The Land of Fire, Ice, and Venus

It was Mother’s Day in Iceland. I was in a local bakery, having just returned from hiking Mount Akrafjall with a few friends. The shop owner said the celebration was the reason for a modest number of men arriving with their sons and daughters, women arriving with their friends, and sometimes, women arriving alone.

It was an interesting and peculiar sight to see. I watched old women walk behind their tensed, adult daughters, men cross the length of the floor with their hands in their pockets, and young women peer at the selection of desserts with a faraway look on their faces. Aware of how I tended to project my assumptions onto others, I let the eyes of every stranger in the bakery remain uninterpreted. Instead, I thought of ways to make my hiking story more dramatic to tell my loved ones later.

Three days after the experience (everyone was impressed by my hiking), I sat down in the living room of Bjarkarhlid, the Family Justice centre for survivors of domestic violence in Iceland as part of a field trip for Gender Equality Studies and Training students under GRO, a multi-disciplinary program promoting social justice and gender equality in low income, conflict and post-conflict countries.  In 2022, police figures denoted up to seven reported cases of violence by intimate partners per day.

As one representative explained the psychological effects of violence on women, I thought back to the day in the bakery and counted the number of women I had seen in just that half hour. What were they thinking and feeling when they woke up that day? What significance did that day hold for them? Was it just a trip to their favourite bakery or did it spark larger sentiments around the power they held beyond a day?

Last year, famously reported across international news organisations, a day-long women's strike was called in Iceland with the slogan: You Call This Equality? In March, a field trip to the National Park of Iceland’s history would reveal the answer. 

 A snapshot of the memorial plaque in the National Park, detailing the drowning of women in 1729.

The same spot which held the world’s oldest parliament institution, the Alþingi, also held evidence of close to 18 women being drowned for ‘dulsmal’ or hidden/ murdered child births. As I read the memorial plaque and observed the self-critical tone of the words engraved, my questions, just like the lines between my eyebrows, deepened. Was it so hard, anywhere around the world, for us to imagine women as equal, as thinking, feeling humans who deserved to choose?

The question of ‘undoing’ inequality unraveled with this overwhelming feeling. Who benefited from the inequality? Who had more stake in its existence? How entrenched was it in our practices as a society?

And more importantly, how long was the journey?

When tracing the strands of inequality, I realised it went back as far as ancient Greek literature. In the play “Medea”, the main hero, Jason says the below-quoted paragraph to his lover, the woman who betrayed her entire society to support him in his quest. 

“But you women / Have reached the stage where, if all’s well with your sex life, / You have everything you wish for, but if that goes wrong, then all that’s best and noblest / turns at once to dust. If only children could be got some other way,/ Without the female sex! If women didn’t exist, / Human life would be rid of all its miseries!”

One would say Jason was misogynistic and harbored a deep psychological prejudice and hatred against women. In fact, for many of us, Jason was a familiar figure in our own lives. He was our friend, brother, father, partner, colleague, neighbour, internet stranger, pedestrian, boss, doctor, scientist, shopkeeper, taxi driver, bakery visitor, and more.

The existence and similarity of many of us experiencing so many Jasons across the world led feminist philosopher Kate Manne to call misogyny a cultural practice of domination, and the worst manifestation of gender relations in a society. Misogyny assumed gender roles to be inherently asymmetrical because the two dominant heterosexual genders were fundamentally felt to be unequal.

Much like the Lögberg or Law Rock upon which men stood to discuss important matters of law, down below in Drekkingarhylur or Drowning Pool, close to half of those sentenced, who were women navigated the exhausting waters of emotional, physical, and mental labour to exist in a gendered social contract.

I had come to Iceland with the belief it would teach me its mysterious, democratic ways of human dignity. The longer I stayed, the more I was a reluctant witness to the fire beneath the icy layer of representation. It became clearer and clearer to me that gender equality was still a hope, a dream, a utopia for many here.

And yet, (Ah, the feminist ‘yet’!) the existence of fire taught me a valuable lesson: to tap into the deeper roots of the movement for equality and address the very source of hate. To allow ice to melt from the embers of burning questions. When asking, “You Call This Equality?” women, non-binary residents, and queer minorities of Iceland were asking and questioning each other: Was the reality of gender equality in present-day Iceland the extent of our feminist utopia? If so, was it enough?

In India, the fight for equality was much farther behind. We were just beginning to talk about the luxury of never being molested on a bus, the wild, utopian dream of walking alone at night, and for many of us who never get to open our eyes, the dream of coming into the world to warm smiles from loved ones. Seeing Iceland achieve and strive to answer these fundamental questions melted my icy smile. Much like the women in the bakery, we were arriving at different times, asking for different things, but we were united in our cause, and in our belief that we decide what we call equality.

And it certainly isn’t this.