The emancipation of women was not a new topic in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Mary Wollstonecraft had, with her A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, articulated the many concerns of inequality that the bourgeois revolution in France had placed on its agenda, and she had criticized Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Romantic ideals of womanhood and femininity that situated women in a gendered and complementary sphere. However, with the spread of Romanticism in Europe, the Enlightenment ideals of sexual equality receded in favor of an ideology that emphasized differences between men and women in their biology and inner lives. Women's liberation was not necessarily perceived as a battle for social, political, and legal rights in society, but more as a desire for spiritual and intellectual freedom on a par with men's personal imaginative freedom.

In Denmark, Mathilde Lucie Fibiger embraced some of these Romantic ideas and wrote in response to them...