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Mathilde Lucie Fibiger (1830-1872)
 "Our position in society is pitiful, and why?
What right do men have to oppress us?
Because we are subjugated, even if the chains are gilded."
Thus wrote the young debutant author Mathilde Fibiger in her epistolary novel Clara Raphael. Twelve letters, which was published in Copenhagen in 1850 with a foreword written by the well-known man of letters J.L. Heiberg. The book gave rise to a literary controversy that has achieved an established place in the history of the route of Danish women towards liberation. Perhaps too well established, for there were also others who took up the condition of women, but the significant fact was that a well-known man, who otherwise represented tradition, exceeded ordinary limits and recommended a text that loosened the mental stays in which most girls were encased throughout their whole upbringing, and which later in life became even more tightly laced for many.
The battle to loosen corset and chain is a subject that bears the stamp of the Danish political and cultural climate, but parallels and models always existed outside Denmark, and the capital - Copenhagen - served as the gateway for feminism imported from abroad. In the pioneer period of the second half of the nineteenth century the new tendencies often spread from the Copenhagen bourgeoisie to the provinces.
Civil rights and women
The French revolution in 1789 influenced the condition of women and raised demands for equal rights in several countries. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, which quickly was translated to many languages, Danish among them. But the new openness did not lead to the suffrage, not even in France. It was first after the revolutions and revolts in 1848 that steps were taken in the direction of the liberation of women in Europe and the United States. To begin with socialist programs often included the rights of women, but often they were forgotten in the heat of the class struggle.
In the United States a group of women with connections to evangelical circles and the anti-slavery struggle took on the battle for women's rights. In 1848 they declared at the famous meeting in Seneca Falls that the "all men" of the Declaration of Independence also included women. Most men did not share this opinion. Concurrence in this interpretation occurred first much later, but their initiative meant that in the United States the issue of women's rights in society reached the public agenda early. From the very beginning arguments were stub bornly and emphatically made for rights within marriage and the right to education. A thread back to the period of the French Revolution was thus picked up and served as inspiration to women in other countries.
The assemblies of the Danish estates in the 1840s included a few men who thought that widows should have the suffrage and a legal status equal to men with rights of majority, but this was not included in the Constitution of 1849, in which women are not even mentioned. Certain bonds were, however, loosened through laws and regulations in the period during which the absolute monarchy was abolished in Denmark. The difference between inheritance rights of sons and daughters was reduced in 1845, and in 1857 the difference was eliminated, as had been done in France immediately after the revolution.
Access of women to education beyond the elementary grades remained a difficult issue throughout most of the nineteenth century. A minor break-through was achieved in 1845 though, when it became possible for women to take the examination for heads of schools. This provided Danish women for the first time with the chance to take an examination in pædagogy, an opportunity that due to certain strong-minded women led to better teaching and education of a minority of girls.
Aside from this, it was in the areas of production and trade that the earliest break-throughs took place. Widows in Copenhagen were allowed after 1800 to receive the permission of the municipality to sew and sell clothing for women and children, and in 1827 the right to produce and sell homemade clothing and millinery was extended to all women who lived "decently". This system aimed primarily at solving the welfare problems of the city, but resulted also in a small step towards economic equality. The trade law passed in 1857 pushed in the same direction. That same year a law was passed that gave unmarried women over 25 of age right of majority, though with a guardian, a male, in reserve. Married women were the losers with regard to civil rights.
In Denmark the word "emancipation" had an inciting effect on both men and women around 1850. When the character Clara Raphael claimed that women were not automatically born to trival work, and that she would " strive and live for what I understand to be the emancipation of women," there were numerous persons with opinions that had to be made public, and the literary controversy was underway. The author and periodical editor Aron Meïr Goldschmidt took an active part. He was totally without sympathy for the emancipation of women and made this statement: "Our era has in principle given woman all the freedom that is in harmony with her nature." And that was that!
"A young girl. Full name: Clara Raphael. Age 20 years. Appearance: lovely. Religion: freethinker. Position: Governess for an estate manager. Character: original, which is testified to by she, herself, and by her girlfriend Mathilde." This is in all its unamiability the beginning of Kierkegaard's intended review of Fibiger's Twelve Letters, which appeared under the pseudonym of Clara Raphael in 1850. As one of the first manifestations of women's liberation, the book started a true "Clara Raphael feud," during which otherwise broadminded people such as Frederik Drejer and Goldschmidt let loose their satirical guns. That Grundtvig was among the few men who were for, only made Kierkegaard become even more against.
Source: The Royal Library Copenhagen
Updated 01 April 2010
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