Fredrika Bremer was born in Åbo (Turku) in Finland, then a Swedish province, as the daughter of Karl Fredrik Bremer (1770-1830) and Birgitta Charlotta Hollström (1777-1855). She but moved with her family to Stockholm when she was three years old. She grew up in Stockholm and in the manor Årsta outside Stockholm. Her father was described as somewhat of a house tyrant, and her mother was a socialite. She and her sisters where brought up to marry in to the aristocracy; a trip on the continent in 1821-22 was the finishing touch of her upbringing before her social debut.
Bremer was not comfortable with this role, and was inflicted by a crisis, which she overcame by charitable work in the country around Årsta Castle. In 1828, she debuted as a writer, anonymously, with a series of novels published until 1831, and was soon followed by others. Her novels were romantic stories of the time and concentrated on women in the marriage market; either beautiful and superficial, or unattractive with no hope of joining it, and the person telling the story and observing them is often an independent woman. She wanted a new kind of family life; not focused only on the male members of the family, but one which would give a larger place for women to be in focus and develop their own talents and personality. By the 1840s, she was an acknowledged part of the culture life in Sweden and was translated to many languages. Politically, she was a liberal, but she also felt sympathy for the socialism of the English working class movement.
Her novel Hertha (1856) remain her most influential work. It is a dark novel about the lack of freedom for women, and it raised a debate, in the parliament called "The Hertha debate", which contributed to the new law of legal majority for adult unmarried women in Sweden in 1858, and was somewhat of a starting point for the real feminist movement in Sweden. Hertha also raised the debate of higher formal education for women, and in 1861, the university for women teachers, Högre lärarinneseminariet, was founded by the state after the suggested woman university in Hertha. In 1859, Sophie Adlersparre, founded the paper Tidskrift för hemmet inspired by the novel; this was the starting point for Adlersparre's work as the organizer of the Swedish feminist movement.
At the electoral reforms regarding the right to vote of 1862, she supported the idea to give women the right to vote, which was talked about as the "horrific sight" of seeing "crinolines at the election boxes", but Bremer gave the idea her support, and the same year, women of legal majority were granted suffrage in municipal elections in Sweden. The first real Women's rights movement in Sweden, Fredrika Bremer Förbundet ("The Fredrika Bremer Association"), founded by Sophie Adlersparre in 1884, was named after her. Bremer was happy to mention and to recommend the work of other female professionals; she mentioned both the doctor Lovisa Årberg and the engraver Sofia Ahlbom in her work, and she helped Johanna Berglind to fund a school for the deaf and mute in Stockholm.
From 1849 to 1851, Bremer traveled by herself, in the United States and to the island of Cuba. She was disappointed in what she had heard to be a `promised land,' particularly in the institution of slavery. She is believed to be the first who wrote about Gospel music, the songs of the enslaved, which she had heard sung. She also visited Switzerland, Italy, Palestine and Greece between 1856 and 1861, and wrote popular accounts of her travels.
Fredrika Bremer never married. She got to know Per Böklin, a principal at a school in Kristianstad in the 1830s, who gave her private lessons and became her friend. He asked her to marry him but, after several years consideration, she declined.
Many of her works were translated into English by Mary Howitt. In Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, Mrs. March reads from Bremer to her four daughters.
