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.
