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I am fairly sure that most listeners of my show are aware that women have a long history of being underpaid and underappreciated. The ancient world rarely provides hard data, but it’s telling that one of the foundational stories of Western literature is the heroic tale of a man who leaves home to go to war for ten years and then spends ten more years wandering around, having adventures, and dallying with women he is not married to. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope is left at home to manage her own work, his work, single motherhood, and an infestation of house guests.
Let us just ask ourselves, “Who is the hero of this story?”
The medieval world gives us a little more hard data. We have the payroll lists of harvest workers in Yorkshire from 1363-64. Women were paid 71% of what men were paid (Bennett, 82). But at least they were paid. In the 12th century payroll lists of the English court, there’s a salary listed for all the positions held by men, but for the washerwoman it says “in doubt.” Yes, the paymaster for the court is “in doubt” as to how much he will pay the woman. Or perhaps he’s in doubt about paying her at all (White, 147).
Still later generations of workers left still more records, and it became was more explicit. Employers routinely paid men more, commonly with the excuse that men have to support a family and women don’t. Since this was frequently not true on both sides, it’s hard not to think there was a little more than that going on, and occasionally, someone even pointed it out. Jacob Riis studied the New York tenements in the late 19th century, and in his very influential book, he wrote that:
“It is a known fact that men’s wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but woman’s wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her. It is simply impossible for any woman to live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns… It is inevitable that they must in many instances resort to evil” (Riis, chapter 20).
Such a pathway was, of course, both dangerous and criminal. It opened a woman up to all kinds of other discrimination, violence, and suffering, but hunger and desperation drove many to it anyway. There was more than one problem at the heart of these social issues, but it does seem clear that much of it could have been avoided simply by paying women in sales and factory work enough to support themselves.
First wave feminism was the formally organized movement that got going internationally in the 19ᵗʰ century. These reformers were well aware of pay, property, and employment issues, but they chose to focus their efforts on voting rights. This is partly because the type of women who joined the movement, were usually middle class or affluent. They weren’t the ones being driven into prostitution. But there was also a rationale but there was also a rationale behind their thinking. If women could vote, they thought, then all other problems could be remedied by way of the ballot box. That is the civilized way to do things, right?
That was a nice theory, but in the mid 20ᵗʰ century, some women looked around and said, you know, first wave feminists mostly got us the vote, but their rationale didn’t pan out. We are still underpaid and underappreciated, among other problems.
Hence, second-wave feminism in the mid-20th century. Results varied around the world, but in the US, second-wave feminists are the reason American women like myself can have a credit card, hold a mortgage, play sports in school, and use contraception. This is also the same time period that there began to be shelters for battered women, and mandated police responses to calls about domestic violence. It also became illegal to pay women less for the same job and to refuse to hire on the basis of gender. None of this happened without effort or controversy, and, as I’m sure you know, some of the controversy still exists. Especially around the abortion issue.
But in 1975, second-wave feminism still only had a few victories in hand and plenty left to do. That year, the United Nations declared it the Year of the Woman and held a conference in Mexico City to discuss how the goal of equality and dignity could be advanced worldwide. Many more local organizations held more local versions of the same conference.
Planning the Strike (or Day Off)
In general, I feel like these conferences are a lot of talk and not much action, but the women of Iceland were inspired to actually do something. They had their own conference in June of that year, and they expressed their frustration about being shunted into low paying jobs, getting paid less than the men, and doing most of the housework and child care, whether they worked outside the home of not. Even though they’d had the vote since 1915.
Then someone suggested a women’s strike. No source gave me a name on who this woman was, but everyone agreed that she was a member of the Redstockings, a radical feminist organization.
The strike idea made some less radical women nervous. Iceland had no legally protected right to strike. A woman could get fired for that. Besides, strikes were effective (sometimes) against workplace problems. A traditional strike would do nothing for the discrimination that women experienced in their own homes.
Then a woman named Valborg Bentsdóttir suggested a change in the branding. Instead of calling it a strike, she said, let’s call it a day off (Rios). Surely, you couldn’t be fired for taking a day off. And a housewife deserves a day off every now and then too.
For a successful strike—or whatever you want to call it—you need a lot of people to participate or the whole thing will fizzle, and possibly some people will face serious consequences. Getting a lot of people involved means organization. It means communication. It means a whole lot of work.
