TRANSCRIPT
Sound of Icelandic wind
Hildur Hákonardóttir: In Iceland there's always wind.
Sound of wind stopping
Hildur: But everything was still. And it was unbelievable. It was like the time stood still. [laughs]
Sound of silence, seagulls, flag pole
Hildur: We wanted it to be known and understood that society couldn't function without our work, both outside in the workfield and also in the homes. If we didn't take care of the homes, what happened to the children? Who cooked? Who looked after? Who cleaned? And also out in the societies that it would stand still if we didn't show up, and… it worked! It worked. [laughing]
Music
Rachel Stewart: On October 24, 1975, the women of Iceland walked off the job. They left their work in shops and schools, on farms and fishing boats. They dropped their kids at their husbands' offices. They abandoned the housework and walked out the door.
Hildur: Well, I was then a school mistress of the art school, so I went down to the school and the women students, they were painting placards and I was just looking after everything was fine and everything was happy.
Sound of voices growing louder in the streets
Hildur: And then you just went downtown and your eyes got bigger and your mouth felt sort of open wand you saw all these women coming from all sides, down all the streets, all sort of streaming into the middle. It's very difficult to describe it, because it was so big. I think everyone was equally sort of surprised. There wasn't anger either. We just wanted equality, that was it. It was more this feeling, like I said, it was a day of the now. There was no past, there was no future. It was just happening now.
Sound crowd getting louder and a speech
Hrafnhildur 'Hrabba' Gunnarsdóttir: 1975, I'm 11 years old. You know, I was very short and so it was kind of overwhelming to be in this sea of people. And I remember just my mom being there and us being there together. And it was an amazing feeling because such a crowd I had never seen in my life. I do remember them singing the song, Afram Stelpur – Go Girls.
Music – Afram Stelpur
Hrabba: It just blew a spirit into your chest. I mean, I woke up the next day and I just thought, okay, everything's going to change…
Rachel: This is Don't Drink the Milk – The curious history of things. I'm Rachel Stewart. Today – what happens when women refuse to do invisible work and say 'enough is enough'.
More music
Phone ringing
Different voices: "развален телефон", "Chinese whispers", "telefono senza fili", "telephone", "kulaktan kulağa", "Stille Post", "испорченный телефон", "téléphone arabe", "głuchy telefon", "Russian scandal", "Don't drink the milk"
Dial tone, sound of hanging up phone
Rachel: So, we follow familiar things around the world and through time on this podcast. Today's topic – invisible work – it feels a little… hard to visualize?! So Sam, can we really count this as an everyday thing?
Sam Baker: Yes! All day, every day, all around us. To help you with that visualization though, I collected a few examples –
Montage of voice notes: First of all, I would like to say that my husband is great and he takes very good care of our daughter. However, I'm the one responsible for organizing activities like swimming and gymnastic classes and music classes and I made sure she got a spot in daycare and later in preschool. // Which sounds like a simple task, but actually took contacting over 60 places. // So every day I have to check in their school planners if the teacher has written a to-do for me and do the to-do at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. in the evening. // Also let's just take a minute to talk about the school bag, packed with the books, so that's textbooks, also pencils, compass, ruler… // Constantly making sure you have a snack on your person. // Do I have enough time to make dinner if we have an appointment? Or do I need to cook something that day that means we have enough leftovers? // Oh, I need to clean. I need to get this and that before to be able to clean because, I don't know, we don't have sponges anymore. // Tidying up when visitors come over. // If we're going on a trip, it begins and ends with me entirely. // I'm the one who trims our daughter's fingernails and toenails. // Child care – fill the gaps with grandparents or babysitters or both. // Agreeing to support colleagues with things beyond my job description because it feels like the right or kind thing to do. // What clothes does he need for the upcoming season? // Buying new clothes. // Organize. Clean out. Just get rid of. // Planning of birthdays, planning of play dates. // I haven't even thought about holiday shopping. // I don't actually write to people on their birthdays, but I do remind my partner to write them. // …aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, I have a mental list – my side and your side. I know who likes what, who needs what. I know who's going to be hurt if we forget. Do you?
Rachel: Thanks to everyone who added another task to their mental load and sent us those voice notes.
Eve Rodsky: It's known as the second shift, the mental load, invisible work, invisible labor…
Sam: Someone who's thought a lot about this – in her own life and for the rest of us – is author and lawyer Eve Rodsky.
