Freedom, Equality and Sisterhood

The Women’s Rights Movement of the 1970s was both contemporary with and an extension of the youth revolt. Among other things it was a reaction against unfulfilled expectations of equality between the sexes. The movement was a protest against the narrowing of women’s roles to those of wife, mother and housewife, as well as a revolt against the material differences between men and women.

One of the items on the agenda for both the earlier and the new Women’s Rights Movement was for men and women to have equal access to the labour market.

The fight for equal pay divided men and women, among other things because employers preferred the cheaper female labour to that of men.  In accordance with their traditional duty as family supporters, men needed higher wages.  One forgot that women, especially single mothers, also supported families.  In spite of early demands for equal pay for equal work, it did not become a law for all employees until 1976. During the market downturn of the 1980s, women were the first to become redundant.

During the 1970s holiday camps, folk high schools and houses for women were established all over Denmark - places where women could be themselves, take the floor and think things over under the motto: No class struggle without women’s struggle.

In the late 1970s the Women’s Libbers, or the Red Stocking Movement, as they were often called, entered the universities where they demanded scientific research into women's lives.

The Women’s Museum in Denmark is a child of the Women’s Rights Movement. The founding of the museum arose from a desire to communicate the results of the research to the public, male and female, to collect and exhibit artefacts from women’s lives - in other words, to give women their place in cultural history.

At the same time the Women’s Museum wanted to create jobs for women in an age with high unemployment rates for women. The museum started as a grass roots initiative and was built in close co-operation with educated and uneducated women, of all ages and from all social classes, among whom many had become involuntarily jobless.

Women’s cultural history was researched and told through exhibitions with titles such as: ‘Make Room for Life’, ‘One Way or Another’, ‘Boil, Pot, Boil’ and ‘Family and Toil’.

There is no end to the subjects that can be illustrated with women’s situations as a starting point.

The UN’s first Women’s Conference was held in Copenhagen in 1980. A number of female artists gathered extensive documentation of women’s art, which was shown on the modern medium of the time: slides projected from alternating carousels.

The Women in Art archive from 1980 is now a part of the Women’s Museum’s collections, whereas original works by female artists are still sparsely represented in public collections.