Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Abelson Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Primary Path ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
European Training

This book delves into the life and times of piano virtuoso Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler. When Fannie Bloomfield embarked on her career as a pianist in 1883, she was greeted with a very different and much smaller musical world. There were fewer music conservatories. The primary path to professional eminence ran narrowly through elite European training and mastery of the German–Austrian repertoire. This book explores Bloomfield-Zeisler's life and career and how she became one of the foremost pianists of her generation. It presents anecdotes that humanize Bloomfield-Zeisler and make her more than a public figure. It also offers insights into her personality in ways that would only be possible if someone knew her well. This introduction discusses a number of historical trends that coalesced to make Bloomfield-Zeisler's career more achievable than it would have been even a few decades earlier: the most significant of these were the increasing presence of classical music in U.S. life and the rise of the “new woman.” It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

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.

Athleticism and the New Woman

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 231-268
Author(s):  
Brigid M. Boyle
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
The New Woman

Queering the New Woman: Ideals of Modern Femininity in The Ladies’ Journal, 1915–1931

NAN Nü ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Chinese Woman ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Social Trends ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Over Time

This case study of Republican China’s most widely read women’s periodical, The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), argues that the New Woman remained a highly contested ideal throughout the journal’s publication from 1915 to 1931. Editors and contributors endorsed competing models of modern femininity that shifted over time, shaped by volatile political conditions and social trends. With a focus on sexual morality, this article subjects normative visions of the modern Chinese woman, as depicted in The Ladies’ Journal, to a queer reading. By exploring the tension between widely circulated heteronormative discourses and their inherent slippages that revealed and fostered subversion, this article demonstrates that, rather than advocating for a clearly defined and radically new icon of sexual liberation, The Ladies’ Journal presented a vision of the New Woman that was capricious, contested, and in some ways conservative.


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