From the moment that Ibsen's plays began to be translated and performed in Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he began to receive remarkable accolades for his dramatic representation of women and womanhood. The extent of his personal sympathies for late-nineteenth-century feminism is rather ambivalent. Whilst in the notes he made for A Doll's House, for example, he reflected that ‘A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from a male point of view’, in a speech he made at a banquet given in his honour by the Norwegian Women's Rights League on 26 May 1898 he notoriously disavowed the apparent feminism of his dramas:

The ‘problem of humanity in general’ to which Ibsen refers is his preoccupation with the obstacles put in the way of individual liberty and freedom by bourgeois society in the late nineteenth century. It was Ibsen's commitment to individual freedom which appealed to nineteenth-century liberal feminism in Scandinavia and Western Europe, for it was on this that the Women's Movement based its claims for women's independence.