Women Members of European Parliaments

Rose Macaulay, among others, has said that “women are always news.” When all else fails, murders, suicides, and divorce cases, journalists can still propound some such question as “can a woman drive a car as well as a man?” and they are sure of a hearing. If it were not for the eternal interest of the public in women as women, women in parliaments would no longer be news. In these last few years there have been nearly a hundred sitting in the various parliaments of Europe, and now and then even the newspapers have shown signs of forgetting that they are there. There is something odd about the geographical position of the countries in which these women members, deputies and senators, are to be found. They exist in a fringe around the north and east of Europe. France, Italy, Spain, and the other countries along the Mediterranean are out of it entirely. Upon closer analysis the situation grows even more mysterious. To find the group of women legislators of longest standing, one must go up beyond the Scandinavian countries, to the Finns, who live farther north than any other civilized people in the world. There are nearly twenty women in the Finnish parliament, and one of them has served her fifth three-year term.