Women's Front

The Women's Front (Norwegian: Kvinnefronten) is a Norwegian radical feminist organization that has in the 2020s increasingly promoted gender-critical and anti-gender views. Describing itself as the country's oldest and largest radical feminist group, it was founded in 1972 and was historically associated with the now defunct Maoist Workers' Communist Party (AKP). Its central focus from the 1970s was fighting what it called "monopoly capitalism" and "imperialism". It claimed that "we have one common enemy: imperialism" and considered "the state, business and capital" to be the main forces which oppressed women. Kvinnefronten considered themselves part of the "proletarian women's movement" and viewed feminism as an opposing, bourgeois ideology. Kvinnefronten was under surveillance by the Norwegian Police Security Service from 1975, as the authorities regarded the organization as a threat to national security. A 1984 report by the Police Security Service described Kvinnefronten as extremist and as a front organization for the Workers' Communist Party. Among other women's organizations in the 1970s Kvinnefronten was sometimes referred to as "Pål's hens" (Pål sine høner) due to its fealty to Pål Steigan, the AKP chairman.

In the 1970s, the Women’s Front was hostile toward lesbians, as a result of AKP's view that homosexuality was decadent and bourgeois. Since at least 2015 it has faced criticism for its views on transgender people. However, its public views on transgender people have been somewhat ambivalent, and it has for example called anti-trans group Women's Declaration International (WDI) "transphobes, racists and sexists" and said that "we strongly condemn them". Former Kvinnefronten board member Anne Kalvig has publicly criticized the organization for its reluctance to campaign openly against transgender rights; dissatisfaction among some members who shared her views led to the establishment of an anti-trans splinter group, Kvinneaktivistene, which campaigns against what it calls "gender ideology." However, Kvinnefronten has since more openly embraced gender-critical and anti-gender views, notably through its support for Reem Alsalem, a supporter of Donald Trump's persecution of transgender people who is considered a key anti-gender and anti-trans voice, and after Alsalem called on states to "ensure that the terms 'women' and 'girls' are only used to describe biological females". In 2025 Kvinnefronten signed a letter of support for Alsalem with other gender-critical and anti-trans groups including WDI. Later that year both Kvinnefronten and WDI Norway invited Alsalem to Oslo to promote her views on transgender people, which was described as a local expression of the anti-gender movement in Oslo. In its current program the Women's Front opposes what it calls the "queer patriarchy", a term described by the gender-critical publication Gender Dissent as having been coined by WDI's Christina Ellingsen.