Do Icelandic Women Know Best?
I walked into the interview expecting two things:
- Our topic of conversation would revolve around the inequalities in the workplace, largely considering that the participant (Freyja) was an engineer and therefore in a male-dominated field.
- That Icelandic women were the most liberated women in the world and leading the charge in feminist conscientization.
Naturally, on both counts I was wrong, or off-base to say so lightly.
To provide context, I shall outline the framework of Freyja’s experiences:
Half Icelandic, half Australian — born and raised in Adelaide. At 19, she moved to a small village in Iceland in order to pursue new opportunities . She started by working as a cleaner in a factory and eventually worked her way up to be an operator. After this, she attended Reykjavik University where she studied mechatronics engineering — prompting her to take a position as a relief process engineer in the same factory. She currently resides in Iceland, loves it dearly, and is completing an MPhil at the University of Cambridge on Engineering for Sustainability.
As we began the interview, I tried to keep the tone light, focusing on basic questions such as a preliminary life history and the experience of living in Iceland as a whole. As we delved further into the material, the intensity and focus of the conversation began to shift more rapidly — eventually moving into what I would consider highly sensitive issues, some of which we decided would never see the light of the internet. What follows is a review of this discussion along with the key points which we picked up for further investigation within the intergenerational lens of the shift of activist consciousness and public narratives.
It soon became apparent that what I found to be of interest and relevant was vastly different from what Freyja thought to be. First, the gendered division of labor and inequality of pay (issues that form much of the conversation in the US) were of less importance as she felt the Icelandic government was making avid and proactive progress to eradicate these issues. However, she did state that mechatronics, her field of study, was male dominated; she thought the current issues related more around creating role models and challenging the societal gendered conception of engineering as opposed to policy. If anything the main complaints were the enforceability of such laws when coming to the grey and nuanced areas of equal pay. In her mind, Iceland was fairly good at providing equal pay for equal work.
What Freyja found to be of greatest interest was the culture of women and the domestic sphere- something I had assumed to be a non-issue. The first point brought up was that of public appearance. Coming from Australia, Freyja explained her shock at seeing the sheer amount of effort and time that went into presenting an aesthetic sense of being ‘made up’. For example, “I once went to this party with my friend, and they were getting ready to go out, and the girl was sitting at this table for like 30 min just putting her mascara on!” A newbie to the world of makeup, Freyja found herself the center of many magnanimous offers of feminizing education and makeovers. However, she does not speak of this in a negative way, but rather as a useful skill she learned that she uses to this day, ‘in moderation’. Arguably she sees makeup as a social ritual, a way of cultural assimilation in which one may fit into the “societal expectations”. Her contention with this issue, echoing perhaps the majority of voices, is how we determine the “idealised female image”. Questions raised were how we determine what a gender should like like, how we define beauty, why this changes across time (especially in a relatively isolated society with a smaller media industry), and how materialism may play into this construct.
From this conversation it appeared that she did not blame the homogenous ‘men’ for imposing these standards, but rather that they were internalised among women themselves. Never had a man told her to get “dolled up”, nor did they comment on her appearance. Rather it was within the social hierarchies of women that these expectations were conditioned and replicated — across and among generations. I do not imply that ‘men’ are truly separate from the process of the creation and reproduction of beauty standards, but rather that her experiences were not formed from such direct interactions.
The second point of discussion was the division of labor within the domestic space. From her experience, she found that women took responsibility, in particular, for the cleanliness of the home. (Johnson, 1984) The standards were envisioned and enforced by them, and its application became a source of pride. What this means is that they are solely responsible for the aesthetics and tidiness of the house — even if cohabited by men. If a man contributes to this value, it is as an assistant, working towards a vision that is not his own. The home is not his domain, and as such his responsibility to it is limited and any work that is done in the name of the domestic is as a favor, not mandatory. What Freyja found most puzzling was that the women did not want to change this, they found a source of esteem in the maintenance of the home, at times to an excessive extent.
“I’d be sitting there having coffee, and my friends mom, she will be like ‘ooh there is a spec of dust — let me get it!’. And it’s like her thing, she wants to do it. and her husband doesn’t seem to really care — it’s her thing. It’s not enforced, they don’t feel oppressed in any way — they want to keep their home to this standard. Which is essentially them being led to believe what they want, I guess that there are outside pressures, but they don’t realize that they are there.”
This line of discussion led to deeper reflections about how these standards have changed over generations, how these issues were discussed in the revolution in the 70s, and if the current state of affairs was what was truly envisioned. A thoroughly introspective process, this interview led to a series of questions that we both felt would be fascinating to explore in conversation with activist women from the former generation.
To the second expectation that I had of the interview, Icelandic women being the most liberated, I would not say that I was wrong nor right, but merely that my understanding of the ways in which we perceive ‘enlightened values’ needs refinement and further reflection. In this claim, I was thinking mainly about the working world and considering monetized labor and effort. While feminist rhetoric has extensively covered the value of work within the home, for some reason it did not resonate in my purview of how societies shift. The knowledge that the gender pay gap was substantially better in Iceland, in my case, came with inaccurate expectations about how the division of work in the household is inextricably tied to market norms. What implicit assumptions do I have about the value of housework per say indicate about the way in which my very research questions are in themselves a product of a deeply conflicted movement. As the labor incurred in the workplace and domestic sphere have historically been measured and conceptualised differently, what does it mean when I unknowingly conflate the two? Perhaps the question of ‘who has it better’ is irrelevant and instead I should be asking what is it I really mean by ‘better’. My hope is that through the next series of interviews on female ‘revolutionaries’ in Iceland I may be able to better understand the complications and contradictions that underpin the theoretical constructs that frame my questions.
I will leave you with the following topics that shall be explored in the 2 forthcoming interviews.
- How do these women perceive the social and economic changes that have occurred across gender lines in the last 50 years?
- How did men react during the revolution and subsequent months? How has their attitude shifted, and why?
- Why did these women choose to walk in the strike?
- What did they envision the future to look like at the time? What are their subsequent sources of pride and disappointment?
- How have perspectives on domestic work shifted? How are expectations amongst women placed differently upon later generations, and why?
UPCOMING INTERVIEWS:
Agusta Thorkelsdottir — a leading advocate for women’s rights.
Sigga Bjornsdottir — a participant of The Women’s Day Off
Johnson, M.E. (1984) Women in Iceland., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1211/