From the beginning, this effort was noticeable because it actively included women of all sorts. It wasn’t just the radical feminists or just the church ladies or just the employees of one offending company. The first Women’s Day Off committee consisted of “an assistant with sick people at home, a seamstress, a housewife, a data operator, teacher, interior decorator, another teacher, housewife, one from the fishing industry and an office manager.” These womens crossed party lines too, with socialists, Democrats, progressives, conservatives, you name it (Rios, Ms. Magazine).
With the help of thousands of volunteers, they sent letters, made phone calls, staked out workplaces, ported signs, and got the media involved. The fliers were printed in multiple languages, including English. Here’s one:
WOMEN’S DAY OFF
OCTOBER 24th 1975.WHY A DAY OFF FOR WOMEN?
The Women’s Congress, held in Reykjavík, June 20th and 21st 1975, urges women to take a day off on October 24th, the United Nations’ Day, in order to demonstrate the importance of their work.
Why was a motion like that put forward and carried at a congress where women of all ages and political parties were assembled?
The reasons are many and here are but a few:
–Because when someone is needed for a badly paid low-status job the advertisement specifies a woman.
–Because average wages of women in trade and commerce are only 75% of the average wages of men doing the same jobs.
–Because the principal negotiation body of the Icelandic Trades Union Congress has no woman representative.
–Because the difference between the average monthly earnings of women and men laborers is icel. kr. 30.000.- (approx. £100.- or $200.-)
–Because farmers’ wives are not accepted as full members of the Farmer’s Union.
–Because it is commonly said about a housewife “she isn’t working – just keeping house”.
–Because there are men in authority unable or unwilling to understand that day nurseries are a necessary part of modern society.
–Because the work contribution of farmers’ wives on the farms is not valued at more than icel.kr. 175.000.- (approx. £500.- or $1100.-) a year.
–Because whether an applicant for a job is male or female is often considered more important than education or competence.
–Because the work experience of a housewife is not considered of any value on the labor market.
The general conclusion is that women’s contribution to the community is underestimated.
Let us demonstrate to ourselves and to others the importance of our role in society by stopping work on October 24th.
Let us unite in making the day a memorable one under the theme of the International Women’s Year:
EQUALITY – DEVELOPMENT – PEACE
Executive committee for women’s day off.
With the country flooded with pamphlets, fliers, and posters, the menfolk of Iceland could hardly fail to notice. None of this was going to be a surprise. Employers, husbands, and fathers had plenty of time to make any necessary arrangements. Some employers did threaten to fire any woman who walked off the job. Planning continued anyway.
The Long Day
When at last the day dawned, women left their jobs, their homes, and their kids, and instead they gathered in over twenty demonstrations around the country, some of them the largest demonstrations that had ever been held in Iceland up to that time (Rios, Ms). (There are many pictures which I intended to place here, but they are copyright protected. Browse at your leisure here.)
They had many speakers. Here’s just a sampling:
Ásthildur Ólafsdóttir, a housewife, said “How long and often have we women not let men think for us and tell us what our role is and what is appropriate for us without offending our feminine charms and housewifely duties? … There is no law of nature that women are better suited to housework than men…. We can teach our sons to value housework and do it without blushing. And we can encourage our daughters to educate themselves and train for various industries in exactly the same way as our sons.”
Björgur Einarsdóttir, a business woman, said “Tomorrow, when we step back into our normal daily routines with our families and our workplaces, whether inside or outside the home, we are not the same women as before. This morning, each of us, alone and unsupported, made the decision whether or not to join the other women in the square. For many of us, it was a struggle to free ourselves from the security provided by family ties and the daily routine of working with the same colleagues, and to suddenly find ourselves exposed as a special individual, which we are now going to weigh and evaluate in a new light. Whichever way our decision was made, if we have stood by it, it is in itself a special experience that we will live with and must harness. Our understanding increases that we are full citizens with responsibilities equal to others, and not just WOMEN.”
Aðalheiður Bjarnfredsdóttir, who was head of the union for women cleaning and working in the kitchens and laundries of hospitals and schools, said “We Icelandic women were fortunate enough to be the first women in the world to reach a consensus on this day. I am proud of that. But more will come. Women are waking up. They know that men have ruled the world since the beginning of history. And what has that world been like? It has been dripping with blood and burning with agony. I believe that this world will change when women start ruling it equally with men.”
