Before there was a President Vigdís, there was a strike.
On October 24, 1975, approximately 90 percent of Iceland's women walked off their jobs — every job, paid and unpaid — and gathered in the streets. No cooking. No childcare. No office work. No factory shifts. The country ground to a halt in a single day, and the men of Iceland were left to manage their own children, their own meals, and their own realization of exactly how much work women were actually doing.
The Women's Strike of 1975 didn't just make headlines. It planted a seed.
In the years that followed, Icelandic women began asking a question: if women hold up this country, why shouldn't a woman lead it?
The answer they settled on was a theatre director named Vigdís Finnbogadóttir.
Vigdís had spent years turning the Reykjavík Theatre Company into one of the most celebrated cultural institutions in Iceland. She had taught French on national television. She was known for her intelligence, her composure, and her deep love of Icelandic language and heritage. She was also a divorced single mother — she had adopted a daughter — and she had undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer.
When women's organizations approached her about running for president in 1980, she agreed — not because she expected to win, but because she believed it was important to prove that women could lead political campaigns.
The questions she faced on the campaign trail were something else.
How could she govern as a single mother? Would she be distracted by childcare? Was she — one journalist actually asked — a virgin? And would having had a mastectomy, would having, literally, one breast — affect her fitness to serve?
She answered every question. Calmly. With humor. With the quiet authority of someone who had decided that the question itself revealed far more about the questioner than any answer could reveal about her.
On June 29, 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir won Iceland's presidential election in a four-way race, prevailing with 33.6% of the vote Wikipedia — a plurality, not a majority, but enough. She had not expected to win.
On August 1, 1980, she was sworn in as the fourth President of Iceland — and the first woman in the history of democracy to be elected head of state of any country in the world.
She served for 16 years. She was re-elected without opposition in the 1984 presidential election Wikipedia, ran unopposed again in 1992, and in 1988 won her only contested re-election with nearly 95 percent of the vote. She used her presidency to champion Icelandic language and cultural heritage, to advocate for the environment, and to represent her nation with a dignity and warmth that made her one of the most beloved heads of state in Icelandic history.
In 1986, she hosted the historic Reykjavík Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev — a meeting widely credited with beginning the end of the Cold War.
She retired in 1996, having served the longest tenure of any elected female head of state in history. In the years since, she has continued working on behalf of languages, human rights, and women's empowerment around the world.
She is still alive, now 95 years old, and still speaking.
Her personal motto, throughout all of it, has been reported to be simple: "Never let the women down."
She lived by it.
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