The aim of this paper is to explore the variety of new social and literary forms adopted by the New Woman movement at the end of the 19th century. We want to discuss the different debates on femininity at the fin de siècle with views on lesbianism and the marriage concept at the time.
Women challenged their subordinate social and political position and condemned prevailing sexual double standard during the course of the 19th century. They urged for women’s rights to employment and full citizenship. With the new theories on Darwinism New Women found a way to rationalize their demands, apart from social and political arguments, also with biological explanations. They voiced their concerns over the woman’s reduction in a patriarchal state and set education, marriage laws and social morality on the top of their reform-list. One factor for early feminists was the 1832 Reform Act, which governed women’s exclusion from the franchise. By the 1850s British feminism had gained an organized form and coherence, largely through the campaigns of middle-class women. Magazines and novels were a vehicle of feminist protest and thus the social and economic position of women underwent great changes.
Content Overview
1. The New Woman - An Introduction
2. The New Woman’s Name and Means
2.1 The New Woman’s Image
3. New Education
4. The New Woman Literature
5. Challenges of and to Fashion
6. The New Woman’s Take on the ‘Woman Question’
7. The New Woman and Sexuality
7.1 Lesbianism
8. Conclusion
The Eighteen-Nineties: New Women
1. The New Woman – An Introduction
This paper will look at the New Woman movement of the 1890s in England. The Fin de Siècle was full of new ideas and challenges. Exciting social and technical developments and inventions took place. Women had challenged their subordinate social and political positions and condemned prevailing sexual double standard throughout the course of the 19th century. Feminists and advocates for the ‘Woman Cause’ urged for women’s rights to employment and full citizenship. In the last ten years of the century, though, the fight for liberation and achievement went a step further. Personal decisions, like dress, habit, choice of partner, or occupation were now becoming increasingly political. The women who fought on the frontlines, and were therefore the movement’s most visible agents, were referred to as New Women. The struggle was not only carried out on an individual level. In the 1850s, women had begun to organise in groups in order to question and defy their subordinate position in society. They were starting to agitate and speak out on all kinds of fields in culture and politics. Feminists were able to profit from the 1890’s accelerated speed of cultural developments; hitherto unthinkable things were being talked about in the press, in women’s clubs, in non-fictional and fictional books, even in fashion magazines. We will explore a variety of these new social and literary forms the New Woman movement in England adopted at the end of the 19th century.
Furthermore we will discuss the different contemporary debates on femininity. A special focus will be on the views on sexuality, the concept of marriage, and lesbianism at the time. Gender dynamics as well as social norms, laws, and professional options for women dramatically changed during the last ten years of the century. New theories on Darwin’s ideas, exploration into the field of psychology, as well as pure pragmatics all shaped the discourse.
The New Women were by no means a homogenous group. We will highlight some of the members’ various political ideas on education, marriage laws and social morality, and discuss their cultural achievements.
One of the main questions in this paper will be: Did the new woman movement really bring about a new type of woman? Did the new women movement make any real changes? If so, what were the limits?
2. The New Woman’s Name and Means
It was Ouida (pen name of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé), storywriter and novelist, who took the now famous phrase ‘the new woman’ from British author and activist Sarah Grand’s essay ‘ The New Aspect of the Woman Question’. With this term she wanted to give those power-seeking females of her times, who were prepared to overturn conventions and accepted notions of femininity, a name. These women showed their ‘emancipation’ in every day life through practices like, for example, smoking, riding bicycles, using bold language or taking the omnibus or train unescorted. They sometimes belonged to all-female clubs like “Mrs. Massingberd’s Pioneer Club” or societies where like-minded individuals met and interchanged ideas. New Women wanted their own careers, desired sexual liberation from male suppression, and proper laws against marital violence.
The New Woman movement was a social and literary phenomenon and is generally considered the predecessor of the suffrage movement.[1] Due to this movement, the latter half of the 19th century saw passionate discussions and agitation on matters such as marriage and divorce laws, women’s property and custody rights, educational and employment opportunities for women as well as a lively debates on female suffrage.
When looking at these discussions one needs to differentiate between two generations of New Women, the first around the 1880s and 1890s and the second around the 1920s and the 1930s. In our paper we will concentrate on the first generation.
At a first glance middle-class New Women agitated primarily for changes in etiquette. They wanted an end to chaperones, long hair, and long skirts. At a second look they, more importantly, also fought for graver matters such as extended professional opportunities, a chance to safe independent travel and living, and the right to choose one’s partner(s). They fought for these changes in the popular press; often in the same magazines that at other times portrayed New Women as “unsexed, terrifying, violent Amazon(s) ready to overturn the world”[2]. In the field of fiction writing the engaged women could express challenging ideas more freely. Non-fictional writing also helped to voice matters not dared to be mentioned publicly before. The suffragette movement depended in particular on such publications.
