Today is the Day of Equality in Finland. Not by coincidence, it’s also the “flag flying day” of Minna Canth, and the anniversary of her birth in 1844. Canth was a prominent Finnish writer and social activist.
She was born in Tampere, a medium-sized town on the Nokia River (yes, that Nokia). Her father was a worker in a textile factory, and worked his way up to be foreman and ultimately the head of the company’s textile shop in Kuopio. His promotion came when Minna was 9, and at that point the whole family moved to Kuopio. In Finland in the mid-1800s girls attended school as well as boys, and Canth was admitted to an upper-class school in Kuopio, both because of her father’s success and her own talents. In 1863 she continued to the Jyväskylä Teacher Seminary, the first college in Finland to offer higher education to women.
Canth married while in college and dropped out. The new family grew fast; by 1880 they had seven children. She didn’t begin her writing career until she was married, and her first work was as an editorial writer at the Keski-Suomi newspaper where her husband was an editor. Her typical subjects were women’s issues and temperance.
Canth’s writing was controversial enough that both she and her husband were forced to leave the newspaper in 1876, but they simply got jobs with the competing newspaper, the Päijänne. At that paper she also began publishing short fiction. She also became a public speaker, primarily about women’s issues, and her speeches were published. Not only that, but she published ten plays. Two of them, Työmiehen vaimo (The Worker’s Wife) and Anna Liisa, are still considered major literary works in Finland.
She died of a heart attack at 53, and is remembered by today’s holiday, quite a number of place names, stamps, commemorative coins, and the like. and statues in both Kuopio, where she lived, and Jyväskylä, where she went to college. A television miniseries about her life, Minna, aired in 1977, and in 2022 an opera about her life and work, Minnan taivas, premiered in Finland. Not all of her work has been translated into English, but The Burglary and the House of Roinila was published in English in 2010.
