Ellen Key

Ellen Karolina Sofia Key was a Swedish difference feminist writer on many subjects in the fields of family life, ethics and education and was an important figure in the Modern Breakthrough movement. She was an early advocate of a child-centered approach to education and parenting, and was also a suffragist.

Ellen Key was born at Sundsholm mansion in Småland, Sweden, on 11 December 1849. Her father was Emil Key, the founder of the Swedish Agrarian Party and a frequent contributor to the Swedish newspaper Aftonposten. Her mother was Sophie Posse Key, who was born into an aristocratic family from the southernmost part of Skåne County. Emil bought Sundsholm at the time of his wedding; twenty years later he sold it for financial reasons.

In the late 1880s–early 1890s, Key decided to write biographies of women who had prominent roles in Swedish intellectual life; they were: Victoria Benedictsson, Anne Charlotte Leffler, and Sonia Kovalevsky. She would also write about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist.

The Cambridge Chronicle of Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 19, 1912 noted that in The Atlantic Monthly, Ellen Key, the Swedish writer, who has had such immense influence over the woman movement throughout Europe, makes her first appearance in an American periodical with her article on "Motherliness". The Woman Movement by Key was published in Swedish in 1909, and in an English translation in 1912 by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

After she retired from teaching, she met and helped the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She was later painted by Hanna Pauli. Die Antifeministen (The Antifeminists, 1902) by Hedwig Dohm cited both Key and Lou Andreas-Salomé as anti-feminists.

She died on 25 April 1926 at the age of seventy-six.