the Red widows was based on the shared status in society and the shared living conditions. The way they systematically called themselves Red widows or Rebel widows in their applications tells of a strong common experience and sense of community. They wanted to bring this out clearly and, at the same time, remember their fallen spouses.

The everyday life of the Red families in the post-Civil War years was a struggle to make ends meet. They lived in the same areas in the same blocks, and they shared similar domestic conditions and similar work in the same factory halls, and this had strengthened their feeling of solidarity and strengthened the community. A joint letter of 15 widows in 1924 manifested their agency and effort to try to fight against the experienced injustice. Via these processes, an emotional community had formed.

The widows were active to report their fight against poverty and how in the 1940s—during the war—they were old, sick women losing their ability to work. They had in common the encounters with the local poor welfare authorities and the experience of humiliation. This position shaped the Red widows’ everyday lives and their experience of society, especially because they also lost civil rights and the right to vote as poor relief recipients. These processes formed the widows’ collective experience of society.

The common perception was that society had taken much from them but given very little. Now their sons were at war defending the shared fatherland, and the mothers worried whether their boys would return alive from the war. The mothers thought that it was unfair that their sons should be forced after the war to maintain their old mothers. The municipal poor relief boards had not gained their trust, which also reflected their experience that they had never received any help and had, in 1918, been left totally alone.

The promises on pensions in 1942 and 1943 had given the Red widows the feeling that they would receive compensation for the suffering of a quarter-century. The great disappointment came when they noticed that not all applicants could get the pensions at once—they had to wait. Additionally, the varying amount of the pension was considered confusing, as their circumstances, incomes, and salaries from the factory work were similar. This caused envy and suspicion among women who had known each other for decades and shared a collective experience. However, they believed and relied on the state, people in the high places, and the Ministry of Social Affairs. The widows began to write letters of complaint where they tried to complete their application and to explain their situation to the recipient at the Ministry. They held a different position when writing to the Ministry of Social Affairs, as the addressee was not someone they knew or had encountered personally. The letters of complaint to the Ministry of Social Affairs spelled out the widows’ view of the Civil War and even gave them the opportunity to express criticism.

However, a pension intended as a major reform broke up the emotional community of the Red widows and gave rise to suspicion and envy. During the application process and wait for the decisions, the widows felt that they had been betrayed and overlooked again. Questions such as why some had missed out completely and why some got more than others arose. Pensions of different sizes and negative decisions hurt trust in the state and society, as the widows had had great confidence in the Ministry and the state. Now this confidence was wounded, and the emotional community was broken by the pension process.