Eliza Reid

Iceland’s first lady wants to teach the world a new word, said Leila Fadel in NPR.org. Eliza Reid, the Ontario-born wife of Iceland’s president, has put the term right in the title of her new book, Secrets of the Sprakkar. “It means ‘extraordinary women,’” she says, conceding that she chose to champion the term not because it’s widely used in Iceland but because English has no word like it. “What I love about it is that if you can think of all of the words we have to describe only women, I can’t think of any that are positive,” she says. Iceland, on the other hand, has celebrated strong female figures in its lore at least since Hallgerdur Long-Legs, in a 13th-century saga, took fatal revenge on a husband who slapped her. And Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Equality Index for 12 years running.

Reid found no shortage of contemporary Icelandic women to celebrate in her book, said Jane Smiley in The Washington Post. She interviews the world’s first democratically elected female head of state, now 91. She talks to a lawmaker who made global headlines in 2016 for giving a short speech in parliament while casually nursing her baby. She also profiles lesserknown figures, including an ex-nurse who’s become both a sexual-health educator and knitting-tour operator. Reid, 45, who edited Icelandair’s in-flight magazine before her professor husband catapulted into the presidency in 2016, credits Iceland’s abundance of accomplished women in part to policies that support parents. But she’s not claiming that her adopted country has achieved gender-parity nirvana. “World’s best,” she says, “doesn’t mean perfect.”