Fifty years later, they still laugh about it. They tell stories of how they sabotaged the Miss Iceland pageant by bringing a young cow on stage, or how they protested women’s exhaustion by “crucifying” a giant rag doll on a Christmas tree in the middle of the street.
In the 1970s, activists from the Red Stockings movement changed the course of history in the island nation near the Arctic Circle. Inspired by a movement created in Denmark a few years earlier, a handful of young women also started wearing crimson tights and socks to motivate “their men.” The national public radio gave them airtime, and they began talking about periods, abortion, sex life, and equal pay. In the press, they were vilified and depicted as trolls with “bellies full of stone children, dangerous, ugly, and hairy.”
“At the time, we found it all very amusing,” reflects one of the Icelandic Red Stockings members. “But when I reread those articles today, I don’t understand how we could laugh about it—it was just too horrible.”