Eve: My favorite term was actually coined by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels. And she called the unpaid labor of women, invisible work. And why I loved her article so much when I discovered it was that she argued that this work is intentionally invisible. The work of the home and raising a family, which in the US women do two-thirds or more of, and globally as well, it's even worse. She argued that that was intentionally invisible because visibility equals value. And if you valued this work, then it would be too expensive and that women would stop being the social safety net of America.
Sam: Yeah, because I don't know if you noticed, but that list we just heard came entirely from women. Women are shouldering way more of the burden of this kind of invisible work regardless of whether they also work outside the home and regardless of if they make as much money as their partners.
Eve: Women say to me that their mind never shuts off, that their work is never done. And so that is a recipe for a lot of mental health implications and physical health implications.
Rachel: Just a head's up, if you've got kids listening in with you, this section does contain a few swears, so you might want to save it for later. But if you have kids, this episode is especially worth your time!
Sam: Now of course, women have been protesting for equality for a long time – for the right to vote, for anti-discrimination and harassment laws, for the right to make choices about their own bodies, for protections against violence and abuse, for more representation in boardrooms and in politics. There's a lot of history here, history that warrants a whole podcast, maybe 100 podcasts, maybe 1,000. But despite all the progress that women have made in the last century or so, invisible work deserves a closer look, because it's still eating up our time, our brain space…
Eve: The reason is we fundamentally view women's time differently than men's time. And what I discovered doing this research for 10 years is this fundamental discrepancy, which is that women's time is viewed as sand, as infinite, and men's time is viewed as finite, like diamonds. And we start to say things to ourselves like 'we're better multitaskers', 'well, my partner's job is less flexible than my job'. We say, 'yes, we're both colorectal surgeons, but my partner is better at focusing on one task at a time and I can find the time'. But I think what I'm here to tell you is that there's actually no way to find time. We're not Albert Einstein. We can't f*ck with the space-time continuum. There's just different ways that women are expected to use their time. And that's what we have to dismantle and that's why this topic is I think so hard.
Sam: So the home and family is one type of invisible work, but as we're gonna see, it can also crop up at work or anywhere, really.
Rachel: And I guess it exists all over the world and probably has existed for a really long time.
Sam: Definitely. That's why today we're on the hunt for solutions to this age-old problem. We've got three very different examples of how women push back.
Rachel: We want to know: Has any country actually cracked it and do the answers translate?
Sam: First stop, Iceland.
Hildur: My name is Auður Hildur Hákonardóttir. Hildur means someone who goes into battle and intends to win it. [laughs]
Rachel: You heard from Hildur at the beginning of the episode. She'd lived in the US and returned to Iceland in the 60's feeling inspired by a new era of activism.
Music & sound of women's movements/protests in 1960s/70s
Hildur: When I came back, I knew you could change things. And I saw how some of the old things were just frozen and not necessary.
Rachel: She wasn't the only one who saw things this way. Left-wing feminist groups calling themselves the 'Red Stockings' were popping up in the US, but also in Denmark and other Nordic countries. Inspired, Hildur and other women brought the Red Stockings idea to Iceland.
SFX old radio tuning
Gudrun Augustdóttir: I heard an announcement in the radio. "Women in red stockings come down to Lemur (which is not far away from here) in your red stockings." And I thought, wow, what is this? That's where my new life started. [laughs] Well my name is Gudrun Augustdóttir and we have this system that we take our second name after our father. My father was August, so I'm his daughter. And I'm 77 years old, will soon be 78.
Rachel: At the time, Gudrun was 22, married and pregnant with her second child. She was working a low-paid airline job, and change was in the air.
Gudrun: And everything was happening all around the world, in the States, you know, the Vietnam War. In France, the students. We wanted to make a revolution. We wanted to change the world and I cannot bear the thought of going in my mother's and my grandmother's footsteps. I want to be part of this society, an active part, and I want to live in a country where women are respected.
Rachel: Part of this revolution needed to begin in the home. Icelandic women were shouldering most, if not all of the household burden. And at no point was that more obvious than during the holidays.
Christmas Music
Gudrun: The day before Christmas, we went downtown. People were shopping and the housewives were sort of nervous. Will I be able to make all the food? Wrap all the…
Rachel: …wrapping presents, preparing dinner, baking treats, hosting family.
