UPDATED
Finland was the first country in Europe to grant women the right to vote in 1906. This is true, but it is only half of the story: Finnish women were granted the right to pass on their citizenship to their children (jus sanguinis) only in 1984, that is, 66 years after independence!
The amendment to the Citizenship Act (HE 43/1984) entered into force on 1 September 1984 with the support of Parliament, as well as that of President Mauno Koivisto and Minister of the Interior Matti Luttinen, also a Social Democrat.
Apart from the 63 women MPs at the time, which amounted to 31.5% of all lawmakers, men MPs pushed for a change in the Act.
Finland had already amended the Citizenship Act of 1920 by allowing a child of a Finnish mother to acquire Finnish citizenship if the father was unknown.
However, women in Europe did not have a general right to pass on their citizenship to their children. The situation began to change after the Second World War, when several countries, such as France, Spain, and Italy, granted women equal citizenship rights. Between 1970 and 1990, many European countries reformed their legislation.
The restriction was far from harmless. For example, I could not obtain Finnish citizenship because only my mother was Finnish. This meant that I had to do my military service in Argentina during the so-called Dirty War, one of the most violent periods in the country’s history, during which around 30,000 people disappeared. My life would have been very different if I had had the right to Finnish citizenship.
What makes the issue even more interesting is that Finland was a country of emigration between 1860 and 1999, during which approximately 1.2 million Finns moved abroad. In addition to being a clear case of gender discrimination, one may ask: did the authorities fear that foreign men would “take” Finnish women and that so-called “mixed-race” children would be born?
Finland used to be a country of emigration. Before the Second World War, most of the emigration was to North America. After World War 2 most Finns moved to Sweden.
Whatever the case, Finland should give an apology to women and those children who were discriminated because of the law.