Between speakers, these demonstrations also had music. They sang a feminist anthem called “Áfram stelpur” (Onward girls), they listened to speakers, and they had a great time (Rios). In other places, a brass band played suffragette anthems, and one woman reported that “there was a tremendous power in it all and a great feeling of solidarity and strength among all those women standing on the square in the sunshine.” This woman was the artistic director of a Reykjavik theater, but she had canceled dress rehearsals and encouraged her female colleagues to come along to the demonstration (Brewer, BBC).
María Sigurðardóttir said, “The feeling of being surrounded by so many women with the same goal was like nothing else! I have never felt like this again in my life.” Maria herself did go to work that day because she was a typesetter for a conservative newspaper. Her employer had negotiated a deal. If the women would work early and late, they could use the newspaper that day to print the news about the women’s day off and still leave during normal business hours for the demonstrations. Maria went to work just after midnight. The newspaper that day was short, and it had no news that wasn’t women’s day off news (Rifkin, Brewer, BBC).
Meanwhile, the menfolk had their hands full. Many businesses closed entirely. They didn’t have enough staff to stay open. Many schools and nurseries also closed. That meant fathers also stayed home from work to watch children, or they took their children to work with them. Television stations played the news as usual, but the male news anchors had their children playing right behind them on camera (Brewer, BBC). The stores sold out of the kid-friendly easy-to-cook sausages (Rifkin). Some employers provided sweets and drawing materials for the kids (Guardian).
The kids noticed the difference. One woman remembered that this day was “the first day that I recall that [my mother and aunts] were not doing any baking or cleaning or fussing around, and the first time I saw my dad and the other husbands and brothers do the housework” (Rios, Ms. Magazine). The men would eventually dub this day something other than the Women’s Day Off. Men called it the Long Day.
A local radio station tried to gauge how many women were participating by making survey calls around the area. Their calls were answered by men who had stayed home to watch the kids. Their wives weren’t there to answer the phone (Brewer, BBC). Later reports suggested that 90% of all the women in Iceland had taken the day off.
The Legacy of the Women’s Day Off
But eventually, even long days come to an end. The women came home. The kids were fine. The businesses were fine. And if that was all, then this day off would be much like many of those conferences I mentioned earlier: a lot of talk and not much action.
But Iceland did take action. A point had been made, and here were the effects:
- In 1976, one year after the day off, Iceland passed its first Equal Rights Act, establishing that and men and women should get equal pay for equal work.
- In 1980, five years after the day off, Vigdis Finnbogadóttir was elected as President of Iceland. She was the first woman to hold that job, and there’s a direct line between the day off and her political career. Because she wasn’t a politician in 1975. She was the theater director I quoted earlier, who canceled her dress rehearsals to attend the demonstration.
- Icelanders started putting more women in parliament too. In 1975, only 5 percent of the MPs were women. But afterwards, more women stood for election and more of them won. Include Aðalheiður Bjarnfredsdóttir, the union organizer who made the speech about women ruling equally with men. Today, just over 50 years after the day off, almost 50 percent of Iceland’s MPs are women (Rifkin).
- Today Iceland has a female president again. Her name is Halla Tómasdóttir, and she too remembers the Women’s Day Off. Not because she went (she was too young), but because she was the one I quoted earlier, who said she had never seen her father and brothers do housework until the Long Day.
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There are a host of other issues, such as health care options, childcare options, maternity leave, and paternity leave (which is a woman-focused issue) in which Iceland also tops the charts.
I mean they top the charts literally because the World Economic Forum publishes an annual report on closing the Global Gender Gap. It looks at a wide range of issues, including economic participation, educational opportunities, health and survival, and political empowerment. As of 2026, Iceland has taken the number one spot for 17 consecutive years, and they are the only country in the world to have closed over 90% of the gender gap. For point of reference, here are a few other countries’ rankings. I’ve chosen these because I know I have some readers in these countries:
- The UK is 5th, with 84% of the gap closed.
- Australia is 8th at 82%
- Germany is 9th at 81%
- Canada is 24th at 78%
- The Netherlands is 46th at 75%
- The US is 47th at 74.9%
Overall, the global score is 69.2% closed, which means there’s still plenty of work to do. Even in Iceland, there is work to do, and many of the more recent retrospectives about the Long Day have stressed that. 93% closed is an awful lot of progress, but it is still 7% short of full parity.
