Saga - 2019, Síða 88

The article argues that Icelandic women, most of whom were involved in the
women’s movement, consciously wrote about women’s exploits in the past and
present and thereby supported and strengthened the identity of women as legit-
imate historical, and thus political, actors in society. This form of historical writing
was not created in a vacuum but was a part of an international phenomenon.
Women in Great Britain and the Nordic countries were, as early as in the first
decades of the twentieth century, concerned with recording the history of the
women’s movement, which was, at the time, an integral part of strengthening
their political identity and agency. In the Icelandic context, the authors of these
works can be referred to as amateur historians (Smith 1998), as there were no
trained female historians writing women’s history in Iceland before the 1960s.
The object of these writings was to represent women as legitimate historical
actors and thus enable women to situate themselves in a society that had granted
them equal rights with men but that had yet to create a space for them to fully
exercise those rights.
After 1940 women increasingly criticised the slow progress of women’s rights
in the public sphere, especially within the field of politics and official postings,
and asked why they were not granted a share in society as full citizens now that
they enjoyed the same rights as men. As a result, they highlighted the story of
their foremothers in biographies, autobiographies and women’s magazines. In
many of these writings, the prevailing male-biased history that followed the inde-
pendence of Iceland in 1944 and the construction of national history is directly
challenged. Histories of women, ordinary women as well as trailblazers, were
clearly set against the growing number of biographies of “remarkable” men dur-
ing the 1940s and 1950s.
Thus, it may be said that women in Iceland, over most of the twentieth cen-
tury, recorded their own cultural and social history for the purpose of encoura -
ging modern women to take action.
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