The Women's Museum Norway recently launched the abortion exhibition HYSJ! (‘HUSH!’). Their goal is to create a space for talking about a topic that is still shameful for many women today.
Kitchen equipment from the British Isles has been found in graves belonging to Viking women from aristocratic families. “We can gain new knowledge about women’s participation in the Viking raids by posing new questions to old findings,” according to researcher.
“Women’s history brings forth knowledge concerning one half of humanity, and makes sure that the discipline does not become gender blind,” says professor of history at University of Oslo, Hilde Sandvik.
“What was written about Hannah Ryggen in the eighties and nineties does not reflect the quality of her art and her significance during her own time,” according to art historian Marit Paasche.
“Norwegian women are perhaps not as modern and liberated today as we like to think,” says researcher Camilla Mørk Røstvik. She has examined how women – and some men – describe their experiences with menstruation in the twentieth century.
How have the limits for what is considered acceptable sexuality been drawn and negotiated through history? This is the question we need to ask in order to understand not only the past, but also our present, according to Tone Hellesund.
In the 1950s, the first successful gender reassignment treatment was carried out. Since then, major developments have taken place within medicine and law, but also when it comes to our perceptions of gender, according to historian Sigrid Sandal.
When Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex was published in Norway in 1970, both sexuality and existentialism were downplayed. “She was made popular,” says Ida Hove Solberg, who has examined the Norwegian translations of de Beauvoir’s work.
