Marriage and Party Discipline. The Political Involvement of Ingibjörg Steinsdóttir and Ingólfur Jónsson Between The World Wars

Marriage and Party Discipline: The Political Involvement of Ingibjörg Steinsdóttir and Ingólfur Jónsson Between the World Wars The history of Iceland’s Communist movement is too complex to be adequately described by analysing policy developments and party activities or by outlining the lives and actions of leading figures. Fortunately, the methods of microhistory offer a broader approach, in that they can illuminate the roles of everyday participants. The married couple Ingibjörg Steinsdóttir (1903–1965) and Ingólfur Jónsson (1892–1982) belonged to the rank and file, meeting in Reykjavik but moving in 1922 to Akureyri, where Ingólfur and his partners ran a printing office. The couple moved to Ísafjörður in 1926, with Ingólfur serving as mayor for eight years, while Ingibjörg was trying her luck as an actress in Iceland’s principal theatres. Convinced that society needed to be reformed in keeping with Communism, both of them helped found an organisation that supported this ideology. Neither of them, however, had any training in Communist theories, even though Ingibjörg had stayed in Moscow for seven weeks under Comintern auspices in 1930. Mainly, their political efforts were directed at improving working class conditions, and they seem not to have shown much concern for orders coming from central party organs far away. The party’s higher echelon in Reykjavík objected to the attempts of the couple to act however they saw fit for Communism; this peaked in 1932, when the central committee excluded Ingólfur from the party. This conflict reflects to a certain extent the historical tension between Communist hardliners and opportunists. Since the couple’s marriage ended with divorce in 1939, one wonders whether the party’s bitter struggles of the 1930s had undermined their relationship.