Gudrun: We, the Red Stockings, were giving out pamphlets that said 'Is this our Christmas? Is this how we want to spend Christmas – tired beyond repair? Or, why do we do this?'
Rachel: But pamphlets alone wouldn't quite capture the public's attention. The Red Stockings wanted to do something shocking, so they made a lifesize doll, dressed as a housewife … and crucified her on a Christmas tree.
Gudrun: And we were not very popular. They said, 'there's nothing holy in your life, not even Christmas.' And we said, 'Christmas can be holy, but that doesn't mean that women have to work so hard that they can't enjoy Christmas.'
Christmas Music
Gudrun: Well, this doll, a young guy, you know they were trying to tease us or something. He lifted up the skirt of the doll and then one of us said, ‘What are you doing? This is your mother.' And he jumped back.
Rachel: In fact, many of the tactics used by these women to gain attention and cause a stir involved a good dose of humor. Like this other time when they decided to call out unfair beauty standards by entering a cow into a local beauty pageant.
Gudrun: And I think we destroyed beauty contests in Iceland for very many years.
Sound of cow mooing
Rachel: But not everyone found it so funny. Like feminist movements before and after, the Red Stockings copped a fair amount of backlash.
Gudrun: People said, you go too far. You are far too rebellious. But we wanted to be, we wanted everybody to notice what we were doing. That was the only way to change Iceland.
Rachel: One thing that clearly needed to change in Iceland was respect for women and the work they were doing. Work that went unnoticed and undervalued, inside and outside the home.
Gudrun: Many men said, 'Our work is so much more important than yours, so much more.' And then we said to each other, 'What can we do to change this? How can we make men see that Iceland is impossible to run, everything will collapse, if we walk out?' …and so we did.
Music
Rachel: At a women's conference in Reykjavik in 1975, a plan was hatched for a strike – for women to walk out on their household responsibilities, their parenting duties and their partners' expectations. For this kind of strike to be a success, it had to be big.
Gudrun: This should not be a small group from the Red Stocking Movement. We needed every woman, from every party. We need you all, we need you all…
Rachel: But there was a problem for some of the conservative women…
Gudrun: They don't like the word 'strike'... And then a very small woman, she just stood up and said, 'what about calling it a 'day off'?' And she smiled. And everybody smiled. Yes! So that was how we could unite.
Rachel: So the women took the "day off". Although it's hard to verify, estimates suggest that an incredible 90% of Iceland's women took part.
Sam: Just to put that into context, the Women's March in the US in 2017 saw an estimated 1.3% of the population take part.
Sound up newspaper rustling
Rakel Adolphsdóttir: So here we have the sort of Newsweek, the Herald Tribune. So ‘women take off in Iceland,’ ‘Icelandic women stage massive equality strike.’ From Canada, ‘men laughed but women strike no joke’... ‘
Sam: Rakel Adolphsdóttir is showing us old news clippings from the day after The Women's Day Off. We're in the Women's History Archives, which she runs and the headlines are pretty clear – this was a success! That was partly because this movement managed to reach women with different politics, different ideologies…
Rakel: Not every woman thought the same thing about abortion rights, for example, or whatever they came up with but they could agree on that women should get better pay and this equal pay as men, that was a big issue. And their work should be valued, whether it be in the home or in the workforce.
Sound of papers rustling
Sam: She leafs through some pictures from the day and points out women not just from all across the political spectrum, but from all walks of life.
Rakel: You know you had the older ladies and you had the workers, you had students, you had young mothers with their babies in the pram. Teachers, for example, they were a big part of it. Women from theater, women in music, farmers, yeah so, and also the housewife.
Sam: Iceland is a cold, but beautiful volcanic island that feels like you're about to fall off the edge of the Earth. So what made this place the perfect spot for a feminist revolution?
Rakel: Well, first of all, it's a small community. I think that also helps. It's a community of neighbors, but also of relatives, and what they did, they just called everybody. And they would just sort of knock on doors on the way there, be like, 'aren't you coming? Aren't you coming?'
Sam: Women tapped their networks and reached out to every women's organization from unions to knitting clubs. It was a true social network. And it paid off.
Rakel: Women in fishery work they all left their workplace and got on a bus and sort of drove to Reykjavik to take part in the protest and sang songs along the way and so on. There were protests all over the country as well. So was not just in Reykjavik, it was also in Isafjordur, or Akureyri in the north, or Eelstad in the east.
