One of my book clubs read the Secrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza Reid. The author is the ‘First Lady’ of Iceland. She is a Canadien by birth who met her husband, the current President of this small nation, when they were both students at Oxford University. She believes her perspective is unique, moving to this insular society in 2003 without any knowledge of the language or culture. Now she represents the place around the globe. Still, she feels she has an ‘outsiders’ perspective that can be of use in telling the world what she has experienced here.

The word Sprakkar is icelandic for exceptional women, and that is the theme of her book. Iceland is at the top of the world list for gender equality (America lags behind in about 30th place). Then again, America lags behind in so many areas, health outcomes, education outcomes, personal saftety, income equality, and national happiness. In the last category, Finland is #1 with places like Iceland right on their heels.

Everywhere you look American is way behind except in rankings of bad things. Mass murders, we top the list. Child poverty, way up there. I just read that 100 million Americans have racked up $200 billion dollars in medical debt. An unplanned medical emergency is the no. 1 reason for U.S. bankruptcies. Other advanced countries treat access to medical care as a ‘right.’ We treat it as just another profit center except for certain groups. American exeptionalism has come to mean exceptionally bad and that American Dream is more like the American Nightmare.

The author, Ms. Reid, focuses on gender issues. Iceland was not always the nirvana it is today even though the country’s females always had to be strong and independent given the prime occupations of the land and that they were on their own a lot. As in many lands, women felt they were second class citizens until almost five decades ago. In 1975, women called a national strike. Of course, there are fewer citizens in the whole country than in Dane County Wisconsin where I live. Still, some 90 percent of the women turned out and the repercussions were profound (note, there have been several additional strikes, the most recent in 2018).

In just a few years, 1980, the people of Iceland elected the first female President in the world, Vigdis Finndogattir, not exactly a household name in the world. Few Icelanders achieve the notoriety of a household name since no one can pronounce their damn names. I might also note that there were earlier female Prime Minister (e.g., Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi among others) but these politicians rose to this postion by a party vote and not a general election.

With that, the race to gender equality was on. At the time of the national women’s strike, only 5 percent of Althing members (their elected governing body) were female. It rose to 15 percent by 1983 and now stands at 48 percent, far outstripping the U.S. and most other peer countries. About three out of four women have paid jobs; the comparable rates are 61 percent in Canada and 56 percent in the U.S.

The statistics could go on but that is not what struck me about her story. In fact, the members of the book club (the majority are women) were not enthused about the book, finding it sanitized and vanilla, as if problems were being downplayed. She is, after all a sitting ‘First lady’ (that is not what she is called there), so political sensitvity has to be an issue in what she publishes.

For example, I noticed she discussed the casual attitude toward sex there, which she praises as a form of liberation, along with the wide availaility of contraceptives and early sex education. Since I came of age in a period and culture (the 1950s, Catholic, working class) of total repression of all things sexual, my immediate response was to take the first plane to Rekyavik. One of her more humorous vignettes was the exasperation expressed by a young gal who felt pressured to introduce to her parents the young men she brought home for a night of carnal delights. What a burden! Then she mentions that only 30 percent of births are to married couples though many more co-habitate (note: there are far fewer teen and unwanted births, however). What she doesn’t explore are the longer term effects of the erosion of traditional marriage. I wish she had since I suspect a downside.

What really imprssed me was something else, not so much gender eqiality (a good thing indeed), but the safety net that makes the people of Iceland (and other Scandinavian countries) so relatively secure and content. It starts with pregnancy. The state supplies free midwife-based prenatal care in the home for the duration of the pregnancy. The birth process itself take splace in a high quality medical facility at a nominal fee (I think she said about 5 American dollars). A full year of paid family leave is guaranteed by the state that can be shared between the male and female parents. The cost of child care is very reasonable, and education through college incurs only a nominal administration fee of about $550 U.S. dollars. Of course, medical care is a right available to all citizens.

Thus, it is easy to have children. Ms. Reid had 4 kids in her first 6 years in the country. The birth rate in Iceland remains among the highest among advance dcountries. Having a child is not a huge economic risk. Living period is not fraught with anxiety where the loss of a job or a pre-exisiting medical condition can spell disaster. One public service caught my attention. She mentioned that the government directly pays child support to the parent raising the child and then attempts to collaect that amount from the absent party. Here, in Wisconsin, I and my collaegues tried to introduce a similar scheme back in the 1980s. We called it the Child Support Assurance scheme. Though we had federal permission to try it, we ran into a firestorm of opposition. Among other things it was seen as government over reach and radical socialism.

Natually, all this cost money and their tax rates are very high, even without any military exenditures. Americans would howl at the rates Icelanders pay. But thay don’t seem to mind. Why?

Well, they feel they get a lot for their taxes, and they do. What Americans pay out of pocket are included in an advanced scheme of public support. But I think the difference goes beyond that. They have a strong sense of community. They tend to see themselves as part of a large family where the burdens and risks of life are shared. When I asked a colleague many years ago why we in the States have such an inadequate saftey net, he respnded with one word … heterogenity. We have no common sense of identity, no common culture, no shared community. It is all ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ Our foundational myths ar based on the settlers who dominated the new land and the cowboy who, on his own, fought off all others for his space and his family. Images such as independence and self-reliance define the core attributes of the good American. Let everyone get their AR-15.

In my fictional book just coming out (Refractive Reflections) I write at length (through my characters) about what is needed to alter the American zeitgeist. It is not only a change in policy that is needed but a transformation in our foundational myths. We somehow must transition from selfishness, conflict, and domination to a something closer to collaboration, civility, and community. That is why I liked this book. It showed a society build on radically different presumptions than here and where the people also were much happier. True enough, they live on a smaller and more manageable scale, but I’ll overlook that for the moment.