Janet Elise Johnson, wrote this article in AlterNet.com. The below is part of the article. The full article can be found at, Vision: The Most Feminist Place in the World | | AlterNet She teaches political science and women's studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is a coordinator of a monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation in Europe at New York University. The Nation / By Janet Elise Johnson Vision: The Most Feminist Place in the World Iceland's unique and powerful feminist traditions ensured that it would have a markedly different response to the financial crisis. February 7, 2011 | Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the world's first openly gay top leader. Photo Credit: Public Domain Despite the damp autumn weather, at 2:25 pm on October 25 some 50,000 Icelandic women and their supporters -- nearly one-sixth of Iceland’s population -- left their jobs or homes and marched down the main street in Reykjavik. The walkout, called Women Strike Back, was a call for “women’s freedom from male violence and the closing of the gender pay gap.” Official statistics show that Icelandic women earn 65.65 percent of men’s average wages. And, as one right-wing city councilwoman texted to her Left-Green Movement colleague Sóley Tómasdóttir, after being chastised for trying to schedule a meeting at 3 o’clock that day, 2:25 pm was the time “when we have already worked for our wages” (that is, 65.65 percent of a regular 9-to-5 workday).Given Iceland’s active women’s movement and the gendered lenses through which Icelanders saw the crisis, it is unsurprising that in the spring of 2009, when the government collapsed, Icelanders voted into office Jóhanna Siguröardóttir -- the country’s first female prime minister and the world’s first openly gay top leader -- and the parties on the left that were the successors to the Women’s Alliance, a party of women for women. In 1999 the Women’s Alliance fractured and its members were absorbed by two umbrella parties, both of which adopted gender quotas for party lists and all elected bodies within the party. The Women’s Alliance had been a voice of reason during the privatization frenzy in 1998–2002, advocating keeping at least one national bank. In the wake of the 2008 collapse, people called for “feminine values” to replace the Viking hypermasculinity. Most Western industrialized democracies have significantly closed the gap between women and men on measures of educational attainment and health, but what makes Iceland extraordinary, even among its Nordic peers, is the political empowerment of women. The women who make up almost half of the members of Parliament are following in the footsteps of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Iceland’s president from 1980 to 1996, the first democratically elected woman head of state in the world. Iceland’s left government -- a coalition of the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement -- has passed a flurry of woman-friendly policies. A 2009 law, modeled on one in Sweden, criminalizes the purchase of sex, while continuing to protect women prostitutes from prosecution. Another closed down the strip clubs and eliminated lap dancing. A March 2010 law extended a 40 percent quota for women on most government boards of mid-size and large businesses. Other legislation last year included legalizing same-sex marriage and allowing access to donor eggs and sperm for single women and gay couples. Longer-term achievements of Iceland’s feminist movement have also included generous government-provided parental leave to be shared by women and men and subsidized high-quality preschools and day care, which allow most parents to combine parenting and work. Iceland’s women’s movement is one of the most active in the world, in striking contrast to the movement in countries like the United States, where it has been professionalized into social service agencies and the academy. The 1975 women’s strike -- with an estimated 90 percent of women participating, according to the former President Vigdís -- brought workplaces and homes to a standstill in what was, at the time, the largest rally in Iceland’s history. That first strike was so successful, according to Auöur Styrkársdóttir, because activists persuaded the labor unions and the federation of employees not to punish their women employees for walking out. The 2005 walkout had 50,000 participants in Reykjavik, 60,000 nationally, with less than two months of organizing. As Edda Jónsdóttir, project leader for the 2005 event, explained, such a feat was possible because of the coordination of the large variety of organizations across the country -- what she called, in jest, a “mafia,” because the women involved “know everybody.” For Guörún Jónsdóttir, an organizer of last year’s walkout, the 2010 mobilization was “empowerment at its best.” But she added, “This is a power we will find a way to activate, I promise you. We have still a lot to do.” It’s not that Iceland has solved all of its women’s problems -- the wage gap is slightly smaller now, but only because so many highly paid men lost out during the collapse. But activists have created what feminist political scientists have called a “triangle of empowerment”: strong activism, a critical contingent of feminist politicians, and feminist officials with legal authority to address inequality. Such broad-based institution-building -- rather than the intergenerational infighting that seems to characterize the American feminist movement -- is more likely to be successful in reducing gender inequality here in the United States.
