The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street.

Popular perceptions of Edna St. Vincent Millay do not generally see her as a poet interested in so-called “domestic poetry.” On the contrary, Millay is most commonly described as the female embodiment of the rebellious spirit that marked the 1920s, the “New Woman” of early twentieth-century feminism. Until the late 1970s, the subject of domesticity seemed incompatible with the celebrated images of Millay's “progressiveness,” “rebelliousness,” or “originality.” But then again, by the 1970s Millay was no longer seen as particularly rebellious or original, and the fact that she had also contributed to the tradition of domestic poetry was not to her advantage. Domesticity may have been an important issue for second-wave feminists, but it was discussed rather selectively and, outside feminist circles, Millay was hardly ever mentioned by literary critics. The taint of “traditionalism” did not help Millay's cause, and the poet's lifelong exploration of sexuality, femininity and gender stereotypes was somehow not enough to generate sophisticated critical analyses. Since Millay seemed to be a largely traditional poet and a “politically incorrect” feminist model, second-wave feminists preferred to focus on other figures, classified as more modern and more overtly subversive. Scholarly recognition of Millay's significance within the canon of modern American poetry did not really begin until the 1990s.

Download Full-text

Der weibliche Aufbruch um 1900

10.5771/9783828875784 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Johanna Wybrands

Keyword(s):

New Woman ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

Female Authors ◽

Self Image ◽

The New Woman ◽

New Beginnings ◽

And Gender ◽

Gabriele Reuter ◽

Female Subjects

Around 1900 there was a generation of female authors who saw themselves as such, even without forming closer groups and combined this self-image with new beginnings and innovation. By analysing generationality as a characteristic of female narration Johanna Wybrands examines to what extent this constellation is also effective on a narrative level. Using well-founded, context-oriented text analyses, the author shows that much-read authors at the turn of the century such as Hedwig Dohm, Gabriele Reuter and Helene Böhlau, with their now often forgotten works, made an important contribution to the interplay between generation and gender, to narrative ways of becoming female subjects and to the prehistory of the New Woman of the 1920s.

Download Full-text

ADVERTISING MODERNITY IN WOMEN'S WORLD: WOMEN'S LIFESTYLE AND LEISURE IN LATE-OTTOMAN ISTANBUL

Hawwa ◽

10.1163/156920804322888248 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 34-63

Author(s):

Pelin Başci

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

New Woman ◽

New Products ◽

Upper Class ◽

Popular Press ◽

Women And Gender ◽

Goods And Services ◽

The New Woman ◽

And Gender ◽

Late Ottoman

AbstractWomen and gender can be used as an index of modernization in late-Ottoman society. The study of women in relation to consumption is relatively new, but it is a topic capable of informing us simultaneously about the emergence of modern goods and services targeting women and women's attitudes and expectations towards the new lifestyle that was beginning to attract them. This study explores advertisements—mostly on education, entertainment, leisure and conveniences, food, and wealth—which appeared in a late-Ottoman women's journal, Women's World, during the early decades of the twentieth century. It traces the emergence of "the new woman" through the popular press, showing how women comprised a well-defined, visible market for many of the modern goods and services in these areas. Advertisements paint a picture of upper-class Ottoman women who were active in shaping a hybrid Ottoman modernity, even as they shared the anxieties of the broader culture, which greeted many of the new products, tastes, and customs with ambivalence.

Download Full-text

The New Woman

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1489-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Caroline Z. Zrakowski

Keyword(s):

New Woman ◽

Woman Question ◽

New Women ◽

Sarah Grand ◽

Historical Figure ◽

Female Consciousness ◽

The New Woman ◽

And Gender ◽

Modernist Fiction ◽

Ubiquitous Presence

A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Sarah Grand in the pages of the New American Review. The New Woman was a ubiquitous presence in fin-de-siècle literature and journalism concerned with debates about the ‘woman question’, and influenced twentieth-century ideas about feminism and gender. The New Woman novel, with its mapping of female psychological space and emphasis on female consciousness, shaped modernist fiction. New Women were often political activists as well as writers, and agitated for reform on political and domestic questions. Most New Woman fiction rejects aestheticism in favor of realism; it deals with sexuality with a frankness that departed from Victorian codes of propriety and takes up issues such as suffrage, marriage, domestic violence, and the emancipation of women. In its realism, New Woman fiction departs from the aestheticism of the period, although some writers, like George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), used the techniques of aestheticism to examine women’s experience.

Download Full-text

The New Woman in Technological Modernity

Gender, Technology and the New Woman ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416269.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Lena Wånggren

Keyword(s):

Social Context ◽

New Woman ◽

Historical Context ◽

Cultural Work ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Technological Changes ◽

The New Woman ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

And Gender ◽

Key Terms

This first chapter places the New Woman figure in the literary and historical context of the late nineteenth century, as well as outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the book. Defining along the way key terms such as modernity, technology and gender, the chapter asserts that in order to describe fin de siècle modernity, one must take into account not only the technological changes or advances specific of the time, but in addition the role played by contemporary notions of gender, and the cultural work of literature in changing these. Just as literature gains significance first in connection to other agencies – such as a reader – so technology also takes on specific meanings first when considered in a social context.

Download Full-text

THE UNIVERSAL DIVINE PRINCIPLE, THE SPIRITUAL ANDROGYNE, AND THE NEW AGE IN SARAH GRAND'S THE HEAVENLY TWINS

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150309090111 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 177-196 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Naomi Lloyd

Keyword(s):

Cultural Context ◽

New Woman ◽

New Age ◽

Religious Authority ◽

The Novel ◽

Divine Feminine ◽

Male And Female ◽

The New Woman ◽

Religion And Gender ◽

And Gender

In February 1893 the feminist journal Shafts published two articles by Mrs. A. Phillips the second of which provided an esoteric reading of the crucifixion in which Phillips, making recourse to Sanskrit, argued that Christ's death on the cross symbolized the “perfect marriage union of the male and female” (qtd. in Dixon, Divine Feminine 163). Feminist theosophists such as Phillips believed Christianity's neglect of the Divine Feminine to have resulted in a masculinist ordering of religious authority and in the concomitant subordination of women. The editor of Shafts, Margaret Shurmer Sibthorpe, agreed; she added a note to Phillips's second article urging her readers to work towards the formulation of a gospel that would facilitate women's emancipation. In the same issue of Shafts, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins was reviewed. The reviewer cited at length a passage from the novel's Proem characterizing the divine as the union of the male and female principles and concluded with a discussion of the “heavenly twins” of the novel's title. The Shafts reviewer, however, did not explore the significance of religious allusions in The Heavenly Twins, nor did she examine the relation between the dual-sexed divine of the Proem and the story of the heavenly twins, Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells. Subsequent Grand scholars have not, for the most part, taken up these questions. The possibility that the novel might constitute an attempt to reconfigure dominant discourses of religion and gender, of the kind Sibthorpe had called for and Phillips undertaken, is largely unconsidered. The New Woman as a “modern maiden” is instead assumed to emerge from a predominantly secular cultural context.

Download Full-text