When I was appointed Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of the Christina Institute in Helsinki, which was founded in 1991, I had worked at the University of Turku for over thirty years. After receiving my PhD in 1982, the last ten years I was Acting Professor of Folklore Studies and Religious Studies. In that same decade, we had starting teaching and developing the subject of Women’s Studies in Turku, and I worked on the side as the teacher responsible. At the beginning of the 1990s, I was responsible for the national guidance network for Women’s Studies funded by the Academy of Finland. In that post, I toured all the other universities where teaching in Women’s Studies was being initiated.

The need for such a network was based on the fact that each university had many students for whose Master’s studies or Doctoral studies the female and gender viewpoint was a possible research perspective. The network was a place for collaboration and peer guidance.

At the end of the 1980s, a lot of interest was being paid in Finland to the planning and realisation of Doctoral studies; I myself had taken part in some work committees as a representative of my own subjects. In continuation, it was decided in 1994 to found a national graduate school system under the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Finland, which has already been closed down. Scholars in Women’s Studies took part in the first round of application to the graduate school and that is how the Gender System Graduate School was born. I became its Director after Kirsi Saarikangas when I came to the Christina Institute. The graduate school had a supervisor group made up of a couple of professors and docents, with which we regularly organised supervisor meetings and seminars for our doctoral students.

The graduate school meetings and work both with other teachers and with students are definitely some of the good moments I remember from those times. The students’ diverse background studies in the humanities and social studies as well as various kinds of emphases in their research topics on women and gender theoretical thinking produced lively and sometimes contradictory discussions. The students and teachers both learned very much from the process, however, and grew as women’s studies scholars. Doctoral dissertations were coming along and being defended in many universities. The graduate school still existed in 2006, when I was directing a discussion for the last time in our work meeting in Tvärminne. The photo attached was taken then.

There was an excited, serious, happy and productive working atmosphere at the Christina Institute. We had a wonderful work community and produced a lot of research. The highest point was at the beginning of the 2000s, when, following lengthy discussions between us scholars and the university administration, Women’s Studies was finally accepted as a major subject. I was Custos as the first doctoral defense in Women’s Studies and proudly witnessed the defense of Antu Sorainen. We also held many celebrations at the Christina Institute on the side of work and toil, sometimes in honour of students’ graduations, of the department’s jubilee years or other special moments. I particularly enjoyed meeting scholars and gender equality and women activists from outside the university at all the parties. That is how we felt – or at least I did – that we were connected to the society and culture we were seeking to change with Women’s Studies.