“You call this equality?”

October 24, 2023 1:21 AM

Today Icelandic women and non-binary people will strike against gender inequality highlighting the gender pay gap [NYT, archive], gendered violence, and the status of immigrant women. This is the seventh women’s strike in Icelandic history, and the first whole-day action since the first one in 1975 [NYT, archive link]. The Guardian’s Miranda Bryant writes about the history of women’s strikes in Iceland.
posted by Kattullus (10 comments total)

The Guardian is doing a liveblog of the Women's Strike.
posted by Kattullus at 3:15 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

In 2019 Icelandic historian Íris Ellenberger wrote an article about the original women's strike, and its legacy, for The Jacobin. Excerpt:

“Women are waking up. They know that men have ruled the world since time immemorial. And how has that world been?” These words were first spoken by Aðalheiður Bjarnfreðsdóttir, a fifty-four-year-old domestic worker, on an unusually warm and dry afternoon in fall 1975. Her audience, in her speech in Reykjavík’s main square, included 25,000 women from all walks of life. They, along with 90 percent of Iceland’s female population, had refused to show up for work that day, in order to demonstrate how much they contributed to the country’s economy. It made no difference whether their work took place in a school, factory, office, or home. They were determined to show that they mattered.

The women’s strike — or, for less radical supporters, “day off” — of October 24, 1975 was, in this sense, a success. The action brought the economy to a standstill, forcing Iceland to recognize how much it depended on women’s labor. The massive turnout also ushered in an era of heightened political participation among women, which has contributed substantially to Iceland’s international reputation as a front-runner in gender equality. Yet not all women gained equally from the action — and its legacy for the women it was meant to serve remains sharply contested.

The idea for a nationwide women’s strike did not simply appear from nowhere — rather, it required organization. Indeed, the plan originated within Iceland’s Redstockings, a radical-feminist movement established in 1970 by a group of young women in their twenties and thirties. Most were middle class, well-educated, and employed in fields from teaching and office work to the visual arts.

Many of these women had lived abroad, where they had first been introduced to feminism, and indeed the Redstockings’ name ultimately harked back to a similarly titled group that formed in New York in 1969. In April 1970 a Danish group called Rødstrømperne (Redstockings) marched down the main shopping street in Copenhagen in red stockings and large hats, and on May 1 an announcement was made on Icelandic National Radio encouraging “women in red stockings” to join Labor Day marches.

Over the 1970s, the Redstockings led the fight for women’s labor and reproductive rights in Iceland, as they campaigned for sexual and reproductive education, abortion rights, equal pay for women, and recognition as breadwinners in the labor market. The movement was on the Left, compared to more established women’s associations, and leaned even further this way as more and more socialist and communist women joined.

Already at the Redstockings’ first general meeting in 1970, a motion was presented for a general women’s strike. Such an idea was not wholly without precedent: activists may have been influenced by the Women’s Strike for Equality in the United States that same year, commemorating fifty years of women winning the right to vote. The organizers of this action gave talks on their efforts in various European countries, including the Scandinavian nations where many Icelandic women were educated. But in Iceland itself, a women’s strike remained a fantasy until the United Nations declared that 1975 would be a year dedicated to women.

posted by Kattullus at 3:58 AM on October 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

The NYT article notes, "For the 14th consecutive year, the nation had the best overall score on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report." But the gender gap persists, as it does in other Nordic countries, even though they are more egalitarian than most. Surprisingly, in more egalitarian countries, the lower the share of women that get STEM degrees. Some researchers propose that in rich countries, women are free to take lower-paying but more appealing jobs: that is, that natural gender differences dominate. Others argue that there's nothing natural about societies have been shaped by a history of gender discrimination.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:45 AM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

RÚV, the Icelandic public broadcaster, is showing the main event live. You can stream RÚV here. It’s a mix of speeches and music, and will alternate between Icelandic and English, and be interpreted into Icelandic sign language.
posted by Kattullus at 7:08 AM on October 24, 2023

Do we have data on the pay gap between non-binary people and men?
posted by Selena777 at 7:59 AM on October 24, 2023

One of the non-binary specific demands of the strike was that the Icelandic national statistics bureau doesn’t track non-binary people specifically, so reliable statistics are hard to come by. If I remember correctly, surveys indicate that non-binary people are similarly placed to women in terms of pay gap,
posted by Kattullus at 11:03 AM on October 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I learned recently that women who emigrated from Iceland to Manitoba were a primary driving force in Canadian women's suffrage. Icelandic women have apparently been out there fighting the good fight for a long-ass time.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:23 PM on October 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

Police estimates that 80 to a 100 thousand people gathered in downtown Reykjavík for the outdoor protest meeting, which in a nation of 400 thousand people is pretty good going. Additionally, there were marches and meetings all over the country, from tiny Drangsnes in the Westfjords to the sizable town of Akureyri, and dozens of other places. If you scroll down on RÚV's Icelandic-language liveblog, you'll find drone footage of the Reykjavík meeting, as well as pictures and footage from there and elsewhere.
posted by Kattullus at 1:44 PM on October 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

The RÚV liveblog translated one of the segment titles as "In the clouds with the solidarity" in English, which I'm loving as an image. I'm guessing that's something like "over the moon" if idioms aligned? It certainly looks like it was uplifting, even with the seriousness of the issues women are protesting.
posted by EvaDestruction at 7:42 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mod note: One comment and it's reply deleted. Wishing violence/death on other people is not OK here and goes against our Content Policy moreover if the comment is aimed at women in general.
posted by loup (staff) at 11:52 AM on October 25, 2023