The 1890s: New Women, Bloomer Girls, and the Old Ball Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra A. Shattuck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Professional Baseball ◽  
Baseball Players ◽  
Ball Game ◽  
New Women ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Way

The 1890s saw a dramatic redefinition of femininity that coalesced into the image of the Gibson Girl and “New Woman.” Men like Bernarr Macfadden taught women that athleticism was a prerequisite of beauty; thousands of women began riding bicycles and playing vigorous sports with gusto. Women’s professional baseball shifted from theatrical to highly competitive and featured talented female players like Maud Nelson and Lizzie Arlington. Their “Bloomer Girl” teams barnstormed the country playing men’s amateur and semi-professional teams. Many decried the New Woman ideal and critics of female baseball players called them Amazons and freaks. Bloomer Girl teams of the 1890s paved the way for the talented female teams of the twentieth century.

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.

scholarly journals Seeking the Dharma on the World Stage: Lü Bicheng and the Revival of Buddhism in the Early Twentieth Century

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 558
Author(s):  
Peng Liu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Animal Protection ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The New Woman

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).

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton: The Disruption of Domestic Bliss

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTEMIS MICHAILIDOU
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
New Woman ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second Wave

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.

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other

2015 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Teresa Mangum
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Physical Phenomenon ◽  
Young Person ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
New Women ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
The New Woman

This essay focuses on the powerful grip anxieties about ageing had on the increasingly diverse field of texts associated with the New Woman. A number of women poets from the period seem uniquely aware of the potential consequences for single women when they transition from being a ‘young person’ to being a spinster. Novelists of the period emphasized effects of ageing not only as a physical phenomenon, but also as an affective, social, economic, and relational influence that affected a character’s identity and options as profoundly as gender and sexuality. Nowhere is the fear of ageing more prominent than in those novels where New Women characters and plots intersect with late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, whether the Gothic setting is the urban or actual jungle.

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
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Products ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Ottoman

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.

New Women in the New Pacific: Japanese–American Romances in the Context of U.S. Empire

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 395-418
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The West ◽  
Japanese Men ◽  
New Women ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Influential Book

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

The New Woman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Z. Zrakowski
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Female Consciousness ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Sarah Grand in the pages of the New American Review. The New Woman was a ubiquitous presence in fin-de-siècle literature and journalism concerned with debates about the ‘woman question’, and influenced twentieth-century ideas about feminism and gender. The New Woman novel, with its mapping of female psychological space and emphasis on female consciousness, shaped modernist fiction. New Women were often political activists as well as writers, and agitated for reform on political and domestic questions. Most New Woman fiction rejects aestheticism in favor of realism; it deals with sexuality with a frankness that departed from Victorian codes of propriety and takes up issues such as suffrage, marriage, domestic violence, and the emancipation of women. In its realism, New Woman fiction departs from the aestheticism of the period, although some writers, like George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), used the techniques of aestheticism to examine women’s experience.

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.

“Acting Victorian”

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Noelle Hedgcock
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Mixed Strategies ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Insightful Analysis

Contributor Noelle Hedgcock examines the tension the studios create when they market the stars of their prestige pictures—Betty Davis, Joan Crawford, Evelyn Venable, and Joan Fontaine, as "authentically-Victorian" even as the women themselves are demonstrating characteristics of an emerging class of modern women. The studio's mixed strategies result in an ideological strain that underscores the mediated nature of the “New Woman” in mid-twentieth century Hollywood and the United States. Images of the “New Woman” could circulate, but only when set in very specific conditions. Hedgcock's insightful analysis shows the studios allowed the “New Woman” to appear as a rich, young woman in an urban setting, but not in small-town, middle-class, conservative America. In this way, Hedgcock suggests, the studios appeal to the aspirations and anxieties of womanhood found in their audiences, but only if they also left space for their stars to fit the less sophisticated notions of womanhood.

‘Vital friendship’: Sexual and Economic Ambivalence in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-153
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Social Position ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sexual Power ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Rhoda Broughton’s novel Dear Faustina (1879), which engages with the conventions of the New Woman novel for the purpose of commenting on the difficult social position of independent women. The novel’s representation of two key forms of new housing, women’ residences (or ladies’ chambers) and settlement housing, uncovers the way that these new domestic spaces made legible the relationship between economic and sexual power. While this novel has often been interpreted as a narrative of inversion or exchange between homosocial and heterosexual relationships, this chapter focuses on the ways that the novel is instead characterised by ambivalence in both form and theme.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document