On October 24, 1975, Iceland came to a virtual standstill when women took the day off. They left their typewriters and steno pads, put down their paint brushes, music books, and lecture notes, took off their aprons, left the dishes in the sink. Actresses walked off the stage. Teachers left their classrooms. Tellers grinned as nervous bank executives stepped up to the window. Moms and daycare workers handed the children over to dads. They didn’t do the shopping or get dinner. Fish factories ran at half-capacity. Planes were grounded for lack of flight attendants. Phones went unanswered. Newspapers weren’t typeset.
From 12 noon to 12 midnight, on a day men would remember as “that long Friday,” 90% of Iceland’s women walked away from their responsibilities to see what would happen. They called it “Women’s Day Off.”
Why? 1975 was the UN’s “International Women’s Year,” and women everywhere were taking a good hard look at their lives. In Iceland, where they made less than 60% of the wages men made, the “Viking mentality” was romanticized, and male violence undermined everyone’s quality of life, the women chose a dramatic action to show just how essential they were to the smooth functioning of their nation.
In Reykjavik that day, 25,000 women, bundled in coats and scarves, streamed out of their homes and workplaces to attend a rally. They came from all walks of life, political parties, religious beliefs, union affiliation. Some chanted and sang, others stood quietly, tears in their eyes. They listened to speeches and waved homemade placards calling for equality, progress, peace.
At the stroke of midnight, having made their point, most went home, but the women employed at Morgunbladid, one of Iceland’s main newspapers, slipped back into the office. They typeset articles for the next morning’s paper, an entire issue devoted to the strike.
Ten Years Later …
In 1985, they did it again. By now, Iceland had a female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir (photographed cheering the day she won the election). A single mom, she stayed home in solidarity with the symbolic strike.
In 2005, women walked out again, this time at 2:08 on the dot, in protest of Iceland’s continuing gender pay gap. By 2:08, if paid the same as men, they would have completed their workday. As women converged in downtown Reykjavik that crisp sunny day, Margrét Pálmadóttir, founding conductor of the Vox Feminae Women’s Choir, led a mass sing-along. The crowd swelled to over 50,000, double the 1975 protest, making it the largest outdoor rally in Iceland’s history.
By 2010, everything was different. The name of the action had changed from “Women’s Day Off” to “Women Strike Back.” Instead of a sunny day, the 50,000 who rallied in Reykjavik defied storm warnings and stood in freezing rain. Violence against women was still a focal point of the protest, but the economic and political landscape had changed. Following a global economic crash, Iceland had gone from one of the world’s wealthiest societies to total economic collapse in 2008, largely, it was held, due to the excesses of mostly male bankers and politicians.
The Most Feminist Place in the World!
In response, the electorate voted in Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir as prime minister, the first openly-lesbian elected leader in world history. A new gender-neutral marriage law, passed in June 2010, legalized same-sex marriage. A few days later, Jóhanna married her longtime partner, Jónína. (Icelanders go by their first names, according to tradition.)
One thing leads to another. It is possible that the one-day strikes, regular reminders of the crucial role of women to the smooth functioning of a society, led to a new day in Iceland. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Rankings, in recent years Iceland has repeatedly ranked #1 in the world for gender equality in economics, education, health, and politics and has been dubbed “the most feminist place in the world.”
To Go Deeper:
“Icelandic Women Strike for Economic and Social Equality, 1975” Global Nonviolent Action Database, Swarthmore
“The Most Feminist Place in the World: After a testosterone-fueled boom and bust, the women of iceland took charge” by Janet Elisa Johnson in The Nation. February 3, 2011.
“The Day the Women Went on Strike” by Annadis Rudolfsdottir in The Guardian, 10/17/05
Birthday greeting for Prime Minster Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir (1 min.)
Courageous action arises from places of misery and oppression — places like Victorian London’s East End.
In 1888, several months before Jack-the-Ripper killed and mutilated six women in the East End, Annie Besant, a crusading journalist, heard about the deplorable work conditions at the Bryant & May match factory which employed many women, most of them teens. She made up her mind to spark public concern with her writing.
