For decades, scholars across Estonia's universities have studied gender through fields ranging from literature and linguistics to history and art , covering topics including masculinity, feminism, LGBT+ history and shifting understandings of womanhood and manhood across eras.

But despite that breadth, much of the work remains scattered across isolated projects rather than tied together through a shared academic framework. Põldsam said the field has developed without sustained collaboration or institutional continuity.

The lack of a comprehensive Estonian-language overview has slowed both teaching and research, she noted, forcing scholars and students to repeatedly rebuild basic contexts from scratch.

"For a very long time in Estonian humanities, each person has basically functioned as a research institution for a single topic," Põldsam said.

As a result, gender has frequently appeared as a secondary lens rather than a central research focus, limiting the development of a strong theoretical foundation or sustained debate regarding the field's framework.

Institutional barriers have compounded the problem, she added.  Estonia has also had few long-term gender studies programs survive, and while students can find courses scattered across universities and departments, degree structures often make them difficult to combine.

Funding remains another obstacle.

Because gender research overlaps with history, culture, law and social issues, projects often fail to fit neatly into existing grant categories, Põldsam said. For example, research on the history of equality may not fit Culture Ministry parameters for art, music, theater or literature research.

"If you don't fit anywhere, then you start wondering whether you're supposed to go to the Justice Ministry to seek funding," she added.

Social stigma has also taken its toll on the field's development. The ethnologist said gender studies were long narrowly associated with women's studies, with researchers at times dismissed as anti-male or fixated on "pseudo-problems."

While those attitudes have eased somewhat, she said their legacy still affects both researchers' confidence and institutional support.

HIdden histories and gaps in context

According to Põldsam, archival research suggests interwar Estonia discussed gender roles and sexual minorities far more openly than often believed today.

Digital archives contain hundreds of articles from the 1920s and 1930s touching on gender and sexuality, reflecting broader public debates shaped in part by the era's widespread interest in eugenics.

"It was a highly topical and public issue at the time," she stressed, adding that it was an important social issue across the political spectrum.

At the same time, she cautioned that many interwar publications included satire, exaggeration and fabricated stories, requiring careful source criticism and consideration of their context from researchers.

Põldsam said similar gaps remain in research on the Soviet period, particularly regarding women's actual economic and legal realities in that era.

"We now know the background of abortion rights [under Soviet rule], but we don't really know, for example, how property ownership rights worked for women," she said, questioning things like whether women at the time could buy a car or even obtain a permit to purchase a car on their own.

Such bureaucratic details, she noted, directly shaped people's lives but have received little attention in Estonian gender research.

Põldsam's own work on Soviet anti-gay legislation found major regional differences in how laws criminalizing homosexuality were enforced. In Estonia, roughly 90 percent of cases prosecuted under the so-called pederasty statute involved violence, most of it linked to prisons. Comparable cases in Latvia more often involved consensual relationships.

The contrast suggests local conditions significantly influenced how Soviet laws functioned in practice, she said, underscoring why the broader Soviet framework alone is not enough to contextualize local realities.

The ethnologist noted that historical research on men and masculinity would also help explain how different eras have shaped ideas of gender roles, power and responsibility.

Building a shared language

Põldsam said the shortage of foundational Estonian-language academic texts is especially visible in the classroom.

To date, faculty have relied on older materials and individual in-depth studies alongside a rapidly growing body of English-language material. But according to Põldsam, university students tend to value materials in Estonian because they help link international theory with local experience.

"Estonian-language texts provide the language and concepts that place the topic directly in its local context," she explained.

"One article alone isn't enough," she continued. "We need books that provide references and support for discussing the Soviet era, the interwar period, the tsarist era and the present day."

Such comprehensive volumes would link periods and research themes into a whole, the ethnologist noted, while also providing a common foundation and shared vocabulary for researchers and students to debate and build on.

Põldsam envisions a broader collaborative project focused on media policy, socioeconomic trends and legal systems — areas she says are key to understanding how public debate, gender norms and people's real-life options evolved over time.

Because Estonia's history has been so heavily shaped by neighboring countries, she said such a project would also require an international scope, involving experts familiar with Finnish, Latvian, Russian and German contexts.

Such efforts, she highlighted, would help clarify what is unique specifically to Estonian gender studies.

Rather than replacing specialized studies, Põldsam said a broader overview could connect them into a clearer picture of how ideas about gender, power and social roles have evolved in Estonia — and how local experiences fit into regional, international and feminist history.

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