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

Hawwa ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-63
Author(s):  
Pelin Başci

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.

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTEMIS MICHAILIDOU

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.


1991 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 687
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Baker-Barnhart ◽  
Patricia Marks

Author(s):  
Alexis Easley

This chapter examines conflicts between different generations of women in the late decades of the nineteenth century as played out in the popular press, including the burgeoning market for women’s magazines. It shows how print culture, including in new feminist magazines, constructed and then exploited divisions between the ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’, often for the purposes of advertising new products. It shows how at this time the modern woman was represented in the periodical press as a consumer and advertising commodity, as a sensationalist figure of controversy, as well as a symbol of the new age.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 558
Author(s):  
Peng Liu

This article focuses on the Chinese woman writer Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943) and her relationship with the worldwide movement for the revival of Buddhism in the early twentieth century. Lü rose up in the context of the “new woman” ideal and transcended that ideal as she rejected the dualistic thinking that was prevalent in her time. She embraced both reason and religion, as well as both modern and traditional ideas. Her story demonstrates that religion and the creation of the “new woman” were not mutually exclusive in her life. In the 1920s and 1930s, Lü traveled extensively in the United States and Europe and eventually converted to Buddhism after she witnessed its popularity in the West. During this period, she successfully created a social space for herself by utilizing Buddhist sources to engage in intellectual dialogues on paranormal phenomena and animal protection. At the same time, she carved out a place for Buddhism in the discourse on the convergence and divergence of science and religion after the First World War (1914–1918).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Wybrands

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.


2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-345
Author(s):  
MARY JO MAYNES

During the course of the nineteenth century, the parameters defining ‘youth’, marking its beginning and its end, were becoming more precise and more institutionally defined for both girls and boys in Europe. More than any other phenomenon or institution, elementary schooling (and leaving school) contributed to a certain ‘normalization’ of the life cycle for young people. By the end of the nineteenth century, most girls as well as boys attended school at least intermittently until at least age 12 or 13; at school-leaving a new phase of life began. Throughout much of Europe a select minority of middle-class and upper-class young women joined their brothers at universities, as higher education became first a possibility and then a routine for them in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-541
Author(s):  
Nikki Mandell

This article examines the little-known phenomenon of apartment hotels built for single middle- and upper-class women during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on New York City, where the first and most influential of these residences opened, this study argues that upscale women’s apartment hotels severed the Victorian equivalency between home and family, and reconfigured home as a site of women’s independence and self-fulfillment. They also helped redefine women’s economic role; rather than engaging elite women as consumers of household goods, apartment hotels engaged them as consumers of housing and as real-estate developers. As women’s apartment hotels moved from amusing experiment to markers of twentieth-century modernity, they etched the New Woman’s individuality, ambitions, sexuality, and civic engagement into the urban landscape.


1994 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 668
Author(s):  
Lois W. Banner ◽  
Ellen Wiley Todd

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