When Henrik Ibsen attended a meeting of the Norwegian
Association for Women's Rights, Ibsen announced that he "must disclaim the honour of
having consciously worked for women's rights...to me it has been a question of human
rights" href="http://www.helium.com/items/1121047-henrik-ibsen-dolls-house">(Literary
Analysis, Ravenscroft).
When Ibsen made this statement he
was referring to the fact that it did not make sense to him to separate the rights of
women from the rights entitled to all human beings. Ibsen believed that all human beings
were entitled to earn enough money to make a living and take control of their own
financial situations. For instance in A Doll's House, Ibsen used
Christine's poverty to denounce society's control over what sort of jobs women should be
entitled to, such as low paying teaching, domestic, and clerical positions
I). Ibsen also used Nora's difficulty in being able to acquire a loan to
denounce the financial restrictions that his society placed on women
1). He believed women were capable of making their own financial decisions and
caring for their own financial well-being.
Beyond finances, Ibsen
believed that like all human beings, women were entitled to the right of an education
and the right to have and share their own thoughts and opinions. Ibsen used Nora's
protests of being uneducated and against having to adopt first her father's opinions and
then her husband's to show just how imprisoned women were in his society
III).
Henrik Ibsen saw society treating women as less than
human beings and it disturbed him greatly. He saw no need to distinguish between the
rights of men vs. women because both sexes were equally human beings and both should be
treated with regards to their basic human rights.
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