36 Facts About Fredrika Bremer

Fredrika Bremer was a Finnish-born Swedish writer and reformer.

Fredrika Bremer was born into a Swedish-speaking Finnish family on 17 August 1801 at Tuorla Manor in Piikkio Parish outside of Turku in present-day Finland, which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Sweden.

Fredrika Bremer was the second daughter of five and the second child of seven of Carl Fredrik Bremer and Birgitta Charlotta Hollstrom.

When Fredrika was three years old, the family moved to Stockholm.

Fredrika Bremer passed the next two decades of her life summering there and at another nearby estate owned by her father, spending winter in the family's Stockholm apartment.

Fredrika Bremer was a talented miniaturist and studied French, English, and German.

Fredrika Bremer described her family as "under the oppression of a male iron hand": While in Stockholm, the girls were forbidden from playing outside and took their exercise by jumping up and down while holding onto the backs of chairs.

Fredrika Bremer wrote French poetry as early as the age of eight, but considered her time in Paris disappointing because of her father's bad temper.

Fredrika Bremer was considered awkward and rebellious throughout her childhood; and one of her sisters later wrote of how she enjoyed cutting off parts of her dresses and curtains and throwing things into the fire to watch them burn.

Fredrika Bremer described the process as a revelation, as, once she had begun to write, she felt the words coming "as champagne bubbles out of a bottle".

Fredrika Bremer challenged her support of Enlightenment and Classicist figures such as Herder and Schiller with a conception of Romanticism grounded in Plato.

The President's Daughters is considered to represent Fredrika Bremer's increased maturity, using a well-observed portrayal of childhood for its humor while soberly illustrating a reserved young woman's blossoming into a more open and friendly way of life.

Fredrika Bremer initially planned to work as a nurse at one of the local hospitals but again demurred, instead devoting her time to literature.

Since her father's death in 1830, Fredrika Bremer had grown closer to her mother.

In 1842, Fredrika Bremer ended the self-imposed isolation in which she had lived since Boklin's marriage and returned to Swedish social circles, which she portrayed in her Diary the next year.

Fredrika Bremer began traveling first around Sweden and then abroad.

Fredrika Bremer's 1846 visit to the Rhineland prompted her 1848 volumes A Few Leaves from the Banks of the Rhine, Midsummer Journey, and Sibling Life, the last recounting her impressions of the tensions leading up to the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in France.

Fredrika Bremer then visited Spanish Cuba before returning to New York, leaving for Europe on 13 September 1851.

Fredrika Bremer spent six weeks in Britain, visiting Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and London and meeting Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, and George Eliot.

Fredrika Bremer co-founded the Stockholm Women's Society for Children's Care to assist the orphans left by the 1853 Stockholm cholera outbreak and the Women's Society for the Improvement of Prisoners to provide moral guidance and rehabilitation of female inmates in 1854.

Fredrika Bremer was not present during the Hertha Discussion, since from 1856 to 1861 she participated in another great journey through Europe and the Levant.

Fredrika Bremer was particularly interested in Switzerland's still-nascent "free church".

Fredrika Bremer stayed in Constantinople before touring Greece from August 1859 to May 1861.

Fredrika Bremer resumed her charitable projects and assisted with the Home Journal, the first women's magazine in Scandinavia, which Sophie Adlersparre had founded during her absence.

Fredrika Bremer was reportedly pleased with the abolition of the Diet in Sweden and of slavery in the United States.

Fredrika Bremer died at Arsta Castle outside of Stockholm on 31 December 1865.

Fredrika Bremer is the namesake of Frederika, a town in the American state of Iowa, and its surrounding Bremer County.

Fredrika Bremer is the namesake of Fredrika Bremer Intermediate School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, includes a Fredrika Bremer Room dedicated to her accomplishments.

Fredrika Bremer's novels were usually romantic stories of the time, typically concerning an independent woman narrating her observations of others negotiating the marriage market.

Fredrika Bremer argued for a new family life less focused on its male members and providing a larger place for women's talents and personalities.

Fredrika Bremer was interested in contemporary political life and social reform regarding gender equality and social work, and she was active both as an influential participator in the debate of women's rights as well as a philanthropist.

At the electoral 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", but Fredrika Bremer gave the idea her support, and the same year, women of legal majority were granted suffrage in municipal elections in Sweden.

The first real Women's rights movement in Sweden, the Fredrika Bremer Association, founded by Sophie Adlersparre in 1884, was named after her.

Fredrika Bremer was happy to mention and to recommend the work of other female professionals.

Fredrika Bremer mentioned both the doctor Lovisa Arberg and the engraver Sofia Ahlbom in her work.