Rachel: And how did the men react?
Rakel: Variously. Some had fun with it. They had daddy daycare centers set up at work. Hot dogs sold out because that's the easiest dinner you could prepare for your kids.
Rachel: Do you think that people actually believed it was going to be pulled off?
Rakel: No, I don't think they believed it would be so wildly successful. But also something turns in the atmosphere and it's easier to go when everybody else is going.
Hildur: I think we had no idea how big it– it went so far from what we had even, I think imagined, or I had imagined. It was just a miracle. But if you do things in the right way at the right time, it happens.
Rakel: So I'm holding this album, a vinyl album they made for the Day Off. And it says “Áfram Stelpur” and that means 'go girls' [singing: "Í augsýn er nú frelsi"]
Music
Rachel: There's that song again. 'I dare, I can, I will' – words that would become synonymous with the Women's Day Off in Iceland. Following the Women's Day Off, things in Iceland really did start to change.
Rakel: The government set up offices for equality. And you could also come there and complain if the new Equality Act wasn't being followed in any workplaces or wherever…
Hildur: …women started to seek education. They flooded into the universities…
Rachel: … and just 5 years later in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the first democratically elected female head of state in the world. Gudrun remembers the night well.
Gudrun: I was alone at home with my two girls, and I slept in the middle, or didn't sleep. They slept. And when the news came, I of course cried, I cry sometimes when I'm happy. I looked at them both and thought 'your life will be so much easier than ours and our mothers and grandmothers', to have a president elected – the first in the world! Here in Iceland.
Sam: Icelandic voters would go on to elect more women to parliament, particularly those who ran in the Women's List Party. Today, the gender divide in the Icelandic parliament is just about 50/50. And Hildur makes another interesting point.
Hildur: When I'm talking to the older men up at the senior center, I have realized that yes, they got the good jobs and all that, but then they had to stay at their jobs every day, day out and day in. In a way, I think maybe that they also won, because when we partook more in the official running of society, also that freed them from some of the stress. So I think everyone won.
Rachel: Today Iceland is regularly named the top country in the world to be a woman, but when you look at wealthy countries, there's one place that's often bringing up the rear. More on that after the break.
Podcast trailer: Past Present Future
Rachel: Now, it's not just women who are partnered or who have kids who have to deal with invisible labor –
Haein Shim: Oh I know plenty of people who did not get hired because of their looks. I also know plenty of people who got fired because of their looks. Like they would have this conversation with their managers for sure, like, 'Hey, what's going on? You're not looking presentable. Are you a feminist?' [laughs]
Sam: Haein Shim is a women's rights activist and university student from South Korea.
Rachel: South Korea. That's the country that comes off so badly in all those gender equality rankings. A country known for Kimchi, K-Pop, and K-beauty.
Haein: Since I was little, I was kind of forced into this idea of conventional beauty, I would say.
My dad would sometimes like turn on the TV and you know, tell me how to walk like Miss Korea in like a swimsuit wearing like high heels, and my mom, she is the person who would, you know, stood on the scale every single day and would kind of ask me on the street, like, 'Oh my god, look at that person. Like, do I look fat like her?' And I remember kind of overhearing my parents talk about my appearance when I was kind of half asleep. And they spoke a lot about my stomach and my thighs, you know, just kind of like a pure criticism about my body. You know, I was only like six years old.
Music
Sam: Of course, Haein internalized these messages. In her teens, she developed an eating disorder and ended up in hospital several times.
Haein: Even in my lowest point like physically and mentally I think people around me like my friends and family, they praised me and also told me how great I looked. But in the reality, the health care workers in the hospital, they really saw it through.
Sam: After high school, Haein worked minimum-wage jobs. She spent a lot of her limited income on makeup, clothes and the latest skin care regimens. But in many ways, she felt like she had to.
Haein: I knew that the owners of the restaurants, like jewelry shops or like other places I worked, you know, like the supermarkets, they kind of expected me to to wear makeup, for sure. So I'd, you know, wake up like two hours early to take a really long shower because you know, my hair is really long and I have to shave my armpits and legs and I dry my hair but also like I have to style it and I was expected always to have like a smooth skin because dry skin on the women is such a turn off for men and so I go through this really complicated skincare routine in the morning and even though I was so broke my closet was full, but my refrigerator kind of was always empty.
