Love and Eugenics in the Late-Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
John C. Waller ◽  
Angelique Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Within Sight: Three-Dimensional Perspectives on Women and Banjos in the Late Nineteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-163
Author(s):  
Lydia Hamessley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Way

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to make the banjo a respectable instrument for ladies. Their overarching aim was to "elevate" the banjo's status from its African-American and minstrel-show associations, thereby making the instrument acceptable in white bourgeois society. At the same time, stereoview cards, three-dimensional photographs produced by the millions, were a popular parlor entertainment featuring a variety of contemporary images, including women playing the banjo. Yet, instead of depicting a genteel lady in the parlor playing her beribboned banjo, the stereoviews presented humorous and sometimes risque scenes of banjo-playing women. Further, virtually no stereoviews exist that show the banjo played by a lady in a parlor setting. Through a study of stereoscopic depictions of women in a variety of scenes, I place these unexpected images of women's music-making in a context that explains their significance. In particular I examine the way stereoviews provide insights about the tensions regarding the position and status of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture as revealed in the figure of the New Woman. Typical of constructions of this threatening figure, stereographic images picture the New Woman wearing bloomers, riding bicycles, attending college, smoking, neglecting her wifely duties and children, and even indulging in lesbian eroticism. Yet, stereoviews are distinctive in that they also show the New Woman playing the banjo, and I argue that the link between the banjo and the New Woman had a decisive and negative impact on the effectiveness of the banjo elevation project. Through an examination of these three-dimensional views, and drawing on late-nineteenth-century writing and poetry about the banjo, I show how the banjo in the hands of the New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. I place this new evidence in the context of Karen Linn's paradigm describing the banjo elevation project as one that sought to shift the banjo from the realm of sentimental values to official values. The figure of the New Woman does not fit within Linn's dichotomy; rather, she falls outside both sets of values. Often viewed as a third sex herself, in a sense mirroring the gender tensions surrounding the banjo, the New Woman helped to shift the banjo into a third realm, that of revolutionary and perhaps even decadent values. This study enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination and furthers our understanding of the complex role women have played in the history of the banjo. Moreover, this evidence demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music, and musical instruments, through powerful iconographic images.

Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Self Formation

The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.

Laura Jean Libbey and Sexual Transformation

2018 ◽  
pp. 199-221
Author(s):  
Dale M. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Traumatic Injury ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Brain Surgery ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Recovery

In chapter 7, Dale Bauer charts the innovations in transitional modernism that turn-of-the-century popular novelist Laura Jean Libbey created in her novels devoted to women’s romance and independence. While little-known today, Libbey’s serialized novels were highly popular and often translated into film. Libbey’s fictions bridged the divide between late nineteenth-century feminism and modern fictions of the New Woman. These novels often end with immediate brain surgeries and near-instant recoveries, with marriages into higher social classes, with rivals for suitors defeated by these women’s pain and bitterness and their transcendence. Many of Libbey’s novels chart women’s social recovery from “brain fever” and brain traumatic injury through brain surgery. As they are almost-instantly transformed to “modern women,” they are often robbed of their resistance. Libbey’s fictions emphasize the uneven development of the New Woman across the century’s turn.

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