Mothers of girls, well acquainted with the marriage market, consequently exerted all their energy to form their daughters for the positions they were expected to occupy. House-cleaning, washing, cooking, darning, etc.,—this was what they had to learn. A demure demeanour was what they had to practise. The society of men was what they had to avoid. Romantic ideas had, above all, to be suppressed, and only such love as would come after marriage, or at least after betrothal, was considered legitimate and decent. A great feature in their education was to closely observe the evils and troubles which followed upon poverty, and how much more comfortable life would be with a prosperous though unattractive husband than with a beloved man who might not succeed in the world. The idea of refusing a proposal of marriage from a well-to-do man, however old and prosy, was regarded as preposterous, and any respectable girl dreaming of such a thing would have been considered as a romantic, ungrateful hussy. As the men seldom married young, the girls were taught to ask no questions about their past, and were trained to sacrifice all their ideals of purity, their dreams of love, what a free woman would call her self-respect, their future happiness, their healthful youth, on the altar of Philistine respectability. There are other ways of degrading women besides yoking them with an ox to a plough, and that they were degraded and de-naturalized the thinking German and Scandinavian women had felt long before Ibsen wrote plays. The struggle for better treatment was however extremely weak and the progress towards emancipation extremely slow. Just as oppressive government, with its police persecution, gags open discontent and drives the forces of revolt under ground, so the tyranny over the German and Scandinavian women—when tradition and prejudice prevented open manifestations—developed in the hearts of women, especially among the most gifted, a dangerously strong spirit of revolt. Already at the time when Ibsen began to write there were numerous but isolated outbreaks. The old treatment, which generally resulted in turning the married woman into a dull, despondent house-slave, a soured invalid, a nagging scold, or a gossiping zany, began to produce scoffing Aspasias, neurotic adventuresses, and here and there avenging furies. This tendency to revolt among the women was stronger in Norway than in the other countries, because it developed parallel with that ethical awakening—the new _Aand_[1]—which during the latter part of this century has taken possession of so many Norwegian minds; also because the strongly imaginative and contemplative character of the Norwegian people, and the intensely emotional nature of their women, led them to brood over their wrongs in a thoroughly Norwegian fashion. Better education and wide reading tended in the same direction. [Footnote 1: _Aand_, the Norwegian for spirit, inspiration.]