2016 Essays

Fernanda Nissen

Myrstad, Anne Marit

The socialist politician and theatre critic Fernanda Nissen was called on to serve as one of two film censors when the Norwegian Censorship Board was established in 1913. Nissen held this position until 1920, when she died on a trip to Germany that she undertook to see film and theatre. In her years as a film censor, she was an active participant in the public sphere. She represented the Labour party in the municipality of Oslo and fought for working-class welfare, while also continuing her work as a respected critic of theatre and literature for the socialist paper Social-Demokraten. Her reputation at the time of her appointment as a film censor may still have been coloured by the scandal she caused in the 1890s, when, as a mother of two small children, she asked for a divorce. Her husband at the time was the editor of the leading liberal paper Dagbladet. However, while fighting on the side of the striking match workers, the first strike among women workers in Norway, she had fallen in love with the socialist doctor Oscar Nissen, who later became editor of the main socialist newspaper, Social-Demokraten.