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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the writings of Finnish women in the context of early 20th century North American socialist movement and how they articulated their ideas about weather and belonging. It explores the interplay of socialist politics and settler coloniality within weather narratives.

Paper long abstract

At the turn of the century, nearly 400,000 Finns migrated to North America in pursuit of a wealthier and happier life. They played a significant role in the early 20th-century North American labor movement, with socialists aspiring to a post-capitalist world. In alignment with this vision, nature emerged as a recurring rhetorical theme in the Finnish-language socialist women’s newspaper Toveritar (The Woman Comrade), published from 1911 to 1930 in Astoria, Oregon.

The newspaper featured contributions from grassroots journalists, including stories, poems, political and entertaining articles, advice columns, and travel reports. Toveritar also welcomed letters from reader-writers reporting on local socialist activities. In these letters, many writers reported local weather and shared vernacular climate knowledge, narrating their sense of belonging and forging socialist visions. These weather narratives portrayed the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn, and winter—as representatives of a socialist worldview, serving as political metaphors. Furthermore, the weather narratives included settler colonial and racist imagery, as well as attempts to adapt to new climates.

This paper explores how women writers articulated their concrete and abstract ideas about weather and demonstrates how socialist politics and settler colonial ideas are embedded in weather narratives. My presentation directly engages with the conference theme of “nature(s) in narrative” in the contexts of labour history, migration, and weather narratives to better understand how Finnish migrant-settler communities have narrated their sense of belonging and expressed their political ideas.