The Day Iceland Stood Still

 

Your silence will not protect you.— Audre Lorde 

Nothing really means nothing. 

Not working. Not cooking. Not cleaning. Not looking after the children. Not being the invisible mechanism through which a society continues to function while attributing the credit for that functioning to others. 

On October 24, 1975, 90% of Icelandic women stopped. The official formula was Women’s Day Off, the women’s day off. The term “strike,” proposed by the more radical feminists, might have frightened some of the participants, especially those who were politically more conservative. And so the strike became a “day off”: an apparently innocuous linguistic solution that in fact contained one of the most radical forms of civil disobedience. 

Because sometimes power begins precisely with words. 

Calling a strike a “day off” reveals the paradox of a society in which a woman can be considered free only when she stops doing what is expected of her. 

Pamela Hogan’s film begins here and carries out an operation that is both historical and philosophical: it gives a body back to what society had transformed into a function. 

The woman of the 1970s portrayed through these testimonies is, first and foremost, a function. Mother. Wife. Secretary. Nurse. Teacher. Shop assistant. Housewife. A necessary presence, provided she does not presume to become a subject. 

Girls could be told that they could become almost anything, provided that “almost” remained broad enough to contain the entire social structure. Ship’s captain? No, you’re a girl. Lawyer? Why study, if you’ll soon be married? A career belongs to a man; adaptation belongs to a woman. 

One of the film’s most interesting insights is that discrimination did not always need to present itself as violence. It could take the much more efficient form of obviousness. 

There was no need to openly forbid a woman from aspiring to something. It was enough for no one to take what she said seriously. 

A young girl could speak about politics and simply be ignored. A woman could perform the same work as a man and watch him advance in his career while she remained where she was. She could teach him the job and then watch him get promoted. The problem, therefore, was not merely the difference in wages: it was the social construction of a destiny. 

A woman could work, but not necessarily advance. 

She could be intelligent, provided she did not become authoritative. 

She could be beautiful, provided beauty remained her capital. 

She could be a wife, a mother, a worker, but without turning any of these roles into power. 

It is here that One Day Without Women ceases to be merely the chronicle of a feminist protest and becomes a film about the very functioning of society. 

Because power is not only what commands. It is also what determines what appears natural. 

In the 1970s, getting up before one’s husband to put on makeup and make sure one looked presentable could be considered normal. A husband’s success became a wife’s source of pride. The home was the place where a woman exercised her talents without those talents being called work. 

Domestic labor had one characteristic perfectly suited to any system of domination: it produced no prestige. 

And what produces no prestige can easily be presented as love, vocation, nature, duty. 

The film has the merit of not turning all this into a sermon. The women remember, laugh, and tell absurd stories. And it is precisely humor that becomes a form of sabotage. 

The Red Stockings understood that ridicule can be more destabilizing than violence. They challenged beauty contests by bringing a cow: if women were to be exhibited like livestock, then they might as well show up with the livestock. The provocation is childish only on the surface. In reality, it contains a precise reversal of the gaze: refusing to remain the object of representation and instead sabotaging representation itself. 

The caricature of feminists as ugly, hairy, dangerous women, incapable of love, hostile to men and children, also reveals something ancient: when a woman stops seeking approval, the system has to invent a reason why that woman should not be desirable. 

Misogyny does not merely say, “you are wrong.” It says: you are unlovable, and therefore you are not a woman in the right way. 

The activists’ response is surprisingly lucid: we do not hate chauvinists. On the contrary, we may love them very much. We simply want to change them a little. 

It is a sentence that contains a political philosophy far more sophisticated than it might seem. The point is not to replace one form of domination with another, but to question the very idea that someone should be naturally destined to dominate while someone else is naturally destined to serve. 

Male fear begins precisely there. 

Because as long as the man is superior, his superiority requires no demonstration. When a woman begins to demand equality, that superiority suddenly becomes something that has to be defended. 

The film also recounts the extraordinary organizational capacity that preceded October 24. There is no charismatic leader dragging along a passive mass. There is a network. Meetings, phone calls, leaflets, unions, associations, discussions, compromises, personal contacts, women persuading other women. 

Before revolution becomes an image, it is logistics. 

And perhaps this is one of the documentary’s most political aspects: an alternative society does not necessarily emerge from a great individual gesture, but from the ability to build a multitude capable of acting as a collective subject. 

The initial question was almost mathematical: how many women would come? 

