Iceland's Women Took a Day Off Work in 1975 and Crashed the Country

On October 24, 1975 — the United Nations Year of the Woman — about ninety percent of the female population of Iceland refused, on a single day, to do any paid or unpaid labor. They didn't cook. They didn't shop. They didn't pick up the children. About 25,000 women, in a country with a total population of 220,000, gathered in central Reykjavík for a rally that filled the streets surrounding the parliament building. Iceland's organizers carefully called it the Kvennafrídagurinn — "Women's Day Off" — rather than a strike, on the theory that men would react better to it as a holiday than a labor action.

Icelandic women were not, in 1975, working a parity wage. Female wages outside the home averaged around 60 percent of male wages for comparable work; women provided most of the unpaid domestic labor on top of paid jobs. The day off made the imbalance unignorable. Fish-processing factories, where most workers were women, simply closed for the day. Government offices ran on skeleton crews. Many fathers brought children to work, leading to noise, chaos, and a national run on hot dogs and sausages — which were among the few foods men could feed children unsupervised.

Iceland's parliament passed equal-rights legislation the next year. Five years later, in 1980, Iceland elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as president, making her the first democratically elected female head of state in any country in the world. She served for sixteen years. Iceland has held three subsequent women's strikes — in 1985, 2005, 2010, 2016, and 2018 — each marking continued wage gaps; the country is now consistently ranked at or near the top of the World Economic Forum's gender-equality index. The day is still locally called the long Friday.