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It was at the time when Ibsen had become very gray and looked very world famous, as Gunnar Heiberg said after a meeting with Ibsen in Rome in 1878. The year before Henrik Ibsen shocked with embarrassing proposals in the Scandinavian Association in Rome, and topped it all by scolding the association’s women on a party night.
The scandal started at the association’s general meeting on 8 February 1879. Ibsen had submitted several proposals. One was about gender quotas. In “the occupation of the librarian post, suitable ladies should preferably be considered, if such have to apply”, suggested Ibsen. 124 years before the Storting’s controversial decision on gender quotas on company boards (Public Limited Liability Companies Act section 6-11a).
Ibsen was fervently convinced “that a woman would not only be able to exercise power, but also perform” the tasks “better than has often happened in the past”.*
But, as if proposals for radical gender quotas were not enough, Ibsen presented a proposal to give women full voting rights in all the association’s affairs. “Is there anyone in this assembly who dares to claim that our ladies are below us all in education or in intelligence or in knowledge or in artistic talent?” asked Ibsen.
The assembly gasped for air. Unheard of! They were dismayed and shocked. Not least the female members without the right to vote, Ibsen received no support from them. On the contrary. Only his most loyal admirers voted for the proposal. And they voted out of loyalty to Ibsen, not out of excitement over the proposal for women’s suffrage. The proposal was voted down.
‘Uneducated women in the deepest sense!’, snarled Ibsen.
Ibsen was furious. He went to each one and indignantly asked what they had voted for, but did not have time to ask everyone. The members of the Scandinavian Association fled the room at full speed, before the angry poet reached them.
Afterwards, Ibsen broke with his old friends, he no longer spoke to them, did not greet them in the street and they were not at all allowed to sit at the poet’s table in the pubs. Not before they eventually announced that they had voted for the proposal on women’s suffrage. Ibsen was “delightfully insolent towards his Opponents”, as the Danish writer JP Jacobsen put it.
The atmosphere was particularly tense in the Scandinavian environment as the association’s annual party evening approached. No one thought Ibsen would condescend to come. But he came! The party crowd thought the great poet had forgiven them, and the party came alive.
All at once Henrik Ibsen strode forward and positioned himself so that he had the whole hall with the dancers in front of him. Ladies and gentlemen! Ibsen spoke softly, but very, very seriously, about how he had done the association a great service by guiding the currents of the times into the association. But how had this been received? Yes, like a criminal assassination! Ibsen was no longer as subdued: And the women! They had intrigued and agitated and thrown his proposal into the mud! What kind of women were these, Ibsen asked “with contempt on his face”.
His voice trembled, his mouth quivered and he thrust out his lower leg. He looked like a lion, or much more, he looked like the later enemy of the people, Dr Stockmann. And he repeated and repeated: What kind of women are these, what kind of ladies, what kind of females, ignorant, in the deepest sense uneducated, immoral…. Flat out! A lady, Countess B., fell to the floor. She, like the rest of us, was waiting for a terrible word. But she anticipated the course of events and fainted. She was carried out.
This is how the journalist, author and theater man Gunnar Heiberg tells it in the article Ibsen-Minder **. He also says that Ibsen continued to speak after the fainted countess was carried out.
He was intoxicated in his eloquence about the wretchedness, ignorance, and constant resistance of people, especially women, to the new ideas that wanted to make people bigger, richer, better.
Ibsen tried to legislate, or enshrine, women’s rights in the miniature Scandinavian society over which he had direct influence at the time. He obviously understood what oppressive social structures were.
Should women take greater co-responsibility for standing up to men, even when it may cost money or influence?
But when the women themselves became more dismayed and shocked than eager at his proposals, things broke for the good Ibsen. He therefore scolded them for not being strong and courageous enough to have the strength to stand up to the men and the male society of the time. For not taking responsibility for changing the prevailing view of women. “Uneducated women in the deepest sense!”, snarled Ibsen.
Education is about the individual’s ability and duty to shape themselves and act as an adult member of society, about the responsibility to acquire knowledge and form character. About not being treated like a ravishing lark, or a sweet squirrel, as Torvald treated Nora.
When Countess B. was carried out of the ballroom, no one knew that Henrik Ibsen was about to write A Doll’s House, the drama that was to become his major international breakthrough. No one knew that the main character, Nora Helmer, would become a feminist icon.
As is well known, a doll’s home ends with Nora breaking out of her civil marriage with Torvald because she is not taken seriously as an adult, but is treated like a doll. She confronts Torvald that the two have never “exchanged a serious word about serious things”.
Nora declares that Torvald has never loved her. He “just thought it was fun to be in love” with her. She leaves lawyer Helmer so there is a thud at the gate. And not only rebel against the husband, but also against the contemporary bourgeois view of women. She leaves her husband and children because she has to find out “who is right, society or me”.
Nora has evolved from being a lark, or from playing the role of a lark, to becoming a feminist in her time. And lark has become a term for women who are sweet and silly, or who play sweet and silly.
Amalie Skram reviewed A doll’s house in Dagbladet (19 January 1880). She pointed to the play’s many warnings, not least to men who treat women like larks, dolls or servants. But also to women who “settle for something whose Consequences are as terrible as those with which A Doll’s House ends”.
Skram emphasizes women’s own responsibility not to allow themselves to be treated like larks, or act like larks or cute squirrels. She asked women to act with education to achieve justice between women and men.
We live in a different time. There are only a tiny handful of young women who run around on “Paradise Hotel” and other commercial television programs and are our time’s vulgar versions of larks and squirrels.
Is it permissible to ask whether women are taking the necessary responsibility for today’s view of women now? After Metoo, the powerful and necessary showdown with men who abuse their position to give women unwanted sexual attention.
Or maybe the time is just right, after the Metoo uprising has sunk into us, to ask: Why do women find it difficult to impossible to stand up to men with more political or economic power? Should women take greater co-responsibility for standing up to men, even when it may cost money or influence? Alternatively, why not? What is most important?
While Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is performed again and again and again on theater stages around the world, and women have mostly stopped fainting from being taught a lesson about personal responsibility.
*See relevant source references in the article about Fanny Riis.
**Gunnar Heiberg in the article Ibsen-minner (1911), from Salt and sugar (1924), taken from the collection Norske Erindringer og dagbøker, Gyldendal 1967.