At a Women’s Congress in Reykjavik in June 1975 attended by several hundred women from differing political perspectives, a group from the radical feminist Red Stockings movement shocked the crowd by proposing that all women in Iceland should go on strike for one day on United Nations Day, October 24.Handout
There’s a moment in the documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still that breaks me a little. (It’s screening at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto on Monday and Wednesday.)
A bunch of lively Icelandic women in their 70s and 80s, former members of a feminist collective called the Red Stockings, are having a jolly time recounting the massive event they masterminded on Oct. 24, 1975, when 90 per cent of the women in their country just … took the day off. No cooking, no child care, no teaching. No working at the hospital, the fish plant, or the bank. Men scrambled to cover the responsibilities. Grocers ran out of hot dogs.
The goal was simple parity with men: equal access to education, equal opportunities for employment and promotion, equal pay. Sure, the Red Stockings made a little mischief in the run-up to the event – they entered a cow in a beauty pageant, for example. But woof, the vitriol that came at them! Editorial cartoons depicted them as hairy trolls “too ugly to marry,” pundits on state radio thundered that they must be infertile, with only “stone children in their belly.”
“At the time, what they said seemed hilarious,” one Red Stocking says in the film. “But looking back now, I can’t understand how we managed to laugh.”
Ow. That line, uttered with directness and good nature by a woman who’s lived to see a lot, says so much about all the slights women stickhandle, all the accommodations they invisibly, automatically make. All the times, one subject recounts in the film, she trained a man who was then promoted over her. All the bosses who said, “You don’t need a raise, your salary is just for makeup and clothes.” All the ways women are made to feel, “Nobody hears what I say.” It’s lines like those that lift this documentary from being a quirky story about a long-ago event in a tiny nation, into a worldwide cri de coeur.
The film’s producer, Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir, an activist and filmmaker who specializes in social justice stories, was in Reykjavik’s main square with her mother that day 48 years ago. She was 11. “I remember this incredible energy, this eerie, quiet, powerful murmur,” she said on a recent video call alongside the film’s director, Pamela Hogan. “So many different kinds of women, but everyone knew why they were there. I thought, oh, everything is fixed now, everything is going to be great. If only.”
Hogan is not Icelandic; she’s an assistant professor at Columbia’s graduate school of journalism and an Emmy-winning filmmaker. (She co-created the PBS series Women, War & Peace, which includes the story of Bosnian women, the first in history to testify about wartime rape, who changed international law.)
On a family trip to Iceland in 2016, Hogan chanced upon a paragraph about the Day Off in the back of a Lonely Planet guide. “Apparently I kept talking about it back home in New York,” she says, “until a friend finally said, ‘Shut up and write a proposal for a documentary, I can get you some money from Abby Disney’s company.’” (That would be producer and philanthropist Abigail Disney, grandniece of Walt, whose company, Fork Films, also produced Women, War & Peace.) On her first scouting trip, Hogan met Gunnarsdottir (she calls her Hrapa), who connected her to an ever-unspooling “human chain” of sources.
On October 24, 1975, 90% of Iceland’s women took the 'day off,' holding demonstrations in villages and towns throughout the country. The gathering in Reykjavik was the largest in Iceland’s history.Handout
“Hrapa and I know that so many women’s stories are not told, and if they’re not told they never happened,” Hogan says. “We knew this was the last chance for the women who created the event to tell the story in their own words.” In fact, a few died during the seven years it took to make the documentary.
The overriding mood of the film is joy, however; the subjects grin with impish giddiness. “We loved our male chauvinist pigs,” one says. We just wanted to change them a little.”
“I learned so much from those women,” Hogan says. “They’re so close to their feelings about that day. They used humour not just to open everyone’s ears to their message, but also to keep each other afloat.”
It worked: Five years after the Day Off, Icelanders voted in Vigdis Finnbogadottir, the world’s first democratically elected female president. (She remained in office until 1996, and appears in the film, bright and sly at 93.) Women now hold 48 per cent of the seats in Iceland’s parliament and make up 60 per cent of its law students. Iceland is the only country in the World Economic Forum that has closed its wage and opportunity gap to 90 per cent.
The Day Off inspired similar women’s strikes in Poland in 2017 and Spain in 2018. And Icelanders still celebrate Oct. 24 (intermittently); the most recent event, in 2023, attracted 100,000 people to Reykjavik’s main square – one-quarter of the nation.
“It’s a serious event, with serious issues that need to be discussed,” Eliza Reid, Iceland’s (Canadian-born) First Lady says on a separate video call, “including the eradication of gender-based violence, which is still prevalent in Iceland and everywhere else, and the rights of transgender and non-binary people. But the overall mood is not angry. It’s buoyant. I think that makes it more effective.”
Reid, who isn’t involved with the documentary, loves it. “It’s hopeful, optimistic, and we don’t often see that in stories about the fight for gender equality. It’s not about a Gloria Steinem, a single hero. It’s very much an egalitarian movement, where everyone feels she has a voice and a role to play. It reminds us of the power of the individual. We all are role models who have an influence on those around us, and if we stand together, we can nudge the dial in the right direction.”
In making the film, Hogan and Gunnarsdottir faced the usual hurdles, including financing, which was a beast, and distribution, which they’d love to land this week. (“I hope Hot Docs gets its act together,” Gunnarsdottir says about the festival’s recent backroom travails. “It’s such an important festival on the international scene. It’s a beam of light in the documentary filmmakers’ world.”)
But one of their biggest challenges was finding anyone today to say anything negative about the Day Off. “Things have changed so radically in Iceland, you will not find anyone who will admit, ‘I was opposed to it,’ or how much they hated the women’s movement,” Hogan says.
She tried to interview a man who, in 1975, had to step in as hospital cook, and was so desperate he fried yogurt. “But he refused,” she says. “All the men we wanted to talk to were suddenly out of town. We had to find archival evidence in the newspapers and on the radio. Because if you don’t understand what the women were up against, you don’t understand how much courage it took for them to do what they did.”
One Red Stocking in the film sums it up: “So many women,” she says, “wanted … something.”
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Johanna Schneller