To take just the one issue I started with, that of equal pay, the causes of lower pay tend to be more complicated now than they were in the past. It is illegal in most places to explicitly pay women less, as employers routinely and openly did in the past. But it is still true that:
- Women are more likely to take lower paying jobs than men. Some will say that this is their choice, and to some extent that’s true, but there is a question of cause and effect. Are women choosing lower paid jobs or are those jobs lower paid because women routinely choose to do them?
- Women are also more likely to take time off work for caretaking responsibilities, and having done so, their careers often do not return to the trajectory they were once on.
- Women are also less likely to succeed at any kind of pay negotiation (Counts).
These structural issues are much harder to legislate than passing a law that says you can’t just flat out pay women lower wages, but they still add up to women earning less overall.
This reality and others like it are why Icelandic women have in some years commemorated the Women’s Day Off with a mark of progress and also a mark of how far there still is to go. On Friday, October 24, 2005, Icelandic women walked out of work at 2:08 pm, which was when they would have completed their working hours for the week, if they been paid at the same rate as men. In 2023, they did a full day strike, this time focused partially on lingering pay disparities, but mostly on gender-based violence, which continues to be a problem in every country (Guardian).
So I don’t want to paint the Women’s Day Off in 1975 as if it solved everything, even in Iceland. We are not living in a feminist utopia. And yet, I am also not one of those feminists who claims that nothing has gotten better. That is demonstrably false in most countries in the world. Things have gotten better for women. And they’ve gotten better largely because women working together made that happen.
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Selected Sources
Brewer, Kirstie. “The Day Iceland’s Women Went on Strike.” BBC News, 23 Oct. 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34602822. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
Counts, Laura. “New Research Shatters Outdated Pay-Gap Myth That Women Don’t Negotiate.” Haas News | Berkeley Haas, 22 Aug. 2023, https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/new-research-shatters-outdated-pay-gap-myth-that-women-dont-negotiate/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
Holder, Michael. “Gender Pay Gap Statistics: A Comprehensive Analysis – Equal Pay Today.” Equal Pay Today, 2025, https://www.equalpaytoday.org/gender-pay-gap-statistics/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
“Icelandic Women Cut Working Day to Protest Wage Gap.” The Observers – France 24, 25 Oct. 2016, https://observers.france24.com/en/20161025-iceland-women-protest-wage-gap. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
James, Selma. “Decades After Iceland’s ‘Day Off,’ Our Women’s Strike Is Stronger Than Ever | Selma James.” The Guardian, 8 Mar. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/iceland-global-womens-strike-protest. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
Jónasdóttir, Valgerður. “Presidential Campaign and Election.” Vigdís, https://vigdis.is/en/presidential-campaign-and-election-3/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
National Organization for Women. “The Gender Pay Gap – Myth Vs. Fact.” Now.Org, 2019, https://now.org/resource/the-gender-pay-gap-myth-vs-fact/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
Rifkin, Rachel. “50 Years Ago, the Women of Iceland Took a Day off—and Inspired the World.” History, 2025, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/icelandic-womens-strike. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives : Studies Among the Tenements. 1890. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, https://www.historyonthenet.com/authentichistory/1898-1913/2-progressivism/2-riis/index.html. Accessed 13 May 2025.
Rios, Carmen. “They Dare, They Can, They Will: The History of Iceland’s Decades-Strong Women’s Strike Movement.” Ms. Magazine, 21 Mar. 2026, https://msmagazine.com/2026/03/21/iceland-womens-strike-history-feminist/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
“The Day the Women Went on Strike in Iceland.” The Guardian, The Guardian, 29 Oct. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/18/gender.uk. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
Vonberg, Judith, and Laura Perez Maestro. “‘If Women Stop, the World Stops:’ Women Choose Not to Work for ‘Feminist Strike.’” CNN, 8 Mar. 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/08/europe/global-womens-strike-international-womens-day-intl/index.html. Accessed 24 Sept. 2026.
White, Geoffrey H. “The Household of the Norman Kings.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 30, 1948, pp. 127–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/3678702, 10.2307/3678702. Accessed 25 Sept. 2026.
“Women’s Day off 1975 – Kvennasögusafn.” Kvennasogusafn.Is, https://kvennasogusafn.is/index.php?page=womens-day-off-1975. Accessed 27 Sept. 2026.
World Economic Forum. “Global Gender Gap Report 2026.” Sept. 2026.
https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_Report_2026.pdf. Accessed September 27, 2026.