A Revolution Hiding in Plain Sight

Iceland recently marked the 50th anniversary of its women’s strike, which took place on October 24, 1975. An estimated 90 percent of Icelandic women stopped working, at both paid and unpaid labor, for that one day to protest intimate inequality, wage gaps, and discriminatory employment practices. Everyday life stalled. Shops, factories, schools, and offices shut their doors. Fathers brought children to work. In real time, a nation was forced to acknowledge the link between women’s unpaid care and society and the economy’s ability to function. The day accomplished something the United States still hasn’t: It reframed domestic labor as a part of public infrastructure, not a matter of private altruism or “natural” feminine capacity.

Change followed quickly. Within months, the Althing, Iceland’s parliament, passed an equal-rights law; five years later, Icelanders elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world’s first democratically elected woman president — another milestone the U.S. has yet to reach and, in fact, arguably, a receding goal. Today, women hold roughly 46% of seats in the Althing. Iceland has also moved beyond abstract “equal pay” debate to audited compliance in which companies have to prove that their pay systems are fair. A landmark “3+3+3” parental-leave law passed in 2000 — three months for each parent, nontransferable, plus three shared months — institutionalized a critical shift, moving child care from a privatized maternal duty to a publicly financed, gender-balanced entitlement. The model has since expanded to 12 months (six per parent, with a small transferable portion), aligning incentives so fathers actually take leave and employers plan for caregiving as a predictable part of civic life.

While Iceland is consistently ranked among the nations with the highest rates of gender equality, Icelandic women continue to fight for change. Over the decades since the first protest, they have periodically staged mass walkouts to keep wage equity, safety, and care on a prioritized political agenda. These efforts are not perceived as threats to men, markets, and even civilization, as U.S. culture-war framings frequently imply, but are recognized as affirming that liberating women is just and good for society. Family life, workplaces, cultural norms, and politics changed and improved, not perfectly, but substantively and measurably. Iceland is now among the world’s most gender-egalitarian countries and routinely ranks in the global top five for overall life satisfaction and happiness.

So why isn’t what has happened in Iceland over the past half-century considered deeply revolutionary? Because we still define “revolution” by spectacle, in terms of how men historically “revolt” against oppressive states, and, often, in terms of the threat or reality of violent acts. What women in Iceland did was peaceful, slow, relentless, and unspectacular.

Canonical revolutions — the American, French, Russian, many anti-colonial wars — are described in terms of punctuated time and vivid, singular acts, often led by notable individuals: uprisings, barricades, capital seizures, and abrupt constitutional breaks portrayed in terms of “days that shook the world.” These histories favor speed, destabilizing and rapid change, people who command violence, formal authority, and glory — historically men. This ideal of revolution typically disregards the decades of quiet work necessary to change norms, influence minds, and make transformative social and political change. Narratively, it favors heroic and charismatic leaders commanding other people, wielding violence, and displaying adherence to fraternal norms and clear hierarchies of power. Masses of people marching together in protest is critical to building awareness and solidarity, to make challenges to abusive power visible. Feminists use these tactics as well. However, protests take things only so far and not nearly as far as the changes wrought in the “ordinary” arenas of women’s lives.

Iceland’s strike was only the beginning of something much larger. It was spectacle, to be sure, but it was women’s long tail of daily refusal, revision, and reimagining that constituted the revolution. Globally, we’re now living through similar slow revolutions: Women everywhere, even conservative women agents of backlash, are reorganizing time, care, relationships, sex, childrearing, safety, and what counts as “productive” and “pay” across every sphere of life. Even as entrenched forces try to dismantle women’s rights and public presence, we should celebrate this reality and embrace what it means for our own purposes and future.

Iceland’s social and political transformation may have started in the spectacle of the strike, but the course of this movement illustrates that the true power of change lies in the quotidian. Strikes punctuate awareness, but the country’s feminist revolution continues to unfold in durational time, over years, decades, and generations. It is emblematic of feminist changes across societies, achieved through women’s boundary-setting, refusals, delayed marriage and childbirth, creation of new kinship networks, institutionalization of more egalitarian work norms, and demands for safety and accountability.

The “ordinary” and theoretically “private” character of gender revolutions is granular and incremental, nonspectacular and nonheroic. In lieu of violent “regime change,” these revolutions are grounded in quiet, easily overlooked or trivialized tactics of everyday disruption, refusal, and intimate accountability. The resulting shifts compound to redistribute time, attention, and bargaining power before hardening into norms, laws, and administration. The results change how everyday life is lived. Today, for example, even the most antifeminist conservative is living a profoundly feminist life compared to even 60 years ago, when women could not be financially independent, well-educated, or more fairly paid and could be legally raped by a husband. It's always rich that women are typically stereotyped as the “emotional,” “weaker,” and “high-drama” gender, because we do our feminist work relentlessly, through endurance, with logical rigor, mainly in low-drama acts, quietly, over time.

Today, women acting en masse, leaderless, and across borders and decades are transforming society. They aren’t invested in heroics, generally aren’t seeking personal glory, and aren’t considered revolutionaries because what media still categorizes as “private issues” fail to meet male- and state-centric yardsticks for what counts as political.