Women also gained access to printing houses. Feminist newspapers of the 1890s such as “Shaft” and “The Woman’s Signal” persistently gave voice to the New Woman’s concerns when such voices were heard only sporadically in more mainstream journals. Some critics claim that literature and fiction had never before contributed so much to the feminist movement as it did at the fin de siècle. To a certain extent the history of the New Woman is only available textually, since the “New Woman” was largely a discursive phenomenon. By naming themselves, New Women opened up their discursive space in the public. This space was quickly filled by feminist textual productions of feminist activists, female social reformers, female popular novelists, female suffragette play writers, and woman poets who valued self-fulfillment and believed in legal and sexual equality. New Women themselves did not always define their goals clearly, their fiction, for example, reveals complexities and contradictions which withstand reductive readings.
2.1 The New Woman’s Image
The first descriptions of the New Women emerged in the press in the early 1890s. The satirical magazine “Punch“, for example, presented an image of a woman with the “typical” features of a spinster wearing glasses, trousers and a short haircut, which was seemingly envious of lovely fashionable ladies, and labelled it “The New Woman”. This image of the New Woman, a newly perceived form of femininity, developed further during the next years. The symbolism was clear to readers of the time. When pictures showed a woman with a latchkey, this then stood for the challenging independence these New Women claimed for themselves, because it enabled them to come and go from their apartment (or the apartment of their husbands) as they pleased. On other pictures we see a “New Woman” smoking a cigarette, which at that time was an exclusively male habit. All in all, these pictures ascribed “more opinions, positions, and beliefs [to the women of the feminist movement] than any real woman could have absorbed in a lifetime.[3] ” “Punch” exemplified this notion probably best through its 1894 portray of the ‘Donna Quixote’[4] – a seemingly powerful and independent woman with latchkey and cigarette with glasses who reads and sits in a kind of throne. In the background the observer can see - amongst others – the reproduction of a female soldier with a male head lying at her feet, the inscription reads ‘tyrant man’. Books by Mona Caird, a feminist journalist of the time, by the then scandalous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Russian writer Leo Tolstoy complete the “Punch” caricature. The placing of allegedly subversive books in that picture is telling. Many conservatives considered higher education not only unnecessary but also even dangerous for women. Also the notion that these new ideas come from outside of England is equally interesting. We will go into further detail on the subject of literacy and literature in the following paragraphs.
All of these particularities did mark the New Woman as independent and thereby also possibly threatening to the established societal rules or at least suspicious with respect to her intents. Therefore, what writers and readers at the fin de siècle thought the New Woman was, the way in which she was constructed by and was a product of discourse, is just as ‘real’ and historically significant as the factual lives of New Women.
New Women were sometimes called “wild women” by the media. In articles it was insinuated that they opposed marriage and sought personal independence and political rights through power over men. In many portrays, this new type of woman was pictured as morally decadent, mannish, asexual but also sexually lecherous. Magazines like “Punch”, some ladies’ magazines or even the literary journal “The Yellow Book”, the major platform for aestheticist artists, blamed new practices in the education of women for the evolvement of these New Women and their supposed ‘masculinisation’ through it.
Even though these pictures were often caricatures and highly exaggerated, they did partly reflect reality. Many of the New Women around the 1890s were young, single middle class women who eschewed the fripperies of fashion in favor of more masculine dress.[5] They often were educated to a standard unknown to previous generations of women. They engaged in occupations, past-times, and habits of behavior that were hitherto only thought suitable for male citizens.
3. New Education
The foundation of new educational opportunities for women was one of the major areas of the new feminist activity. By the 1890s universal elementary schooling had been in existence, legally at least, for two full decades and many new and academically competent private schools for girls had been founded. Established women’s colleges were awarding degrees to women and some female scholars could train at women’s medical colleges in London and Edinburgh, which had been established by the pioneer women doctors of the previous years. New Women saw education as the key to a broad range of other freedoms. This attitude was also reflected in their habit of reading ‘advanced’ books usually read only by men and in their stance towards work. The New Woman sought to be financially independent of husband or father through earning her own living in one of the career opportunities opening up to women at the time, like journalism or teaching. “Between 1851 and 1901 the total number of women in the workforce increased from 2.832.000 to 4.751.000.”[6], this number includes all the women who were answering industrialisation’s demand for cheap manual labour, paid work for women with a higher education was still sparse.
[...]
[1] see: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/suffragettes.htm
[2] Richardson, Angelique (ed.). The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle
Feminisms, S. 39
[3] Richardson, Angelique (ed.). The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle
Feminisms, S.50
[4] see: "Donna Quixote" in “Punch”, 28 April 1894 zit. in A New Woman Reader, S. 228
[5] see: http://www.tudorlinks.com/treasury/articles/view1890.html
[6] Richardson, Angelique (ed.). The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle
Feminisms, S.5
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