Vigdís Finnbogadóttir
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was president of Iceland for sixteen years, from 1980 to 1996, the first woman anywhere to be elected head of state in a national vote, a divorced single mother and theatre director who won the election of June 1980 against three men by a third of the vote, was returned unopposed twice and against a token opponent once, and made the office, which has no power, into the country's face abroad and the argument at home for what women could be. The girls born in Iceland in the 1980s grew up thinking the president was a woman's job, and the country has since had a woman prime minister, the first openly gay one, and a parliament that was for a time nearly half women. She was born in Reykjavik in 1930, the daughter of an engineering professor and a nurse, studied French literature at Grenoble and the Sorbonne, taught French, ran the tourist board's guide training, presented French lessons on television, and was director of the Reykjavik Theatre Company from 1972 to 1980. She adopted a daughter in 1972, the first single woman in Iceland allowed to. The women's strike of 24 October 1975, when ninety per cent of Icelandic women stopped work for a day, was the background to her candidacy. A group of women pressed it on her in 1980 and she accepted, she said, because she had run out of reasons to say no. She won with 33.8 per cent against Gudlaugur Thorvaldsson's 32.3, took office on 1 August 1980, and used the presidency for the language, the forests, which she planted trees for on every visit, and the children. She refused in 1985 to sign a law ending a flight attendants' strike on the day of a women's rally, and signed it after making her point. She hosted Reagan and Gorbachev at Hofdi House in October 1986 for the summit that nearly abolished nuclear weapons. She stood down in 1996, founded the Council of Women World Leaders, was UNESCO's goodwill ambassador for languages, and has an institute of foreign languages at the University of Iceland in her name. At ninety-five she is the country's most honoured living citizen.
- Lived: 1930 CE – ?
- Nationality: Icelandic
- Roles: president, head of state
