Norway The women's movement

Ibsen consistently asserted that A Doll's House examined issues facing humanity rather than women in particular. Even so, the women's movement embraced him as one of the leading champions of its causes after the publication of the play. Many critics have observed that, regardless of Ibsen's claims, no playwright could have created such an assertive, likable heroine without feeling some sympathy for the challenges facing women at the time.

Camilla Collett became Norway's most celebrated feminist. Her groundbreaking novel, The District Governor's Daughters (1854-55), protested the notion that marriage was the all-encompassing goal of a woman's existence. Collett referred to the novel as "the long-suppressed cry from my heart," and it echoed the sentiments of many other women throughout Norway as well (Collett, p. 13). In Collett's view, women had to be educated in order to regard themselves in a new way. She felt sure that once they had more education and greater economic freedom, political privileges would soon follow. At the time, a woman's economic status was tied to her husband, who, for example, had to formally approve any loans for the household. If a woman tried to earn her own money, as Nora and Kristine do in Ibsen's play, her employment opportunities were usually limited to low-paying jobs such as needlepoint, teaching, and menial clerical positions.

The second half of the nineteenth century did witness many changes for women in Norway. In 1854 women received the same inheritance rights as men, and in 1863 the government declared that unmarried women over age twenty-five were legally competent. Educational opportunities expanded in 1882 when women gained the right to take the exams necessary for admittance to the university, although they had to wait until 1884 for the right to earn a university degree. The Women's Rights League was founded in the same year, following the controversy that would result from the performance of A Doll's House in 1879. A decade after the play, in 1889, Norway modified the marriage vows, in which a wife professed subservience to her husband, that had been in place since 1688. Finally, more than twenty years after Ibsen's play appeared, women won limited rights to vote in municipal elections (1901); it would take another dozen years for them to win universal suffrage.



Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/a-doll-s-house-events-in-history-at-the-time-of-the-play