Born: 19 March 1844, Finland
Died: 12 May 1897
Country most active: Finland
Also known as: Ulrika Wilhelmina Johnson
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Authoress, social reformer, pioneer of the feminist movement in Finland. She was born in 1848 in the city of Tampere, where her father was foreman at a cotton-factory. Later the family moved to Kuopio, another provincial city.
There, Minna was graduated from a girls’ high school and then entered the teachers’ seminary in Jyvaskyla, the first of its kind in Finland. In Jyvaskyla she was married to Mr. J. F. Canth, one of the teachers in the seminary. Left a widow with eight children, she moved back to Kuopio, conducting, during the rest of her life, a large business concern. Minna Canth died in 1897 at the age of fifty-three.
Here the real literary career of Minna Canth began. She first attracted attention by a drama called Burglary, which treated of peasant-life and was performed at the national theatre in Helsinki (Helsingfors). Soon, however, she devoted herself whole-heartedly to the social ideas of the eighties, particularly to the feminist and labor movements. Her most forceful production during this period is a drama called The Worker’s Wife, 1885.
Later, the tendency of her work underwent a change; she ceased solely to blame the external conditions, admitting that an improvement must take place, also, in the human hearts themselves. Her best and most profound production of this last period was the drama Anna-Liisa, 1895. Minna Canth was one of the most prominent representatives of the realistic school in Finland. She excelled, above all, as a dramatist, but has also written tales and novels. Her importance is considerable also as a pioneer of social reforms, and the feminist movement, especially, is greatly indebted to her.