The movement of the doll was a influenced by a play about a woman who became self-motivated woman being in a womandenying man’s world. Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20 of 1828 in a city known as Skien in Norway. His was a Norwegian playwright best known to “A Doll’s House” among his many works. Ibsen was frequently known as the most influential playwright of the early twentieth century and his work was controversial and inspiring. He is also referred to as “the father of realism and is the founders of modernism on theatre. Several of his dramas were considered controversial and scandalous to his many in his time.
The European theater expected to model strict morals of family and propriety but he did the opposite. Henrik Ibsen is widely regraded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare and he also influenced other playwright and novelists such as George Bernard and Oscar Wilde. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903 and 1904. The “Doll’s House” is a play which the author used the device of money and role-played, Ibsen delves into the dilemma of many prescription for behavior and comportment that were enacted upon women during his own era.
The precise problem of this drama deals with the difficulty of maintaining an feminine personality within the confines of a stereotyped social role. The problem is personified as Nora, the doll, strives to become a self-motivated human being in a woman-denying man’s world. In the play, Nora appears to be a silly and a selfish girl, but then we learn that she has made great sacrifices to save her husband’s life and pay back her secret loan. By the end of the play, she has realized her true strength and strikes out as an independent woman. Torvald, for all his aults, appears to be a loving, devoted and generous husband.
But it later we learn that he is truly shallow and a vain man that is concerned with his public reputation. He is also too weak to keep his promise to help with any burden that would fall upon Nora. The Helmer marriage first seems loving and nice but them we discover that its based on lies, play-acting and an unequal relationship. Before the late 1800’s women in Norway were considered to be nothing less than a ” house wife”. Women weren’t allowed to vote file for divorce or take out loans without their husband or father’s permission.
As we see in the play, Nora couldn’t take out a loan without the authority of her husband or father. They needed the authorization of the man who “owned” them. From 1854 to 1879, new laws were being passed, and although it didn’t revolutionize the status of the women but it cross some barriers. In 1885, The Women’s Suffrage Association was founded under the leadership of Ms. Gina Krog, one of the pioneers of the Norwegian women’s movement and a major figure in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Ibsen’s work ” A Doll’s House” was embraced as on of the leading example in the women’s movement.
Ibsen’s concerns about the position of women in society are brought to life in A Doll’s House. He believed that women had a right to develop their own individuality, but in reality, their role was often self-sacrificial. He believed that women were not treated as equals with men, either in relation to their husbands or society, as is clear from Torvald’s horror of his employees thinking he has been influenced in a decision about Krogstad’s job by his wife. Two significant laws were passed in 1888. The first law was that married women gained a majority status. The second law ended the authority of the husband over the wife.
The man retained control of the home of the couple, but the woman could now freely dispose of the fruit of his work. In In 1890, the first women workers’ union was established, then in 1896, that of the Norwegian Women’s Health Organisation and the National Council of Women. When all men were granted full suffrage in 1898, many women saw it as deeply unfair that no women had the right to vote. In 1901, for the first time, women were allowed to vote in a political election but only women who had paid taxes exceeding a certain amount, or married women whose husbands had paid such taxes.
It was in 1910 that universal suffrage is adopted for all municipal elections and in 1913, by an act of Parliament, Norwegian women gained the right to vote and Norway became the first independent country in the world to introduce universal suffrage. After suffrage was won, feminists began to work to get women elected to government. The movement of the doll was a influenced by a play about a woman who became self-motivated woman being in a woman-denying man’s world. After that 100 years have passed, the progress toward gender equality in politics has been slow.
In January 2004, a law was enacted to help the process along. This law says that at least 40% of the board members of publicly owned businesses must be female, and at least 40% must be male. This has helped the struggle for equality, but even though Norway is a leading country in gender equality, statistics show that, as of 2012, 83% of board members at publicly traded companies and 73% of business owners are men. There is only one in every ten company directors are women. There is still a long way to go before women are as well represented as men.