Author Bremer Fredrika

tractive with no hope of joining it, and the person telling the story and observing them is often an independent woman. She wanted a new kind of family life; not focused only on the male members of the family, but one which would give a larger place for women to be in focus and develop their own talents and personality. By the 1840s, she was an acknowledged part of the culture life in Sweden and was translated to many languages. Politically, she was a liberal, but she also felt sympathy for the socialism of the English working class movement. Her novel Hertha (1856) remain her most influential work. It is a dark novel about the lack of freedom for women, and it raised a debate which contributed to the new law of legal majority for adult unmarried women in Sweden in 1858, which was somewhat of a starting point for the real feminist movement in Sweden. At the reforms regarding the right to vote of 1862, she supported the idea to give women the right to vote, which was talked about as the "horrific sight" of seeing "crinolines at the election boxes": the same year, women of legal majority were granted suffrage in municipal elections in Sweden. The first real Women's rights movement in Sweden, Fredrika Bremer Förbundet, founded by Sophie Adlersparre in 1884, was named after her. She was happy to mention and to recommend the work of other female professionals; she mentioned both the doctor Lovisa Årberg and the engraver Sofia Ahlbom in her work, and she helped Johanna Berglind to fund a school for the deaf and mute in Stockholm. From 1849 to 1851, Bremer traveled by herself, in the United States and to the island of Cuba. She was disappointed in what she had heard to be a `promised land,' particularly in the institution of slavery. She is believed to be the first who wrote about Gospel music, the songs of the enslaved, which she had heard sung. She also visited Switzerland, Italy, Palestine and Greece between 1856 and 1861, and wrote popular accounts of her travels. Fredrika Bremer never married. She got to know Per Böklin, a principal at a school in Kristianstad in the 1830s, who gave her private lessons and became her friend. He asked her to marry him but, after several years consideration, she declined. Many of her works were translated into English by Mary Howitt. In Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, Mrs. March reads from Bremer to her four daughters.