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Jenni, thank you for your great poster! So interesting topic. Have you ever considered if Alf Lüdtke’s Eigensinne would be a useful concept in your research? Or is your everyday resistance actually the same concept?
Thank you for comment, Pirjo! Eigensinne is indeed an interesting consept and I have been considering it for my study. It really comes close to my broad understanding of resistance. For example I have been thinking if actually going on with the lifestyle that is labeled vagrancy, could also be seen (partly) as resistance – or Eigensinne.
Thank you for an interesting poster! Your forthcoming study will certainly open up an important view on the dimensions of vagrancy and marginalization. Could you please say a couple of words of the ways in which you are planning to deal with issues such as gender and age of your research subjects?
Thank you for your question, Johanna!
Gender is a very important dimension when talking about vagrancy, because the definitions of vagrancy were very different for men and women. Women were often treated as vagrants because of suspected prostitution. Their sexual behavior was the main feature of the indecency of their lifestyle and one main target of the control. While alcohol abuse was often a part of vagrancy of women, it was the main reason for vagrancy control of men. Men and women were also placed in separate work prisons. Based on statistic reports in 1883-1917 only 27% of the people who were sent to prison for investigation by the means of vagrancy were women, but from those who then actually got convicted to work prison 48% were women (also approximately half of the appeals were from women). So it seems, that men and women were treated very differently in the vagrancy control system, by the police who sent them to the investigation in prison and/or the provincial governors who made the decisions of sentencing these people to work prisons. My plan is to include both men and women to this study, because this way the gender differences could become more visible.
The appeals were from people aged 23-59 years old. Some of them had been under the vagrancy control since the age of 15-17 and some were labeled as vagrants for the first time in their forties or fifties. The appeals of the younger and older ones were different, for example some of the older ones were pleading on health issues or asking to be sent to a communal workhouse instead of a prison.
In addition to recognizing the diverse backgrounds of these people and the various definitions for vagrancy, I am interested how the resistant acts, responses to them and the conditions where they emerged were similar or different depending on gender and age.
Thank you for your reply, Jenni! I am really looking forward to the results of your analysis. The way in which the elderly might prefer the workhouse to the prison is also very interesting.
Edit: Since my virtual hand did not work in the poster social session, just one more comment here: I think the above-mentioned “preference” is fascinating, because this points to the fact that these people were well aware of the conditions in the different institutions of the time. One might wonder whether this was a result of their individual “careers” in different institutions, or if it is possible to find traces of “silent knowledge” that was passed on in the networks of marginalized people.
Thank you for your presentation! I think your research question is interesting. What caught my interest was the idea of social control practiced upon people – how defining people as vagrants shaped the city by perhaps deeming them outsiders and for them having to act from the margins. It would be nice to hear your thoughts on the place of vagrants in the citizenry of Helsinki.
Heidi Tähtinen
10.3.2021 13:55
Thank your comment, Heidi! This is a very interesting question and I am glad that I didn’t have time to answer this before the Poster Social, since the discussion of spatiality gave me some new thoughts about this. I think that one interesting view is that people labeled as vagrants were pushed to the margins and very visible in the urban space at the same time. Very often the vagrancy arrests took place in the streets and usually it was about disturbing the order in the city, for example by being loudly drunk or suspected of prostitution. This ment also that certain parts of the city, such as streets known for prostitution, became labeled by strong presence of the police surveilling vagrancy.
Jenni Simola
10.3.2021 18:32