Her father had been in military service in Russia from 1855 and, after their mother's death in 1868, the children moved to the town of Oulu to live with their uncle, a saddler.

Trygg first attended a German school in Turku in Finland, before continuing her studies in Oulu and then training to be a teacher in Ekenäs, graduating in 1874.

Trygg fell in love with a cousin, son of the uncle who had taken the family in, and they were engaged to be married, but he died of typhoid.

[1][2] Trygg worked as a teacher for twenty years, at the Fagervik Ruukki School in Inkoo from 1874 to 1880 and in a working-class district of the Finnish capital of Helsinki from 1880 to 1894.

In 1887 she gave a speech to the association on women's suffrage, which was considered shocking by most of the other participants and was not even recorded in the minutes of the meeting.

[3] She later began to distance herself from the cautious line of the Women's Association and moved to a new kind of activism involving more concrete action, although she maintained her membership in the organization until the last years of her life.

Trygg corresponded with Uno Cygnaeus, considered the father of the Finnish public school system, and with the rector of the University of Helsinki, Zachris Topelius, among others she had met during various seminars.

Trygg was also probably the first Finnish woman to become familiar with YMCA and YWCA activities, learning about these organizations during a visit to Stockholm in 1888.

[1][2] In 1894, Trygg left her teaching job to focus on temperance education for children and youth, as she was convinced that it would be most effective way of warning of the dangers of alcohol "in a timely manner".

[1][2] In 1889 Trygg established a soup kitchen in Sörnäinen, Helsinki, as a competitor to the taverns that offered strong alcohol.

In the following year, she established the Sörnäinen People's Home, which was intended to be the centre of the intellectual and social life of the working population.

Matti Helenius travelled extensively abroad, did scientific research on the issue of alcohol, and from 1902 served as secretary to the Friends of Sobriety and later as a member parliament for the Christian Workers' Union of Finland.

The couple participated in temperance work together and published in 1897 a book based on a joint lecture series, What Does Science Say About Spirits?, which described the health effects of alcohol and presented sobriety as a broad societal issue.