Andrew's Wiki
New Woman

Content

• Short stories by new woman writers such as Sarah Grand and George Egerton
• One play, The New Woman
• Lots of nonfiction debates in periodicals: woman’s suffrage; the idea of “New Woman;” marriage; which includes not only the New Woman stuff but also the negative responses to them (cf Lombroso on “the Physical Insensibility of Women” and Punch cartoons), including a hilarious parody of the New Woman story tropes (the husband and wife discussing things they’d never discuss before; the woman’s apparent contrariness for everything that cannot break the marriage bond; superficial shocking; love for Wilde; smoking; the woman has tons of imagination; discussion of the Everlasting Woman; the woman being elusive and special)

Intro

• Term “New Woman:” Sarah Grand coins it 1894, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” in North American Review
  • “the new woman” = “solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy.”
  • lots of angry and satiric responses (not only by men, but also by woman novelist Ouida)
• New Woman description/stereotype
  • Girton College, Cambridge (estb 1869)
    • Newnham 1871; ones in London 1879 and 1882
  • bicycle
  • “rational dress”
  • smoked
• New Woman truth
  • attack cultural roles as not natural, want freedom to determine OWN roles
  • attack double standards
  • want mobility outside homes (latchkey)
  • want career and education opportunities
  • talked about women’s desire and sexuality
  • not anti-marriage but wanted to change the terms of the arrangement
  • more about economic and social freedom than legal issues
    • the vote will get other freedoms, not an end in itself
    • suffrage movement had begun long ago, before 1890s; tho of course some did end up joining the agitations in the decade before WWI
• New Woman attacked the biological argument about separation of spheres: no, it’s cultural separation, they say
  • They won’t accept these cultural roles
• Connex with decadence: artifice, not nature; decadents and New Women both mocked; both sexually ambiguous; both met with hysterial denunciations b/c they would contribute to degeneration of society b/c of the lack of clear roles
• New Woman Novel
  • Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) one of the first
  • Ibsen featured new woman; these plays come to London in 1889 (Doll’s House) and 1891 (Hedda Gabler)
  • Some other male New Woman writers: Hardy, Gissing, Shaw; but most written by women
  • Content: woman are rebelling against limitations (esp education jobs and experiences outside the home), more female sexuality (frank), some “very negative portrayals of marriage” xii; some show women trying to become writers
  • Style: some of it innovative, stream of consciousness, dream sequences, stylistic innovation
• Says that “demise of the three-volume novel in 1894 broke the power of Mudie’s Circulating Library” which had basically power of censorship. 1890s: one volume novels published, so people get to buy them outright, which breaks bourgeois middle class readers’ moral control over publishing, and thus “more daring” novels are published xiii
• Yellow Book: founded 1894, pub. Bodley Head (John Lane)
  • ed. Henry Harland
  • gave venue for women writers: Egerton, D’Arcy alongside James and Symons (mostly realism)
• Keynote Series, John Lane’s series, beginning 1893
  • First book: Egerton’s book of stories Keynotes
  • 33 volumes, 13 by women
• End of New Woman: largely by end of century… “no longer a shocking figure and many of the social and legal changes which she had desired and written about had been effected” xiii
  • Some write this fiction still, but no one pays much attention
  • Basically, five or six years of getting a lot of attention