Unsurprisingly, feminist contemporaries of Ibsen welcomed the play, although, as theatre critic Caroline McGinn points out, when he was invited to speak at a women's congress, he told them he wasn't a feminist himself. The first German production notoriously altered the ending so that Nora did not leave home, when leading woman Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to act the part as written, an amendment Ibsen later described as "a barbaric outrage". In the century and more since, the play and the role of Nora have taken on iconic status; Unesco's Memory of the World register calls Nora "a symbol throughout the world, for women fighting for liberation and equality