What a wonderful day!
The Hot Docs Festival is on this week and the very special film I attended celebrated the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of The Day Iceland Stood Still, an account of an October day in 1975 when 90% of the women in Iceland took the day off. We were privileged to view the premiere of the doc of an event that has had a lasting effect on women everywhere in the world.
The women began by calling it.a strike but that seemed too belligerent and threatening so they just suggested that they’d like to to take a day off. The first organizers reached out to women in groups and organizations and unions throughout the country, including small “Sewing Societies” of women who didn’t sew but who liked to get together regularly to talk. The big businesses didn’t like the women’ s idea.. Strike or day off, they didn’t like it.
What would happen if people couldn’t do their banking or shop for groceries or get their hair done (or cut) ? How could they get along without the newspaper to tell them what was going on in the world? The newspaper prepared the news and the women worked as usual before The Day but then no one was there to print it or publish or distribute it so—no news.
Wives and mothers warned their husbands they’d have to take care of the house and kids, and meals. Many of them delivered their pre-school children to the men at work to look after them tor the day. Older school girls joined their mothers in a joint act of independence.
Many of the activities, or lack thereof, and women, young then, were photographed at the time. The whole day was close enough to present time that young women were caught then and now, older.
And they had something to say, about what they did and what they were thinking and what they are thinking now.
“We loved our male chauvinist pigs,” one woman ssid. “We just wanted to change them a little.”
Because the Day Off had a powerful effect.
Within a few weeks a law was passed in Iceland granting women equal pay for equal work.
We’re all still working on that one. When I was widowed, women were earning—being PAID—about 53 cents on the dollar that men were getting. (My stats aren’t accurate, but they’re indicative.) Now it’s up to about 73 cents. Maybe trays weigh less.
Ah, but women don’t do the heavy lifting that men do. That was the common rebuttal. I have been in dining rooms at events where equal pay for equal work was the subject, when the guest speaker stopped a waitress clearing a table, asking her to allow her tray with its burden to be weighed—and guess what? Too heavy for a woman to lift.
We all—still—have stories to tell, though not quite as bad here as in other countries.
Inequities exist.
As a result of their Day Off, so long ago (not that long), Icelandic women are.now 10% away from closing the gender gap, committed to full equality in the next few (how many?) years.
Iceland is considered to be the best place for a woman to live.