When I was an infant, my mother, then 26 years old, took me with her to the first women’s strike in downtown Reykjavík. It was a momentous day in 1975, with 90% of Iceland’s women stopping work in protest at gender inequality. Today I am an educated, middle-class woman living in the country that has been No 1 on the global gender gap index for years. So why go on strike again, as thousands of women and non-binary people did on Tuesday? Didn’t my mother’s generation fix everything?
There has been much talk here among both men and women who say they don’t really get it. They argue that the strike is just about ungrateful middle-class feminists who have it all but stay angry over everything and nothing. That this is us taking a day off to meet our friends and play victims of an imagined injustice. I admit that I was looking forward to meeting my friends downtown yesterday, but more importantly, I felt a deep need to be there, to be part of the unbelievable force of a meeting like this. And it really was powerful – an estimated 100,000 people took part, including the prime minister. That’s more than a quarter of the entire country.
It is relatively easy to live here in Iceland and wonder what the fuss is about. We have examples of powerful women all over the place and privileges that women in too many parts of the world can only dream about.
At the same time, Iceland is not an island except in the literal sense, and you don’t have to dig deep to see that we have problems of discrimination, misogyny, sexual violence, domestic violence, “himpathy”, the wage gap, the authority gap, the orgasm gap, pornification, gendered racism and inequities of emotional labour. Some troubling statistics: in our country women on average earned 21% less than men in 2022, while just over 62% of the victims of sexual violence are under 18 and just under 92% are women.
I am a teacher and I have worked with teenagers for almost 20 years. I have heard more stories of sexual harassment and violence than I can count. I have listened to girls describe their anxiety about living in an online world that pornifies them endlessly. I have spoken with hundreds of youngsters who are worried about the way everything is going, with the reactionary backlash to increasing freedoms, the Andrew Tates, the pressure to conform to narrow gender roles and beauty standards.
I am worried, I am tired and I am angry.
That’s why yesterday I collected all my worries, fatigue and anger and took them with me to the protest. As I stood on Arnarhóll, the small hill in Reykjavík that we use for our biggest national celebrations, I could feel the collective energy of women coming together from all walks of life as we stood there singing, shouting and clapping in unison to demand equality and justice for all of us, including the women and non-binary people who were not able to attend.
As I listened to the inspiring people on stage I suddenly started crying. It all came over me at once; I could feel the frustration and fatigue of the women who stood there in 1975. I felt the struggles of women who are less privileged than myself, and the worries and fears of all our sisters and daughters who are growing up in this mess of a world. I also cried on behalf of the little girl who was there in her mother’s arms in 1975, who despite all her privileges had to experience the sexual harassment, denigration, self-doubt and misogyny that comes with the territory of being a woman. Even in the country that ranks No 1.
We owe it to the past, the present and the future to never give up.
María Hjálmtýsdóttir is an activist and a teacher in a secondary school in Kópavogur, Iceland
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