Anette Dina Sørensen
Field of expertise: Gender studies, feminism, pornography
Short bio: MA history, gender studies (1994), Assistant professor University of Roskilde (1994), Project manager Nordic Gender Institute (2003) Editor of the web edition of History of Nordic Women’s Literature (2009), Reveiwer of feminist literature in the daily newspaper Politiken.

Jytte Nielsen
Field of expertise: Gender studies, feminism, women’ s movement
Short bio: MA literature (1995), Research librarian (1996), head of KVINFOs llibrary (1997)

Eva Lous
Field of expertise: The history of the Danish Women’ s movement
Short bio: MA history/ ethnology (1982), research librarian at State and University Library, Aarhus (1987), head of the national women’s archive The Womens’s History Collections (1997)

Selection

Report on the selection process by the Danish FRAGEN team

Expertise on the history of Danish Second Wave Feminism is concentrated in the archive and library sector, i.e. in The Women’s History Collection and at KVINFO, whose joint digitalization project Danish women’s modern history is published on KVINFO’s website.
The site includes about 250 texts from The Second Wave, which in Denmark rose during the 1960’s and faded away in the 1980’s.

Thus the director of The Women’s History Collection and the director of KVINFO’s library were obvious choices for the task in hand, and they were supplemented by a researcher with expertise in gender studies from the 1990’s and 2000’s.

The task of the team was, first, to select less than 10 texts out of the very many texts, which all reflected the almost revolutionary changes in the gender system in two decades from 1965 to 1985. Then the team had to find influential texts from the last two decades, where public interest in feminism, equality and gender studies was decreasing.

Because of the very different course of Second Wave Feminism in the various member states, it has been up to each team to adjust both the time period and the criteria to the state of art of their particular country. Thus, we have placed historical relevance on top of our list of criteria.

Since Danish Second Wave feminism was inspired by socialism, and because lesbians became front figures in the women’s movement, intersections of class and gender as well as controversies about heterosexuality versus lesbianism are key issues in many of the texts. Thus multiple inequalities and diversity of approaches have been adequate criteria as well as class and sexuality, whilst race and ethnicity first entered the feminist agenda in the late 1990’s.