Sam: This beauty regimen was a lot of work. And who was she really doing it for? To meet the expectations of her employers, her parents and society. That's invisible work. You might sometimes hear it referred to as appearance labor, display labor or beauty labor.
Haein: Of course, none of this was actually pushed on my male colleagues, you know when I'm doing the same work. You know this meant they could sleep more, or do whatever they wanted with that extra hour or two or maybe three.
Sam: Haein even got plastic surgery to reduce the size of her jaw. It cost her eight grand. She thought it would change her life dramatically, but it didn't.
Haein: Oh, hell no. I was still in the working class. I was still hustling.
Sam: South Korea is a plastic surgery destination. A place where it's not strange to receive a plastic surgery package from your parents or grandparents as a high school graduation gift - because it's seen as an investment in kids' futures. Haein bought into this idea too, quite literally. Until one day, a friend made her start to question things.
Music
Haein: She was like, 'Don't you think we're kind of spending a lot of money on the makeup and like the clothing and everything?' And I was like, I don't know, I got kind of defensive. Her question was super reasonable because we were always worried about money. We're always worried about, like, when are we going to pay rent next time? I'm kind of behind my phone bills. And I think, as I engaged a little more deeply in that conversation, I had this, I don't know, feminist 'aha' moment.
Sam: Many other young South Korean women were having the same "aha moment." They found each other online and started the Escape the Corset Movement, inspiring each other with pictures and videos of themselves crushing up makeup palettes, destroying uncomfortable clothing, and cutting their hair.
Haein: And it got spread like wildfire. It was insane.
Sounds of social media posts
Sam: Haein eventually got up the courage to ditch her makeup too.
Haein: It took me a while, but one day I [breathes in] I had nothing on my face but the basic lotion, right? So I decided to step outside and go for a walk. The first moment when I went outside without my makeup, it felt right. That was really the true me and I felt that, you know what, maybe I am enough.
Sam: The final step was letting go of her hair. Her long, shiny, straight hair that she had invested so much time and money into over the years.
Haein: I got rejected from hair salons like three times. They said, 'you're going to regret this later. And I'm like, 'what the heck? I'm ready to pay.' And once I had that feeling of the buzzing…
Sound of hair trimmer
Haein: …the clippers kind of like touching my neck a little bit. It felt so good. It felt so good that I was almost screaming inside and kind of thinking that this feels amazing. I don't have to wash my hair, my long hair. Oh my god, it took me so long to wash it, dry it, style it. My head is not heavy. I don't feel like, you know, this heavy burden on my head anymore.
Sam: The online spaces that allowed Escape the Corset communities to grow, have also become sites of backlash. Haein says she and others in the movement have received hateful and threatening messages, activists have been doxed, and harassed with revenge porn and deep-fakes. And the backlash has even spilled offline.
Haein: We recently also had a criminal case where a stranger man attacked a female clerk working in a convenience store simply because he assumed that she was a feminist because of her short hair. And he was kicking her and punching her and screaming, saying that you deserve this because you're a feminist. You know, this is a reality that we're living in.
Rachel: This violence and discrimination has come on a wave of anti-feminism in the country that reaches right up into the government. In 2022, President Yoon Suk Yeol's pledge to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality proved very popular among some voters.
Haein: I think a lot of women do not want to continue to live like their moms, but a lot of men want to live and continue their lives like their dads. I think that's the problem. A lot of men really kind of like believing that, know, okay, if you do well in school, if you do get a good job, you know, you will eventually meet a woman who's beautiful and, you know, out of your league because you work really hard, almost as a reward. But in our same generation, women – we're going to get educated, we're not going to be someone's trophy wife.
Music
Rachel: This is how the idea for the 4B movement began.
Haein: So 4B means 4 'nos', 'bi' means no.
Rachel: No to heterosexual sex, dating, marriage, and babies.
Haein: We do not need men to continue our inner lives. We are rejecting all of that.
Rachel: From more obvious invisible labor like household chores to beauty regimes and now to rejecting marriage and motherhood – it might seem like an extreme leap. But it's all tied up in the expectations heaped on women. And so Haein and other women basically want to hit South Korean society where it hurts.
Haein: South Korea really is a country with the lowest, lowest birthrate in the world. If South Korea is going to go down with this low birth rate because we're not going to give birth to continue this really toxic society of harming women, then this is going to be the first example in the world history that a country disappeared because of women who are so sick and tired of getting treated as second class citizens, they didn't reproduce anymore.
