ABSTRACT
Now, today, I am travelling by a fast inter-city train heading for the Feminist University in Norway; a special educational institution which I set up in 1983. I realize as I observe the beauty of the autumn colours in the woods and fields outside my window that I am, indeed, 68-years-old or, to be more exact, 68 and six months. That amounts to about 18,000 days and around 400,000 hours, of which a third has been spent asleep. So tell me: how do I select from among those days and hours the events which give the most accurate picture of my life’s exceptionally rich opportunities? And of the ingenious structural and cultural resistance to feminists’ attempts to change my patriarchal society for the better? My train travels fast. When I reflect about my experiences, I realize that I should draw on my training in advanced statistics and methodology at the University of Michigan’s doctoral program as long ago as 1959-60. As a mother of four, I was told that the Board of the Institute for Psychology had been very doubtful about accepting me. I had won the American University Association of Women’s Scholarship. That counted positively. My grades from the University of Oslo were good. But a young mother of four? It would have been different, of course, had I been a father of four! The Institute had a rule which they had been following for a while: to admit three women for every seven male students with degree results of a similar standard. I found this a shocking state of affairs when I first heard about it, especially as the reason given was that the Institute needed scholars who in the future would become famous social scientists, an outcome which could not be expected from female students since they would gradually disappear from their jobs to have babies and take on family responsibilities. This was certainly a pre-Friedan society, implementing the patriarchal rule: ‘Keep them barefoot and pregnant to support the US economy by bringing new consumers into the market!’ But the quota argument had such an impact on me that I remembered it clearly when I later became an elected party leader in 1973 back in Norway. Then I demanded new rules including a quota system which would guarantee at least 40 per cent representation by women at every level of the party’s organization. This was possibly the first set of regulations of this kind in the world of politics (see Ås, 1984).
