Women of the Sauna: Keepers, Healers, and Future Builders
- Feb 18
- 1 min read
“Women have always been the keepers of sauna, and they will be the ones to lead the culture forward.”
Across generations, sauna has been a place of community care and healing, with women at its centre. From midwives guiding childbirth in the warm, clean heat, to families preparing loved ones for burial, to healers practicing folk medicine and ritual, women have long tended the fires, prepared the löyly, and carried sauna knowledge across lifetimes. Sauna has always been a shared, relational space where trust, care, and cultural memory were formed through everyday practice.
Today, women hold this lineage in new ways as cultural knowledge bearers, entrepreneurs, designers, and stewards shaping the global sauna movement. Women-led sauna spaces in Finland, North America, and beyond are so much more than businesses. They are deliberate acts of cultural stewardship that resist the dilution of sauna into a fleeting wellness trend and anchor it as a living, intergenerational practice rooted in reciprocity, equity, and care.
This session positions and showcases sauna as a third space, essential social infrastructure where culture is practiced rather than performed. Drawing on folklorist Dalva Lamminmäki’s research on women’s deep-rooted role in sauna-tending, alongside Becky Pelkonen’s scholarship on regenerative third spaces, the session explores how women’s leadership sustains sauna as a resilient cultural commons and ensures its vitality for generations to come.
Speakers: Becky Pelkonen and Dalva Lamminmäki