In the past few decades, feminism has achieved world-shifting transformations in “private” social reproduction — care, kinship, sexuality, education, birth control, childbirth, child-rearing, demands for heteroegalitarianism. These shifts are still routinely misunderstood, demoted, and even demonized. Women’s demands for intimate equality are depicted not as a matter of social or political justice but as threats — to men’s emotional well-being, to the economy, to capitalism, to the law, to “civilization.” In day-to-day life, these demands and their effects are often characterized as selfish or even man-hating — either way as politically and publicly nondecisive nonevents, even as feminist changes and their effects are massively reconfiguring the economy, workplaces, and political agendas.

In the process, the feminist nature of revolutions is misclassified, erased, or subsumed in the idea that women’s individual choices are private matters only. Feminist agendas are still excluded from politics and from the idea of revolution at all. Take, for example, the increasingly public claim that Democrats lost the last presidential election because the party’s focusing on “women’s issues” drove men into the arms of the right. According to many pundits, issues such as abortion, care infrastructure demands, pro-Palestinian activism, and fighting white nationalism swamped “economic anxieties” narrowly defined in terms of jobs. This is an argument that can only be made if you center white male economic needs and ignore, for instance, the economic impacts of making abortion illegal, denying people birth control, and dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to correct historic wrongs. How for example, does compulsory pregnancy and having an unwanted child impact worries about working, money, and affordability?

When media refuse to look at the effects of women’s actions at scale, in the context of systems, economics, and political life, they fail to adapt their understanding of what constitutes revolution. Today’s feminist change, globally, is under massive threat, but it is still taking place, and in much the same way that it has in Iceland. It is diffuse, largely leaderless, and taking place at the most granular levels of life. Globally, it is diverse, technically accelerated, and expressed through networked movements (#MeToo; Black Lives Matter; NoDAPL; Polish women’s strikes; South American abortion-rights waves; LGBTQ rights; global solidarity movements for women in Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, and Iran). These efforts share ideas and strategies across cultures, languages, race and class, and borders, using technologies to communicate, imitate, innovate, and leverage virality. Feminists leverage coalition-building, intergenerational knowledge, and mutual care, even as they are forced to operate under political pressure and threats of violence and, increasingly, through displacement, militarization, and environmental collapse.

Despite there often being no central command, no one leader, limited hierarchy, and unreliable resources, feminist change continues to follow an arc from ideas initially adopted by small groups to new norms at scale. Ideas that once were emerging — and often gatekept by mainstream media — become massive cultural shifts and political demands (“yes means yes,” “care is infrastructure,” “Black lives matter,” “intimate violence,” “care work,” “water is life,” “pollution is violence”) to inform public understanding, political debate and statutes, and infrastructures.

To put it in terms that both the right and left wing technorati like: Feminist movements are anti-fragile: Distributed, organic, they run along rhizomatic pathways and small-world nodes — through identity and relationships; on sports fields and streets; in homes, classrooms, courts, media, workplaces, legislatures. When one channel narrows or closes, others appear and carry the shifted agenda. Symbols, words, tactics, even colors move quickly and are used widely and in evolving contexts. By the time change is recognized in terms of “political” gains, through formal laws, court rulings, and workplace policies, the change has happened. No spectacle, no heroes, no barricades.

In all of this foment, the public/private divide so central to the liberal order has been eviscerated. This divide maintained the idea that equality in the public sphere could coexist with inequality (and the beliefs that maintain it) in the private sphere. This concept of privacy, as feminists argued for years, historically maintained gender and racial inequality publicly. Taking to social media over the past quarter century, women exploded the long-standing feminist commitment to showing how the personal is political. We now talk about sex, bodies, pregnancy, coercive control, reproductive abuse, intimate violence, rape, menstruation, hormones, menopause, sexualized harassment, workplace bias, normalized misogyny and misogynoir, and violence at work, on streets, in homes. We now tie these to the reality of wider and wider circles of injustice and inequality.

Despite consistent and increasingly institutionalized backlash, feminism has, over decades, peacefully, thoroughly, and effectively enacted a genuine, world-altering revolution. We have rewritten our identities, relationships, and social contracts in the process. Today’s escalating macho-fascist backlash is a result of conservatives realizing the power and continued ambitions of this revolution, which, despite their best efforts, has so thoroughly transformed the consciousness and lives of so many people. Authoritarian movements and leaders — in Russia, Turkey, the U.S., the Philippines, Hungary, and elsewhere — are substantively movements to undo feminist gains and reimpose “order” that is, ultimately, male supremacist to its core.

Today, feminist conservatives (an actual oxymoron) around the world are tradwife propagandizing, trotting out ridiculous claims about women in public life, and celebrating feminism’s “failing.” Mainstream media often amplify their messaging. What these claims either ignore or forget, however, is that feminism has never worked through approval or depended on single spectacular moments.

They ignore that we are the revolution.

Soraya Chemaly’s new book, All We Want Is Everything, offers both unflinching analysis of male supremacy and genuine hope for a feminist future. From private relationships to global politics, the book examines how naming and refusing male supremacy is essential to resisting the forces tearing democracy apart. It is a call to refuse supremacist identities, relationships, and values in order to build more just, healthy, and sustainable worlds for everyone.