Women's Issues In And Concerning A Doll's House

Women’s Issues In and Concerning A Doll’s House



A Doll’s House was a groundbreaking play upon its original theatrical release. Critics were extremely negative at first, as demonstrated by Rosefeldt’s opinion, “In Henrik Ibsen\'s A Doll\'s House, Nora abandons her children. This offense against motherhood shocked the play\'s original audience just as it shocks some students of literature today. Certainly the play questions the real definition of motherhood” (Rosefeldt). The play was even banned for how it portrayed women. It showed them acting in a way that was illegal at the time, taking out loans without their husband’s permission and forging signatures. At the end of the 19th century in Europe, women were not allowed to speak up; they were to do as told by their significant others. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex also touches on this social issue, as the rights of women are the main subject of the book. The message of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is that women should be able to think for themselves, and over time, with the influence of other important figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, women gained autonomy by securing jobs comparable to men’s and by making their own decisions.

The most influential and important figures of the women’s suffrage movement were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Uglow explains in The International Dictionary of Women’s Biography, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to work for a constitutional amendment to give women the vote” (442). Without them, the Suffrage Movement may have never been in full swing and the rights of women would not have changed to this day. When they grew too old to be suffrage advocates, they passed the torch to the other women who kept it going. In The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time, Felder explains, “During the 1870’s and 1880’s suffrage became Anthony’s single-minded cause, while Stanton...