The article discusses a number of court cases on women's same-sex fornication in the Finnish countryside in the 1950s. Based on a close reading of the minutes of the police investigations and the court records, the article shows how the notion of sexual acts between women, and the notion of certain modes of conduct as "sexual," were constructed in these proceedings. The authorities could conceive sexual relations only in terms of the "heterosexual matrix" (cf. Judith Butler); hence they assumed that the alleged sexual encounters between the women were a copy of a heterosexual sexual intercourse. As for the accused women, many of whom were connected with a Christian sect, they often insisted that the physical expressions of their mutual affection were not sexual, and they opposed the interpretation that their conduct might have anything to do with homosexuality, which they considered a pathology. As the women nevertheless often ended up repenting their conduct, they reproduced the conventional image of sexually passive "soft" woman, though perhaps partly because of strategic reasons.
Female History, 20th Century