Aili Mari Tripp is Vilas Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has focused on gender/women and politics, women’s movements in Africa, transnational feminism, authoritarian politics in Africa, and the informal economy in Africa. She is author of Why African Autocracies Promote Women as Leaders (Oxford University Press, 2025) and several award-winning books, including Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocracies Adopt Women’s Rights (2019), Women and Power in Postconflict Africa (2015), African Women’s Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes (2009) with Isabel Casimiro, Joy Kwesiga, and Alice Mungwa, and Women and Politics in Uganda (2000). She has served as the President of African Studies Association, Vice President of the American Political Science Association, and a co-editor of the American Political Science Review.
Tripp will be presenting a paper, based on a current book project she is working on. The paper shows how Finland became the first country in Europe to allow for suffrage for both men and women and the first country in the world where women won seats in national legislative office. The paper uses the Finnish case to show how war and the end of empire have often been catalysts for the expansion of women’s rights more generally, particularly when there is a shakeup in the political elite, changing international gender norms, and where there is a pre-existing women’s movement seeking fundamental changes. It describes a series of cascading events beginning with the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, followed by the 1905 revolution in Russia and Finland, and efforts to obtain Finnish independence from Russia as the empire dissolved. These events created opportunity structures for the expansion of suffrage in Finland and later Russia. The overall patterns linking war and the end of empire to the expansion of women’s citizenship are evident with the later demise of the Ottoman, British, French, and Portuguese empires after World War I and II.