Escape the kitchen and explore the skies!

While Estonian feminism and women's rights have been actively forgotten or written out of history altogether, they actually go hand-in-hand with the creation of Estonia as an independent nation, a new exhibition at Tallinn’s Vabamu Museum shows for the first time.   

Escape the Kitchen! 150 years of Estonian Women’s Movements stretches from 1872, when weavers and spinners rose up against inhumane working conditions in Narva, until the present day. It highlights women and their contributions to the nation's development and gives them a "dignified and equal place alongside the men".

This is the first time an exhibition cataloging the history of women’s rights in Estonia has gone on display and comes from research by Piret Karro, formerly the museum’s head of exhibitions. She curated the exhibition alongside artist Flo Kasearu, decorator Kaisa Sööt, and graphic designer Sandra Kosorotova.

The exhibition takes its title from Estonia's first, but little-known, self-identifying feminist Lilli Suburg (1841-1923), a writer who fought for seven years to open her own magazine – the first women's magazine – and finally got the go-ahead only with a man's permission.

She told women to "Escape the kitchen and explore the skies!"

Feminism is an interesting choice for an exhibition and is not always a popular discussion topic in Estonia.

“One of the anti-feminist claims that kind of goes around is that Estonian feminism is like an alien thing in Estonia, just imported to us in the 90s, which is simply not true if we really look into the history. We do have 150 years of roots and it also starts with our own awakening movement,” she told ERR News in a recent interview. 

The exhibition sprang from research carried out for an article Karro wrote for the literature magazine Vikerkaar and is based on ideas she had while studying gender studies at the Central European University. The course exposed her to ideas that connected global feminism and Estonia which she previously had not explored.

While research had been carried out into specific people or parts of the feminist movement, Karro realized a comprehensive timeline and overview was missing.

“And going into this research, I really saw how much it's entwined with the development of the history of democracy in Estonia,” she said. “Actually, women were a super large part of it.”

Women were part of the first republic’s (1920-1939) governments and created legislation alongside men. During this time, there were active women’s movements in every part of society pushing for further emancipation and involvement in public life. They had a “very, very strong voice within society” Karro said.

Estonian women were also among the first to be enfranchised in 1918, while the country was still part of the Russian Empire.

But this changed with the Soviet occupations (1940-1941, 1945-1991). Women's groups and any activities promoting Estonian independence were shut down. Many of their leaders were deported. After the end of World War Two, the USSR preached a message of equality but in reality, this was the infamous “double shift” where women were now expected to work and manage domestic life.  

Soviet authorities promoted women who fit their narrative, such as those from poor backgrounds who achieved great things, but repressed knowledge of women, such as Lilli Suburg, from the first republic who advocated for the actualization of Estonia as a nation.   

“And from that pivot in the political regime in Estonia – don't remember the women who were active in the bourgeois state of Estonia –  began one phase of erasure,” Karro said. “And after that, after the 50 years was over, they were not remembered anymore.” 

Some women slipped through the net, such as Suburg’s classmate Lydia Koidula, now elevated to the status of Estonia’s national poet, who Karro said was seen as a “symbol to survive the occupation”, “a diamond to protect”. 

After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, another “erasure” started. History needed to be “pulled out of the Soviet ideology and rewritten again”.  

“And that writing was done by male historians who were not interested in what the women were doing,” Karro said. “So that's how we got our contemporary history narrative – it was these important men doing these important things – and the fact that women had been active in that society in the interwar period was forgotten. So there is this sort of an active mechanism of forgetting.” 

One example she highlights from that time is a book written by Estonia’s first Prime Minister Mart Laar about Estonia’s National Awakening movement which included 455 men but only 4 women. 

"I have had methodological and academic disputes with editors regarding these numbers, but the disparity is certainly staggering," Karro said when the exhibition opened, on March 8 - International Women’s Day

Reaction to the exhibition has been positive: “To my face at least”, Karro laughed. At the time, it received a lot of media coverage in all three language spheres Estonian, Russian, and English. Museum tours have been popular.

“And when I've been doing tours for other museum professionals or some other organizations who've been interested, then they have been very thankful and said that this narrative that I'm kind of dusting out is important to know, the fact that we do have women's history or feminist history,” she said.

Schools also visit the exhibition and the museum has developed a lesson about the history on display. Few women, except Lydia Koidula, are included in Estonia’s textbooks, Karro said.

One reason for Koidula's dominance in the memory space is because she fits the chosen " national patriotic narrative" better than Suburg does, Karro believes.

"Of course, her poetry is great but she also feeds into how those male historians wanted to show Estonia. She is longing for her homeland and the kind of narratives that she writes about," she said.

In contrast, Suburg is an "uncomfortable figure to remember as part of your national memory". She was a feminist, a nationalist, a radical, and never had children.

"She wanted to empower Estonian women also in their Estonianness," Karro said. "She was oriented towards women in the sense of political empowerment or empowerment as an intellectual being. At the time she was super honored and respected, and even the government of the Estonian state at the time honored her funeral."

But how can we bring these women back into public consciousness?

“I think it's a good idea to erect monuments for women and also have streets and public squares named after them and to use all of these mnemonic devices that we use for men because we have so many streets for even mediocre men,” Karro said.

Discussions around street names and public space remembrance have hit the headlines after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as Estonia has also sought to remove the remaining traces of the Soviet occupation. Street names in cities Narva, Tartu, and Sillamäe have been or are scheduled to be changed. But politicians have not capitalized on this to rename them after women.

New statues have also been erected only for men in recent years.

Across Estonia, only five historical women are honored with street names and approximately 5 percent of statues are named after women.

“This reflects a larger phenomenon of mediocre men getting more attention and praise than super cool women,” Karro said. “The women who have been participating in the building of this democracy have been forgotten.”

 Escape the Kitchen! 150 years of Estonian Women’s Movements is open at Vabamu until spring 2024. Discussions are underway to turn it into a traveling exhibition after its initial run ends.

View photos from the exhibition below.