“The New Woman and the Manly Art”: Women and Boxing in Nineteenth-Century Canada

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-163
Author(s):  
MacIntosh Ross ◽  
Kevin B. Wamsley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Niagara River ◽  
The Press ◽  
British Colony ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Canada West

On July 27, 1859, “Canada” Kate Clark met two Americans, Nellie Stem and Mary Dwyer, for a pair of prize fights in Fort Erie, Canada West. Beginning their adventure in Buffalo, New York, they rowed their way across the Niagara River to the fighting grounds in the British colony. Like pugilists before them, they stripped to the waist to limit potential grappling in battle. Both the journey and pre-fight fight preparations were tried and true components of mid-nineteenth century prize fighting. Although the press, and later historians, overwhelmingly associated such performances with male combatants, women were indeed active in Canadian pugilistic circles, settling scores, testing their mettle, and displaying their fistic abilities both pre- and post-Confederation. In this article, we begin to untangle the various threads of female pugilism, situating these athletes and performers within the broader literature on both boxing and women's sport in Canada. By examining media reports of female boxers—both in sparring and prize fighting—we hope to provide a historiographic foundation for further discussions of early female pugilism, highlighting the various ways these women upheld and challenged the notion of the “new woman” in Canada.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 104-124
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
East Side ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The New Woman

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar centers on two shock-fueled transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis and Esther’s transformation from an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot into a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Reading Esther’s psychic transformation against its geopolitical and spatial markers of renewal—the slumified lower east side of the Rosenbergs, the newly built glass-sheeted office buildings where the protagonist Esther works, and the newly constructed UN headquarters that hangs in Esther’s hotel window—the chapter challenges dominant readings of the novel, which often forefront how the double bind of consumer mass culture and patriarchal 1950s values trap and confine women. The chapter suggests the novel is less about the entrapment of women than it is about the formation of the woman we assume to be trapped. Specifically, it argues that the novel’s celebrated critique of the repressive, patriarchal state ultimately leads not to a more progressive position, but rather to the formation of a lactified, suburbanized, and entrepreneurial female subjectivity.

scholarly journals Listening to Emerson's “England” at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-662
Author(s):  
TOM F. WRIGHT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Transatlantic Relations ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Urban Riots ◽  
Performance Career ◽  
The Press ◽  
Anglo American

Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech.

scholarly journals Beth Caldwell's Reading Experience

Spectrum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelby Elizabeth Haber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Personal Engagement

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Grand coined the phrase "New Woman," which was influential throughout the first wave of the feminist movement. This paper examines how Sarah Grand's representation of Beth Caldwell's reading habits in her novel The Beth Book acts as a metaphor for the subversive femininity of the New Woman. My project explores the ways in which Grand's feminist ideals are reflected in The Beth Book through the scenes when Beth is reading. I suggest that Beth's atypical engagement with books as textual and physical objects can be equated to social dissent. However, Grand also portrays Beth reading within educational and marital institutions. These experiences lead Beth's engagement with the text to become similar to common nineteenth-century reading practices. I conclude with the argument that Grand represents any personal engagement with a book, even if it is not especially radical, as capable of re-evaluating systemically-enforced interpretations.

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