NEW WOMEN, OLD AND NEW

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 579-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Precise Definition ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
New Women ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
The Way

DESPITE SOME TWENTY YEARS of scholarship in the field, core questions such as “what is a New Woman?” and “what is New Woman fiction?” still remain vexed and all too often need more precise definition. Yet one can say that for all the conflicts of meaning and emphasis between sexual and political, discursive and actual, or caricature and didactic, the feminist rediscovery of the New Woman during the late 1970s has not only opened the canon but has also begun a transformation in the way we understand the entire fin de siècle.

A CLUB OF THEIR OWN: THE “LITERARY LADIES,” NEW WOMEN WRITERS, AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE AUTHORSHIP

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
New Women ◽  
Life Styles ◽  
The Press ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman

THE NEW WOMAN was both a discursive formation and a figure produced by materialist history as a result of debates over marriage, sexualities, political rights, labor conditions, life styles, and fashion. Unnamed until 1893 (Tusan 169), the “New Woman” became a lively topic in the press only in 1894 (Schaffer, “‘Nothing’” 39–40), at which point the rhetoric aimed at actual women quickly transformed into attacks on or defense of a literary phenomenon – in part, Ann Ardis suggests, because a literary controversy was less threatening than the prospect of actual social change (12). The “‘props’” attributed to the New Woman by Punch, the preeminent periodical to construct the literary stereotype, included five defining activities: “She smoked, rode a bicycle, frequented women's clubs, read voraciously and wore bloomers” (Miles 247). Scholars have long acknowledged that the New Woman did not suddenly appear but had a pre-history dating back to the 1880s (e.g., Ledger 23). A crucial part of that pre-history in life and in print was the founding of the “Literary Ladies,” a women writers' dining club, in 1889. The club not only represented significant innovation in fin-de-siècle authorship but also, more crucially, precipitated in the press the “props” (bloomers excepted) that would typify – and target – the New Woman from 1894 onward.

First Life—and then Fame

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Reznicek
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman

Katherine Cecil Thurston’s 1910 novel, Max, explores the bohemian Paris of the fin-de-siècle through the eyes of a young artist newly arrived from Russia. This young man is, however, actually a young princess in disguise, trying to escape an abusive marriage. Through the use of disguise and the New Woman figure of the female-to-male transvestite, this novel represents Paris through two competing genres: the masculine adventure narrative and the female romance.

Technologies of Detection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Forensic Evidence ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Modern Technologies

This sixth chapter concludes the monograph by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective. Mapping the literary trope of the New Woman detective, and the part played by modern technologies in these narratives, the chapter considers the nature of forensic evidence and the gendered use of technologies in producing this knowledge. Reading M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), the chapter considers New Woman detective fiction as a culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle.

Medical New Women I: Nurses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Diagnostic Tools ◽  
New Women ◽  
Medical Technologies ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Gender Knowledge

The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and systems of knowledge came into use. The fourth chapter considers the medical New Women who, through new diagnostic tools as well as their admission to the institutional technology of the hospital, entered new spaces and roles as nurses. It locates the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the earlier Nightingale New Style nurse. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, A Woman With Tenacity of Purpose (1900) as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, the chapter explores the role of modern medical technologies in the formation of notions of gender, knowledge and medical authority.

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