Icelandic Women's Day Off (1975): The Strike That Stopped a Land

On 24 October 1975 women across Iceland stopped work, at their jobs and at home, for one day to show how much the country depended on them. Known in Icelandic as Kvennafrídagurinn, the Women’s Day Off, it drew an estimated 90 per cent of the nation’s women and brought schools, shops, offices and newspapers to a near halt. The protest became a landmark of the women’s movement and a source of pride in Iceland’s later record on gender equality.

Background: International Women’s Year

The United Nations declared 1975 International Women’s Year, and the first UN world conference on women met in Mexico City that summer. In Iceland, as elsewhere in Western Europe, women had won the vote decades earlier (in national elections from 1915 for women over 40, and on equal terms from 1920), but they remained scarce in parliament and earned considerably less than men.

When the strike took place only three women sat in the 60-member Althing, the Icelandic parliament. Women were concentrated in low-paid work in fish processing, retail, care and offices, and were expected to do almost all housework and childcare.

Organising the day

The idea of a women’s strike came from the Redstockings (Rauðsokkahreyfingin), a radical feminist group founded in 1970. At first it seemed too divisive for more traditional women’s associations, but at a women’s conference in June 1975 the proposal was adopted, and five of Iceland’s main women’s organisations agreed to run it together.

The organisers made a key choice: they called the action a “day off” rather than a strike. A strike outside a labour dispute risked dismissal, and the word put off conservative groups and housewives. Framed as a day off, the protest could unite women across political parties, classes and the countryside. It was set for UN Day, 24 October, a Friday.

What happened on 24 October

Women stayed away from offices, factories, schools and shops, and many also refused to cook, clean or look after children. Banks and many businesses closed or ran with skeleton staff, nurseries and schools shut, and telephone exchanges struggled. Newspapers were thin or late, because so many typesetters and printers were women.

Many men took their children to work, and a popular story holds that shops ran out of sausages, an easy meal for fathers cooking for the first time. Whether exaggerated or not, the image captured how the country realised its dependence on women’s unpaid labour.

In the afternoon an estimated 25,000 people gathered at Lækjartorg square in central Reykjavík, out of a national population of roughly 220,000. Speakers included women from trade unions, parliament and the household, and the crowd sang. Similar meetings took place in towns and villages around the coast.

Key people

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, then director of the Reykjavík Theatre Company, took part in the day off. She was not one of the organisers, but she later described the experience as giving women the confidence to step forward.

Among those who spoke at the Reykjavík rally was Aðalheiður Bjarnfreðsdóttir, a leader of the Sókn union of low-paid women workers, who later became a member of parliament. The organising committee drew members from the Redstockings, the Women’s Rights Association of Iceland and other bodies, deliberately avoiding a single figurehead.

Consequences and later strikes

In 1976 the Althing passed Iceland’s first Gender Equality Act, which banned discrimination on the grounds of sex and set up a Gender Equality Council. The law was strengthened several times in later decades, most notably by a 2017 amendment requiring larger employers to certify that they pay men and women equally for work of equal value.

On 29 June 1980 Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was elected president of Iceland. She was the first woman anywhere to be elected head of state in a national election, and she served four terms until 1996. In 1983 a women’s political party, the Women’s List (Kvennalistinn), won seats in the Althing, and the share of women in parliament rose steadily.

Icelandic women repeated the walkout on 24 October 1985, 2005, 2010, 2016 and 2018. In most of these, women left work at a set time in the afternoon (2.08 pm in 2005, for example), chosen to show the point at which they stopped being paid, in proportion to men’s earnings.

On 24 October 2023 Icelanders held a full-day “Kvennaverkfall” (women’s strike), the first all-day action since 1975, with tens of thousands joining rallies and Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir taking part. Since 2009 Iceland has ranked first in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index every year.

The 1975 protest has inspired similar actions abroad, from Poland’s “Black Monday” in 2016 to women’s strikes in Spain and Switzerland. Like the American Women’s Strike for Equality and Swiss women’s long fight for the vote, it is remembered as a moment when women used collective absence to make their contribution visible.

Myths and facts

It is often said that the whole country “shut down” on 24 October 1975. In reality essential services such as hospitals continued, partly because many nurses and other care workers chose to keep working or were asked to. What stopped was much of everyday economic and domestic life, which was precisely the organisers’ point.

Another common belief is that the day was a single, spontaneous outburst. It was in fact the product of months of planning by a committee that included women from left-wing, centrist and conservative backgrounds. Leaflets, radio announcements and local committees spread the word across a sparsely populated island, and the inclusive framing was a deliberate tactic.

Finally, the Women’s Day Off did not by itself close the pay gap. Icelandic women still earned less than men decades later, which is why the later walkouts were timed to the minute at which women, in effect, stopped being paid. The 1975 protest is better understood as the start of a long campaign than as its end.

Iceland in a wider context

Iceland in 1975 was a small, close-knit society with strong trade unions and a tradition of collective action, which made a nationwide protest easier to organise than in larger countries. Many women were already members of unions or of local women’s associations, and these networks carried the message to fishing towns and farms.

The country was also changing fast. Rising education levels and the growth of service jobs were drawing more married women into paid work, while childcare provision lagged behind. The question of who looked after children and homes was therefore a practical issue for many families, not only a political slogan, and it gave the day its wide appeal.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1970: The Redstockings movement is founded in Reykjavík.
• June 1975: A women’s conference adopts the proposal for a nationwide day off.
• 24 October 1975: About 90 per cent of women stop work; some 25,000 rally in Reykjavík.
• 1976: The Althing passes Iceland’s first Gender Equality Act.
• 29 June 1980: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is elected president of Iceland.
• 1983: The Women’s List wins its first seats in the Althing.
• 24 October 2005: Women leave work at 2.08 pm on the 30th anniversary.
• 24 October 2023: A full-day women’s strike is held for the first time since 1975.

Why it matters

The Women’s Day Off showed, in a single day, how much of a modern society rested on women’s paid and unpaid work. Its broad, non-partisan organisation turned protest into political change in the country that had founded the Althing, one of the world’s oldest parliaments, and it remains a model for peaceful mass action on equality.