In historical tradition, the ‘forest brother movement’ means going into hiding in the woods, bogs, or on bog islands to escape wars or looting raids. The term ‘forest brother’ came into use as a more contemporary general term during the German occupation (1941–1944). It originally meant the brotherhood in arms of the time of the Summer War of 1941 but its meaning quickly started broadening. Although forest brothers are even nowadays defined as participants in armed resistance, generally speaking, in historical literature, everyone who hid themselves from the Soviet regime is referred to using this term, regardless of age and gender.

While ‘the forest brother movement’ and ‘forest brother’ are established general terms, ‘forest sister’ is more of a colloquial expression. Thus, that term has not gained general acceptance in historical literature. Although as a rule, the gender of forest brothers is abstract in research papers, the term itself can lead to the mistaken understanding that only men hid themselves or fought against the Soviet regime. For that reason, this overview attempts to fill that gap and shed some light on the role of women in the history of the forest brother movement after the Second World War.

Conclusions. It is difficult, if not impossible, to describe the entire history of the forest brother movement under a single denominator because the movement consisted of thousands of individual histories that are scarcely connected to one another. Since the Estonian forest brother movement was little organised, fragmented, and quite passive by its nature, it can be said in summary that it is not so much a history of combat than it is a history of concealment. For this reason, it can also be argued that women could in one way or another have been connected to the forest brother movement even more than men.

The history of forest sisters themselves can temporally be divided in two: before and after the mass deportation of March, 1949. Like forest brothers, most forest sisters were also passively in hiding. We also cannot speak of a clear division of roles: the conditions of that time were so extreme that roles took shape according to need, not according to gender. It can provisionally be argued that punishments imposed on women for the same deed were slightly milder. That was mostly due to their previous background, not so much because they were women.

Before 1949, the relative proportion of forest sisters among the people who were in hiding was marginal because initially, women had no real reason to go into hiding. In the eyes of the Soviet regime, the ‘sins’ of women were initially less serious: unlike men, it was not possible for them to achieve particularly significant social positions or to rise all that high in occupational hierarchy in the independent Republic of Estonia and in the period of German occupation, which could later have brought on punishment by the Soviet regime. Similarly, women were in no danger of mobilisation into the army of the occupying power, from which men also started going into hiding.

A new stage in the history of forest sisters began in March of 1949, when the relative proportion of women among the people who had gone into hiding increased manyfold. Starting from 1949, the histories of people who started hiding themselves from the Soviet regime did not differ from one another to such an extent that it would be necessary to draw clear distinctions based on gender. The Soviet regime also did not draw any clear gender distinction. Gender differentiation is practically not found at all in statistical summaries – they were simply all lumped together as ‘bandits’.

In conclusion, we could ask: is ‘forest brother’, which originally denoted brotherhood in arms (from the time of the Summer War), actually a suitable general term? At least in the time after the mass deportation of March, 1949, there were already so many women among the people who had gone into hiding that the term ‘forest sisters’ is also appropriate. We should not hesitate to use this term or relate to it with irony.