During the second half of the 19th century in Europe and the United States, women’s rights movements began to gain power. Women were working to ensure their voices were heard, as they sought to gain equal legal protections, improved working conditions, access to education, and the right to vote. Many mediums were women, and this role gave these individuals a platform from which to be “heard,” as they travelled and spoke to large crowds. Some of them employed this new social power to take on roles in political activism, often in alignment with the women’s rights movement, while also promoting issues like abolitionism and children’s rights.
In Sweden, girls and women were subject to inequal access to education. Female students were not accepted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts until 1864. In the ensuing decades women artists were still not given serious consideration; it was widely held that women could only copy and not innovate. When one of Stockholm’s first avant-garde groups, The Young (De Unga), formed in 1907, they explicitly forbade women from membership. In 1910, Hilma af Klint joined the Association of Swedish Women Artist (FSK), hoping to fight this status quo.
Likewise, Hilma af Klint’s older sister, Ida, was fighting for women’s suffrage through Fredrika Bremer Association. It was not until 1919 that women’s suffrage was obtained in Sweden.
Demonstration for women's suffrage, with among others FKPR President Frigga Carlberg, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1918 NMA.0032617
Photo: Anna Backlund / Nordiska museets arkiv