Saqqummersitaq

This report details the findings of the EQUIL project: Equality in Isolated Areas. The project focuses on people living and working in geographically relatively isolated areas of the Nordic region, and asks how they are able to make a living and maintain ties to locality, and how questions of gender equality impact on work and family life decisions. The report addresses the questions: How is gender equality and equal participation in paid work and care for the family negotiated in communities characterised by relative geographic isolation? How do people develop working life strategies in such places? What is the basis for future work life and family life in the selected places?

During the early-modern period, women in Western European countries began to marry at an older age. This historical observation is known as the (Western) European Marriage Pattern (EMP). As a result, the position and agency of women arose by enhancing human capital formation and by encouraging women and girls access to wage labor. These developments coincided with the arrival of Christian missionaries to colonized areas and the diffusion of European cultural traits. Only a few historical studies have found whether the characteristics of the EMP ‘traveled’ outside of North-Western Europe. While existing literature on this phenomenon has typically focused on European countries and peripheries, regions in the Arctic have been neglected. This paper uses the Protestant church’s historical records of marriages of various Greenlandic towns (Nuuk, Qaqortoq, Qeqertasuaq, and Aasiaat) to explore whether the marriage patterns in colonial Greenland exhibited characteristics of the EMP. It discusses how the gender division of society changed with the creation of the Danish trade monopoly and how the subsequent development of colonial labor markets may have affected the marriage decisions of Greenlandic women. It concludes analyzing the potential underlying mechanisms and causes of the existence (or absence) of the EMP in colonial Greenland.