Low pay and 12-hour days were not the workers’ only hardship. The factory air was thick with phosphorus. White sulphur, used on match tips, got onto the workers’ fingers. They ate at their work benches, Annie wrote, “disease the seasoning to their bread.” Poisoned by their work, the young women often became bald, and some developed “Phossy Jaw,” a disease that literally ate their faces.
The company threatened a libel suit and insisted that all workers sign a petition certifying that Besant’s article was untrue, exaggerated at best. Despite their desperate straits, not one worker signed.
The highlight of the strike came when the matchgirls marched to the House of Commons. A delegation of young workers was allowed to enter and speak about their lives in their own words. One fifteen-year-old pulled the scarf from her head to show that she was almost completely bald. The MP’s were shocked.
Regretting bad publicity, the directors of Bryant & May met with strike representatives and agreed to all their demands, including better wages, a separate room where the workers could eat, and the abolition of fines. The matchgirls’ successful strike is still celebrated in British labor history.
In Lysistrata, that bawdy old Greek comedy, scantily clad women fed up with the Peloponnesian War lured their warrior husbands home, then slammed shut the bedroom doors, so to speak, promising to open up when peace was declared.
● @1600, Iroquois Nation — Noting that they produced the warriors, women threatened to forego childbearing until men conceded some decision-making powers on the war council.
● 2006, Colombia — Proclaiming a “strike of crossed legs,” women in Pereira withheld sex to stop gang wars and drive home the point that violence is not sexy. The ten-day strike may have worked. By 2010, Pereira’s murder rate declined by 26.5 percent.
● 2011, Philippines — Women in a sewing cooperative on rural Mindanao Island were unable to sell their wares because violence between men in rival villages had closed the main road. They called for a sex strike. Within a few weeks, the road was opened and deemed safe for travel.
● 2012, USA — The Texas-based Liberal Ladies Who Lunch set up a Facebook page urging women to withhold sex for a week, not as a weapon against men, but as a reminder that “if women lose our hard won rights to medical care, birth control, and pregnancy choice, it won’t only affect women.” The strike proposal was made somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the demand that congress and insurance companies cover contraception was serious.
Musical & Theatrical Sex Strikes:
The 2001 Turkish sex strike inspired two modern films. The 2008 award-winning German-French comedy Absurdistan, directed by Veit Helmer and filmed in Azerbaijan, tells about two young lovers in a remote Soviet village, caught up in a sex strike for repair of a water pipeline. Absurdistan (2 min trailer)
The 2011 French film, The Source, directed by Radu Mihāileanu, is set in a small Arab village in North Africa, where women go on a “love strike” to protest their hard labor carrying water from the mountains. (2-minute trailer) 
If women ever really went on strike and refused our assigned roles, “Everything, everything would have to change!” So wrote my mentor, Barbara Deming (1917-1984), pacifist, lesbian-feminist author-activist.
“You can’t make fundamental changes in society without the occasional mad act.” That’s what President Sankara boldly proclaimed when he came up with the idea for “Market Day for Men.” Indeed, it seemed a mad act.
In the few years before his assassination and the coup, President Sankara appointed several women to high positions, including second in command at the Ministry of Defense. For Minister for Health and Family Welfare, he appointed Joséphine Ouédraogo. She was trained as a sociologist and worked for the revolutionary government from 1984 to 1987.
The mid-1980s was a time of great change in Burkina Faso, a country that traditionally had a strict division of labor along gender lines. In September, 1984, with the blessing of both President Sankara and Minister Ouédraogo, the women in the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution called for a one-day women’s strike and, simultaneously, a “Market Day for Men.” They urged community leaders — priests, imams (Muslim prayer leaders), teachers, and news reporters — to encourage support for the experiment.
At each marketplace, the men were greeted by teams of militant women from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. They stopped women from entering the markets unless they were single or had husbands who were ill that day.