Kvindeliv

Arbejdermuseet, København

2023

A special exhibition at the Workers' Museum in Copenhagen on the women of Danish labour history, from the 1870s to today: work, everyday life and the double struggle for rights as women and as workers. It opens in a darkened reconstruction of the museum's own archive, where 396 boxes hold the papers of the movement's leading figures. Only 30 of them belong to women. From there the exhibition moves through the kitchen, the factory floor and the picket line, past lines of chalk handwriting on the walls, into a pink-curtained lounge where visitors sit down and listen to agony-aunt columns from Tove Ditlevsen to Tine Bryld. It ends in a miniature of the museum's own festival hall, where nine pioneers, none of whom have a statue in Copenhagen, are raised as classical busts. Kvindeliv ran for almost two years.