During the whole interwar period, women’s political representation in Denmark stayed at only 1-2 %, but after 1945 the number slowly started to increase. The real take-off phase came in the 1970s. Men were still the political leaders, but from the mid 1980s women MPs for the first time got an equal share of formal leadership positions in parliament. An institutionalization of gender equality policies took place during the 1980. Women slowly entered the leadership of political parties. The analysis will give an overview over this development. Moreover, it will look in details at what happened within three parties, the Liberal Party, the Social Democratic Party, the two biggest parties, and the smaller Socialist People’s party, which emerged in 1956 as a totally male dominated splinter party from the old Communist Party, but in the 1970s became the first Danish party with a female majority in parliament and the first to adopt a feminist program. Since the 1990s, however, the feminism of the party has faded. It is argued that the rapid engendering of Danish politics during the 1970-80s, was furthered by a special combination of a new strong radical-leftist feminist movement, which despised formal politics, and the moderate feminists active inside and outside the political parties, working across party divisions, including ‘right-wing feminists’. The chapter discusses why in the 1990s, women’s political representation in Denmark, once among the highest in the world, began to stagnate, and why quotas have been so unpopular .The stagnation is discussed in the light of the prevalence, in the 1990s of the EU issue which split the feminist movement, and in the 00s of the heated debates about immigration and Islam.
