Ellen Bergman
Ellen Bergman was a Swedish musician, vocal educator and women's rights activist. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.Biography
Eleonora Magdalena Bergman was born at Strängnäs, Sweden. In 1864, she began her education at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm. She studied cello, organ, harmonic and solo singing, graduating in 1867. Ellen Bergman worked as a singing teacher at the Royal Seminary and Royal College of Music from 1868-99. For her achievements in musical teaching, she was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 1876.
From the first half of the 1880s, Bergman was known as a leading member of the Swedish Federation, the Swedish branch of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts which had first been established in Great Britain during 1869 by Elizabeth Wolstenholme and Josephine Butler. The organization worked against prostitution and particularly the abusive genital examinations of registered prostitutes. Svenska Federationen deemed the existing Swedish regulation system to be humiliating and socially stigmatizing. Bergman was an active writer and speaker who became involved in a conflict with Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg because of her views of gender, who once referred to her in a letter written in 1884 as: "djefla maran Ellen Bergman".
She was awarded the Illis Quorum in 1899.
