In the time ahead, we will highlight feminist and queer icons. First up: Eva Kolstad.
Eva Kolstad emphasized that feminism is a shared struggle for an equal society. She was the first national politician in Norway to openly support queer rights. In 1978, she became Norway’s first Gender Equality Ombud. Eva Kolstad stood for an inclusive feminism — and she was far ahead of her time.
Eva Kolstad (1918–1999) led both the Liberal Party (Venstre) and the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights. For half a century, she was the central and unifying figure of Norway’s women’s rights movement. She served as Minister of Consumer Affairs and Administration in the Korvald government and, in 1978, became Norway’s first Gender Equality Ombud. Gro Harlem Brundtland wrote that Kolstad “was active at a time when it was difficult to gain support for ideas of equality and equal worth between genders.”1 Kolstad was also one of the pioneers of the Norwegian Humanist Association. The Liberal Party has honored Kolstad with the Kolstad Seminar on liberal feminism.
Women’s rights is a struggle for greater human freedom
Kolstad based her vision of women’s rights on liberal, humanist, and inclusive values — deeply rooted in human rights, respect, and empathy. For her, women’s rights were the shared struggle of all people, regardless of gender, working together for equality and human liberation. She emphasized that women’s rights concern society as a whole. In her 1959 article “Women’s Rights in Norway: What We Wanted and What We Want” in Kvinnesaksnytt, Kolstad wrote:
What we strive for is a society where individual talents determine a person’s path — not social norms or outdated traditions. Women’s rights are therefore, now as before, not a struggle against men, but a struggle for greater human freedom and for further spiritual liberation. The struggle concerns all men and all women — it concerns the family, and society as a whole.2
That same year, in an article in Dagbladet, she wrote:
Modern women’s rights are (…) a struggle against the entrenched, tradition-bound notions of what is masculine and what is feminine. It is a struggle for the liberated human being — the liberated man and the liberated woman.3
Women’s rights – feminism – equality
The term feminism only became widely used in Norwegian in the 1970s and 1980s. Kolstad and the women’s rights movement used the term kvinnesak (“women’s rights”) in much the same sense that we use feminism today — as a shared struggle for equality, grounded in human rights.
We Who Feel Differently
In 1957, Øivind Eckhoff published Norway’s first academic book on homosexuality, Vi som føler annerledes (We Who Feel Differently), under the pseudonym Finn Grodal. In 1964, a public debate arose around the book, during which Kolstad wrote an open letter to psychiatrist Jan Greve in Dagbladet. Kolstad wrote that Eckhoff’s book “moved me. It impressed with its calm and wise tone, its remarkable depth of knowledge, and its restrained, sensitive, and thoughtful style.” She encouraged not only psychiatrists and psychologists but also “ordinary people, who far too easily draw hasty conclusions about their fellow human beings,” to read the book.4 Her letter was likely the first time a prominent Norwegian national politician publicly spoke out in defense of queer people.5
- Gunnar Bergby, et al. (1988). Underveis: Festskrift til Eva Kolstad. Oslo: Aventura. ↩︎
- Eva Kolstad (1959). «Norsk kvinnesak: Hva vi ville og hva vi vil”. Kvinnesaksnytt. 10 (2): 11–15. ↩︎
- Eva Kolstad (25 May 1959). “Hva er i grunnen kvinnesak?”. Dagbladet. p. 3–4. ↩︎
- Eva Kolstad (22 February 1964). “Den homofile og psykiateren”. Dagbladet. p. 2. ↩︎
- Runar Jordåen (9 June 2020). “Eva Kolstad”. Skeivt arkiv. ↩︎