New Woman
- For Bolesław Prus's 1893 novel, see The New Woman.
The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century and had a profound influence on feminism well into the twentieth. The term "New Woman" was popularized by American writer Henry James, to describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States.[1] The New Woman pushed the limits set by male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). "The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain," according to a joke by Max Beerbohm (1872–1956).[2]
Writer Henry James popularized the term "New Woman", a figure who was represented in the heroines of his novels, such as Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, and Daisy Miller in the novella Daisy Miller. According to historian Ruth Bordin, the term New Woman was
intended by him to characterize American expatriates living in Europe: women of affluence and sensitivity, who despite or perhaps because of their wealth exhibited an independent spirit and were accustomed to acting on their own. The term New Woman always referred to women who exercised control over their own lives be it personal, social, or economic.[3]
Post-secondary and professional education
Although the New Woman was becoming a more active participant in life as a member of society and the workforce, she was most often depicted exerting her autonomy in the domestic and private spheres in literature, theatre, and other artistic representations.[4] The 19th-century suffragette movement to gain women's democratic rights was the most important influence on the New Woman. Education and employment opportunities were increasing for women, as Western countries became more urban and industrialized. The pink collar workforce gave women a foothold in the business and institutional sphere. In 1870, women in the professions were only 6.4% of the United States non-agricultural workforce; this rose to 10% in 1900, then 13.3% in 1920.[5]
A larger number of women were winning the right to attend university or college. Some were obtaining a professional education, and becoming lawyers, doctors, journalists, and professors, often at the prestigious all-female colleges such as the Seven Sisters schools: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. The New Woman in the United States was participating in post-secondary education in larger numbers by the turn of the 20th century. Alice Freeman Palmer became Wellesley's first woman president in 1881.
Sexuality and social expectations
Autonomy was a radical goal for women to aspire to at the end of the 19th century; it was historically a truism that women were always legally and economically dependent, either on their husband, relatives, or social and charitable institutions. The emergence of education and career opportunities for women in the late 19th century, as well as new legal rights to property (although not yet the vote), meant that they stepped into a new position of freedom and choice when it came to marital and sexual partners. The New Woman placed great importance on her sexual autonomy, although this was difficult to put into practice as society still voiced loud disapproval of any sign of female licentiousness. For women in the Victorian era, any sexual activity outside of marriage was judged to be immoral. Divorce law changes during the late 19th century gave rise to a New Woman who could survive a divorce with her economic independence intact, and an increasing number of divorced women remarried. Maintaining social respectability while exercising legal rights still judged to be immoral by many was a challenge for the New Woman:
Mary Heaton Vorse put her compromise this way: "I am trying for nothing so hard in my own personal life as how not to be respectable when married."[6]
It was clear in the novels of Henry James, that however free his heroines felt to exercise their intellectual and sexual autonomy, they ultimately paid a price for their choices.
Some members of the New Woman trend found freedom to engage in lesbian relationships through their networking in women's groups. It has been said that for some of these women, "loving other women became a way to escape what they saw as the probabilities of male domination inherent in a heterosexual relationship".[7] For others, it may have been the case that economic independence meant that they were not answerable to a guardian for their sexual or other relationship choices, and they exercised this new freedom.
Class differences
The New Woman was a result of the growing respectability of post-secondary education and employment for women who belonged to the privileged upper classes of society. University education itself was still a badge of affluence for men at the turn of the 20th century, and fewer than 10% of people in the United States had a post-secondary education during the era.
Literature
Literary discussions of the expanding potential for women in English society date back at least to Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and Elizabeth Barrett's Aurora Leigh (1856), which explored a woman's plight between conventional marriage and radical possibility that a woman could become an independent artist. In drama, the late nineteenth century saw such "New Woman" plays as Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890), Henry Arthur Jones's play The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and George Bernard Shaw's controversial Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Candida (1898).
In fiction, New Woman writers were Olive Schreiner, Annie Sophie Cory (Victoria Cross), Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton, Ella D'Arcy and Ella Hepworth Dixon. Some examples of New Woman literature are Victoria Cross's Anna Lombard (1901), Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman and H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica (1909).
Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) also deserves mention, especially within the context of narratives derived from Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) both of which chronicle a woman's doomed search for independence and self realization through sexual experimentation.
The emergence of the fashion-oriented and party-going flapper in the 1920s marks the end of the New Woman era (now also known as First-Wave Feminism).
Quotation
[…] The finest achievement of the new woman has been personal liberty. This is the foundation of civilization; and as long as any one class is watched suspiciously, even fondly guarded, and protected, so long will that class not only be weak, and treacherous, individually, but parasitic, and a collective danger to the community. Who has not heard wives commended for wheedling their husbands out of money, or joked because they are hopelessly extravagant? As long as caprice and scheming are considered feminine virtues, as long as man is the only wage-earner, doling out sums of money, or scattering lavishly, so long will women be degraded, even if they are perfectly contented, and men are willing to labor to keep them in idleness!
Although individual women from pre-historic times have accomplished much, as a class they have been set aside to minister to men's comfort. But when once the higher has been tried, civilization repudiates the lower. Men have come to see that no advance can be made with one half-humanity set apart merely for the functions of sex; that children are quite liable to inherit from the mother, and should have opportunities to inherit the accumulated ability and culture and character that is produced only by intellectual and civil activity. The world has tried to move with men for dynamos, and "clinging" women impeding every step of progress, in arts, science, industry, professions, they have been a thousand years behind men because forced into seclusion. They have been over-sexed. They have naturally not been impressed with their duties to society, in its myriad needs, or with their own value as individuals.
The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all the womanhood of past ages, has come to stay — if civilization is to endure. The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her — and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works.
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- Winnifred Harper Cooley: The New Womanhood (New York, 1904) 31f.
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References
- ^ Stevens, Hugh (2008). Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge University Press. p. 27. ISBN 9780521089852.
- ^ "The New Woman"
- ^ Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson (1993). Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman. University of Michigan Press. p. 2. ISBN 9780472103928.
- ^ Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson (1993). Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman. University of Michigan Press. p. 2. ISBN 9780472103928.
- ^ Lavender, Catherine. "The New Woman". City University of New York. Retrieved July 21, 2012.
- ^ Lavender, Catherine. "The New Woman". City University of New York. Retrieved July 21, 2012.
- ^ Lavender, Catherine. "The New Woman". City University of New York. Retrieved July 21, 2012.
Further reading
- A New Woman Reader, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Broadview Press: 2000) (ISBN 1-55111-295-7) (contains the text of Sydney Grundy's 1894 satirical comedy actually entitled The New Woman)
- Martha H. Patterson: Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (University of Illinois Press: 2005) (ISBN 0-252-03017-6)
- Sheila Rowbotham: A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States (Penguin Books: 1999) (ISBN 0-14-027902-4), Chapters 1-3.
- Patterson, Martha H. The American New Woman Revisited. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