Rachel: It's not clear that the 4B movement will have any significant impact on South Korea's already very low birth rate. But these women are still saying loud and clear: If society doesn't value and respect us, we reject the expectations of that society. We're going on strike. And this idea is now resonating on the other side of the Pacific… in light of recent election results.
Music
TikTok montage: Women are talking about bring that 4B movement right here to the United States.// It is the best thing I've ever done for my mental health.// We are taking coochie off the table indefinitely.// We're done. We're not going to partner with them or have their kids.// If you're angry about the 4B movement, you're the problem.// It's gonna be a huge success here in America.
Eve: People really underestimate the unpaid labor part of the birth rate discussion. I think people are missing the fact that women are getting smart to the fact that there's 2000 items of that cognitive labor that they would be responsible for if they choose to have a family. Well, the alternative, as we said, is there's a 4B movement. So of course you can do that, right? But we have to just acknowledge the reality that marriage is a very, very, very prominent institution. And so to ignore making that institution more fair, makes absolutely no sense to me.
Sam: We'll come back to those 2000 tasks and responsibilities in a second. Here's Eve Rodsky again. In 2019, she published a book and game called Fair Play. It offered a new idea for how to find a fair balance of work in a household between partners. In her own life and those of many women around her, Eve realized that working moms and stay-at-home moms alike were feeling deep resentment towards their male partners, reaching high levels of burnout, and in some cases, even their breaking points. All this became so obvious to her one day when she joined a bunch of friends on a breast cancer march.
Eve: And we were covered in pink glitter, you know, carrying signs. But because it was a Saturday morning and I was with 10 women, not all married to men, but most were, when everybody got silent around noon, texting their husbands back when their husbands had sent them things like, 'Where did you put Hudson's soccer bag?' Or 'What's the address of the birthday party? You didn't leave me a gift.' Or my favorite was my friend Kate's husband – remember this is noon – he texts her, 'Do the kids need to eat lunch?'
Sam: So because her friends couldn't be sure that their kids would be fed lunch, they skipped lunch with one another that day.
Eve: But what I did that day was I had them help me count up how many phone calls and texts we had received before they left. And we had 30 phone calls and 46 texts I believe, for 10 women over 30 minutes. And so that began this idea that visibility equals value.
Sam: Like Icelandic women decades earlier, Eve figured out that she needed to make the invisible, visible. One way to do that? Write it all down.
Eve: So I started to ask what is invisible to your partner that takes you more than two minutes to do? And over a year, I collected 98 tabs in an Excel spreadsheet and 2000 items of invisible work that I titled the 'Sh*t I Do' spreadsheet.
Sam: But Eve realized that making this work visible wasn't enough. To actually change her situation, to make a functioning home tenable, she came up with a game – a game that boiled these 2000 tasks of invisible work down to just 100 cards, cards that you divvy up with your partner. The person holding any given card has to take full ownership of that responsibility.
Eve: And when I would ask people questions like 'Who handles groceries?' What was happening to women married to men, and when I spoke to the men as well, was that they kept saying 'Both, we both do.' And I called it the both-trap. And so what I did was ask a question that literally revolutionized my life and I think the data, which was to go back and ask them, 'how does mustard get in your refrigerator?'
Sam: She asked this mustard question all around the world – in Germany, Japan, China and Norway. Ok, she modified the condiments to local tastes, but you know what? There was a pattern.
Eve: In all of these countries, women were the ones knowing that their second son, Johnny, likes yellow mustard, not Dijon, but yellow mustard with his protein, otherwise he won't eat it. And then they were monitoring that mustard, for when it ran low. And then the reason the both-trap came because men were reporting that they go to the store to go pick up the yellow mustard. So conception and planning were staying with women, whereas men were helping with execution. But the problem is they're bringing home spicy Dijon. And so when that happens, women started to tell me 'Eve, you have a Fair Play card called 'estate planning'. I'm not going to trust my husband with my living will. The dude can't even bring home the right type of mustard.'
Sam: So Eve wrote rules into her game that whoever held the 'grocery' card - had to own it from start to finish. It's this concept of owning a task that's helped get men on board - no more feeling 'nagged' to do something. And, it lightens the mental load for women. But some female readers questioned why they were the ones having to start this conversation.
