Many in Ibsen's day considered his work to be scandalous due to his critical portrayal of marriage, and women's role in it. "A Doll's House" presented an outwardly perfect marriage as filled with hypocrisy. In a Liberal Studies lecture at Malaspina University-College, Ian Johnston called female protagonist Nora Helmer's escape from her traditional social obligations "the most famous dramatic statement in fictional depictions of this struggle." It was this depiction, according to Johnston, that was key in linking Ibsen with women's rights, whether or not that had been his original intention.
In 1879, when Ibsen wrote "A Doll's House," married women were not legally permitted to borrow money without a husband's consent. Ibsen addresses this issue through Nora Helmer, showing her resorting to deception to borrow needed money. A decade after Ibsen wrote "A Doll's House," laws changed so that married women in Norway did gain control over their own finances.
A hotly debated topic in 1879 was whether women have rights of citizenship --- in particular, the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony started the suffrage movement a decade earlier, and during the same period, John Stuart Mill's famous essay came out on "The Subjugation of Women." Critics do not agree on whether or not it had been Ibsen's intention to support women's suffrage rights with his plays. His female protagonists caused controversy long before American women were granted suffrage in 1920. But a speech that Ibsen made to working men of Trondheim in 1885 suggests his intention, as well as his influence in this area: "The transformation of social conditions which is now being undertaken in the rest of Europe is very largely concerned with the future status of the workers and of women. That is what I am hoping and waiting for, that is what I shall work for, all I can."
In his notes to "A Doll's House," Ibsen wrote 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 the male point of view." At the end of the nineteenth century, "new woman" was the term used to describe women with a more feminist sensibility --- those who, like many of Ibsen's female protagonists, were pushing against the limitations imposed by society at that time. Ibsen's contemporaries associated him with the new woman, and her social ideals of equality independence rather than the more typically feminine ideals of self-sacrifice, according to the Ibsen page on the Brooklyn College website.