The Invisible Work of Intellectual Advocacy: Female Volunteering for the Socialist Cause in Cold War Iceland

This article focuses on the writings of female Icelandic socialist intellectuals and activists during the twentieth century and analyses how they perceived of time spent on work dedicated to the socialist education of the Icelandic working class. It will neither try to evaluate the impact of intellectuals’ work, nor will it attempt to deconstruct the class dichotomy and power structures inherent in intellectuals advocating on behalf of workers. Instead, the focus here is on intellectual women's conceptualisation of time devoted to advocacy, broadly defined, in light of their gender, authority, and privilege. In Iceland, as in many other places, writers and intellectuals were at the forefront of the ideological battle between communism and capitalism that took place during the Cold War. Earlier, in the interwar period, intellectuals also led the way in terms of advocating for Soviet style socialism in Iceland, and they took their role as educators very seriously.