page_title: Fredrikke Nielsen
section_title: Methodist preacher and women's pioneer
hierarchical_section_title: Fredrikke Nielsen / Methodist preacher and women's pioneer
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Fredrikke Nielsen. Private owner: N S-H. The Theater archive, University of Bergen.Norsk bokmål: Malt av Knud Bergslien (1827-1908). Privat eie: N S-H. Teaterarkivet, Universitetet i Bergen.
context_page_description: Fredrikke Louise Nielsen, was a popular actress and a women's pioneer. She played more than 300 roles in her twenty-six-year-long career, and was personally directed by both Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Ibsen chose her to play Signe, one of the lead characters in The Feast at Solhaug, which was his first audience success. In 1880, Nielsen left the stage and joined the Methodist Movement in Bergen. She now became a preacher, first in Scandinavia, and later in the United States. She felt a strong social commitment and used the pulpit for preaching other topics than religion, such as women's and children's rights.
  Fredrikke Nielsen was married to actor Harald Nielsen. She is also the great-grandmother of artist Gunnar Haugland.
context_section_description: Around the same time, the theatre at last decided to stage Ibsen's long denounced play Love's Comedy. Fredrikke Nielsen had probably recognized aspects of herself in the play's protagonist, Svanhild, when the controversial piece came out, and therefore had learned all the lines, but no theaters dared to put it up. Now sixteen years later, she was too old for her dream role, and was forced to play Svanhild's mother. This artistic defeat probably contributed to her entering into a deep existential crisis. The following year, she left her position at The National Stage, and June 17, 1880, she made her last performance, as Miss Bernick in Ibsen's The Pillars of Society. After that she never set her foot in a theater again. She underwent a religious revival, and became a Methodist preacher.
  In the following thirty years, Fredrikke Nielsen travelled around preaching. First only in the Scandinavian countries, but after her husband died in 1881, she travelled to the United States, where three of her daughters had settled. Here she preached for the Scandinavian Methodists, and managed to get through most of the continent.
  Her social commitment led her to also use the pulpit for issues other than religion. She fought for women's rights, to better single mothers' role in society, for inheritance rights for children of single mothers and for the education and upbringing of children. She was a popular speaker and she also wrote newspaper articles about these issues. At a time when being a woman in itself could be a challenge, Fredrikke Nielsen continued to travel until the end of her life.
caption: The Preacher. Oil painting by Knud Bergslien. The Theatre Archives, The University of Bergen. From around 1878 Fredrikke Nielsen started to seek the Methodists in Bergen, after her eldest son urged her mother to "leave the stage and follow the Lord."
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