The answer was 90%. 

At that point, it was no longer a protest. 

It was an empirical demonstration. 

The system could finally see what, until then, it had been able to afford not to see. 

Schools stopped. Newspapers struggled to come out. Factories slowed down or closed. Services were placed under pressure. Fathers had to take their children to work. Men discovered that cooking, looking after children, organizing a day at home while working at the same time were not spontaneous activities dictated by female nature, but work. 

The most interesting thing, however, is that the country did not collapse because women possessed some mysterious form of hidden power. It collapsed because the work that seemed not to exist very much did exist. 

A society can make something invisible without making it nonexistent. 

It can refuse to pay for it, name it, celebrate it, or include it in the statistics of prestige. But when that work is withdrawn, its reality suddenly appears with the violence of a void: the void is one of the most radical forms of visibility. 

On October 24, absence became presence. 

The women who for years had been treated as a secondary part of society transformed themselves, simply by stopping, into the part of it that could not be replaced. The images of the demonstration capture something the film conveys very well: the exhilaration of discovering that there are many of you. 

Not one woman protesting. 

Not an isolated feminist. 

Not a dissatisfied wife. 

Not a worker asking for a raise. 

A river. 

A mass. 

A multitude. 

And the multitude changes the way each person perceives herself. Because as long as a woman thinks she is alone, the problem seems to belong to her. When she discovers that thousands of other women are living under the same conditions, the problem ceases to be psychological and becomes political. 

It is the fundamental passage from “I” to “we.” 

And the film recounts this passage with a lightness that prevents memory from becoming a monument. 

The women remember that day as one of the happiest moments of their lives precisely because, for once, they were not forced to prove that they were individually indispensable. They discovered it together. 

Even the original title, The Day Iceland Stood Still, contains a perfect ambivalence: Iceland stops, but women finally move forward. 

It is the paradox of protest: to produce movement, one sometimes has to stop the machine. 

The day in 1975 did not magically resolve inequality. But it helped change the political and cultural terrain on which that inequality could continue to exist. The following year, Iceland passed a law on equal rights for men and women; in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir would become the first woman in the world democratically elected as president of a country. The causal link between the day off and that election is not a simple equation, but the film shows how that mobilization helped transform what had seemed unthinkable into something that could be imagined. And the transformation is not merely symbolic. 

In Iceland’s parliament today, women hold 29 of the 63 seats, or 46% of its members. This is a figure that makes visible how the long sedimentation of those struggles has transformed political representation, without justifying the idea that the question of equality has been definitively resolved. And it is precisely here that One Day Without Women avoids, at least in part, the risk of becoming an edifying fable. 

The story could be told as a simple parable: women stop, the country understands, society changes, end of story. 

But history does not end. 

Every achievement produces new contradictions. Every acquired right must continue to be exercised. Every formal equality can coexist with material inequalities. Society can change institutions while preserving habits. It can elect women and continue to distribute domestic labor differently. It can declare equality while preserving subtler hierarchies. 

This is why the strength of the film does not lie in telling the story of a perfect past, but in reminding us that no social order is natural when it can be brought to a standstill in a single day. 

The Icelandic women of 1975 did not seize power by taking it. They made it visible by withdrawing themselves. 

That is an enormous distinction. 

Their revolution does not consist in saying, “look what we can do.” It consists in saying: look what happens when we stop doing it. 

Power does not belong only to those who command. It also belongs to those who make possible the daily existence of what is commanded. 

For centuries, women have been asked to take care of the world without expecting to govern it. 

On October 24, 1975, they responded with an almost elementary form of disobedience: for one day, nothing. 

And that nothing produced an image that no rhetoric could have constructed. 

An entire country discovered that the invisible had weight, that the private was political, that the home was a workplace, that unpaid work was still work. 

That a woman who speaks is not necessarily a woman who must be listened to, but that a multitude of women who stop speaking through their daily tasks can become impossible to ignore. 

In the end, one phrase remains that seems almost banal and yet contains the entire structure of the film: dare, want, be able. 

Before we can change the world, we must be able to imagine it differently. And before that, we must stop, at least for a moment, behaving as though the existing world were the only possible one. 

On October 24, 1975, nine women out of ten decided to find out what would happen. 

For twenty-four hours, Iceland found out. 

And for once, it was the world that had to learn how to do without them. 

Feminism is not anti-male; it is anti-sexist.— bell hooks