Abstract:

An Open Moment is the story of the seven women I called mother. When I was born, on New Years Eve, 1972, my mother lived with six other women in the apartments next to the first Women’s House in the center of Copenhagen. For the first four years of my life I called them all mothers: “mother Sanne”, “mother Hanne”, “mother Inger.” In An Open Moment I tell the story of how these women arrived in Copenhagen from different parts of Denmark, how they joined the Redstockings movement, how they met at the first feminist summer camp on Femø in 1971, how they lived and worked together, and, finally, how the collective they built broke up in 1976. My story shows that the early 1970s was a particularly open moment in feminist politics in Denmark—one filled with such possibilities for radical change in our understanding of gender and sexuality that its effects still reverberate today.

Contact: Associate Professor of History Pernille Ipsen from the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the Department of Gender & Women´s Studies

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