Eve: How does change happen? Change happens because the oppressed are the ones who change things, right? I mean, factory workers strike. It's not because, you know, all of sudden one day, the CEOs of car manufacturers say, 'you know what, I actually think we're not giving a living wage to our employees.' Right? It just doesn't work that way. So women are the ones shouldering this unpaid labor. And so I think we have to remember that it's very hard to do the work of trying to change systems.
Sam: And Eve admits that getting men bought in has been difficult too. But not impossible. And men who have embraced the idea have given pretty positive feedback. She even told me about the reaction from a few male influencers…
Music
Eve: And they will look at their audience and say, there's not a day in my life I've ever regretted being the tooth fairy for my kid. There's not a day in my life that I've ever looked back and say, I regret the fact that I took my kid to school. I think that the more we start realizing that housework and chores – the way we've been talking about it is completely wrong. And we need to blow that up and look at this as a, not just a factor of inherent fairness, but a factor of love, connection, strengthening our institutions, health, humanity, raising the next generation, then I think we will finally center this conversation that has been absent.
Sam: Whether it's walking off the job of invisible work like the women of Iceland, refusing to do it at all anymore like activists in South Korea, or putting all your cards on the table like Eve – your tactics might depend on the cultural context in which you find yourself. But one thing is clear: making this work visible is an important first step to showing its value.
Sound from cinema
Rachel: Back in Reykjavik, we've come to a special anniversary screening of a new documentary – The Day Iceland Stood Still. The place is packed. A lot of politicians have turned up ahead of upcoming snap elections. In the crowd we spot Gudrun, Hildur and many of the other women who took part in the Women's Day Off 49 years ago. And remember that 11-year-old girl, struggling to see above the crowd that day but so certain that it was the beginning of something new?
Hrabba: I think it has really marked my whole life.
Rachel: She's the co-director of the film.
Hrabba: Okay, my long version name is Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir, sometimes called Hrabba, especially in America. And if you can't say Hrabba, you can call me Jane. It is very important to make films, write books, do whatever you can because if it's not in the history books, it didn't happen. You know, you look at America, you look at different places in the world, you look at Afghanistan, it's just extremely frustrating. And you hear things about Japan and Korea and other places. And I think, you know, I would just like the film to spread like the wind and inspire women to step forward, make changes, and be able to reach their most fullest potential.
Sounds of crowd cheering
Rachel: Nearly 50 years on, this is a celebration of the turning point of the Women's Day Off. But it's also an acknowledgement that the battle isn't over. Rakel from the Women's History Archives is here too. In fact, she helped organize the event. And she tells us that there are still a lot of big problems to deal with, like the gender pay gap and gender-based violence. And what about that invisible labor?
Rakel: So women still take on a lot more of the housework than men and take care of the kids in the household and also elderly parents or sick relatives.
Rachel: Pretty much all the women we spoke to in Iceland were very keen to steer away from this image of Iceland as a utopia for women. But the Women's Day Off was an important moment with an important legacy.
Rakel: I think it's just that you can see that if we work together, and if we push on the agendas we can agree upon, then we can really turn things around quite rapidly. And then of course we have disagreements as well. But there's sort of key issues that we can agree upon and then we can really change our society.
Rachel: And let's not forget that Icelandic humor.
Rakel: Fun and humor can sort of push through and above a lot of other things and it can energize you.
Rachel: Because there's always this narrative of angry feminists, right?
Rakel: Yes. Yes. And we are angry! But we're also having fun.
Women singing Áfram stelpur in cinema
Right on cue, a familiar chorus breaks out.
Gudrun: If you feel something deep down, as I did when I was 20 or something, and get the opportunity to do something about it, then you are a lucky person, absolutely.
Rachel: So, Women's Day Off 2025?
Music – FREKJUKAST by mammaðín
Rachel: This episode of Don't Drink the Milk was a labor of love for producer Sam Baker. Julia Rose checked the facts and Charli Shield did the invisible task of editing. It was hosted by me, Rachel Stewart. Thank you to filmmakers Hrabba and Pamela Hogan for their help and insights. Do check out their documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still. It's fantastic, and like the women of Iceland, quite funny. Thanks also to the RÚV Archive for broadcast material from the Women's Day Off and we'll link to Iceland's Women's History Archives in the transcript on our website. Now do you recognise the strains of that Icelandic protest song? It's had a modern remix, so final thanks to Icelandic artist mammaðín for letting us feature it. "I dare, I can, I will…"