The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle

The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.

Technologies of Detection

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

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.

The New Woman in Technological Modernity

This first chapter places the New Woman figure in the literary and historical context of the late nineteenth century, as well as outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the book. Defining along the way key terms such as modernity, technology and gender, the chapter asserts that in order to describe fin de siècle modernity, one must take into account not only the technological changes or advances specific of the time, but in addition the role played by contemporary notions of gender, and the cultural work of literature in changing these. Just as literature gains significance first in connection to other agencies – such as a reader – so technology also takes on specific meanings first when considered in a social context.

Medical New Women II: Doctors

The fifth chapter examines the debates surrounding women’s entry into the medical sphere as doctors, examining gendered debates around medical authority and professionalism. While New Woman nurses were figured as especially feminine, the New Woman doctor was – similarly to her typing and bicycling counterparts – posited as an ‘unsexed’ or ‘unwomanly’ creature. Noting the role of female doctors in the fight for women’s access to higher education and in the wider women’s movement, the chapter moves on to consider the role of literary texts in debates around female doctors. Reading Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894), the section describes the harassment faced by early female doctors.

Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.

Conclusion

This book has highlighted the essential link between gender and modern technologies as crucial not only to New Woman writing but to early or first-wave British feminism. Locating the New Woman in connection to technologies of the time provides an understanding of how certain technologies come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems signifying female emancipation. Throughout the book, the fundamental conflict between technological determinism and feminist criticism has been stressed: the ‘modern’ aspects of late nineteenth-century technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle and medical technologies entail the ways in which they are taken up as symbols of emancipation and ‘newness’ in literary works, as well as in the medical and periodical press. In addition to analysing specific late nineteenth-century technologies, this book has drawn attention to the technology of language itself: the ways in which literary texts work as social and cultural agents. Material objects and institutional technologies, and technologies of self-formation, come together in these fictions through yet another technology; that of the text itself. In this way, New Woman writing that engages with technology partakes in and shapes late nineteenth-century debates regarding both social and literary issues....

Introduction

The introduction outlines the main concern of the book: the crucial role of technology in configuring notions of female emancipation in the late nineteenth century. Drawing attention to specific New Woman writings from fiction and the periodical press, the chapter introduces an understanding of how certain technologies of the time come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems connected to the New Woman and thus signifying female emancipation. Briefly discussing New Woman writers’ engagements with modern technologies of transport, media, and communication not included in the monograph (such as the railway, omnibuses, photography, the telegraph, and the telephone), the introduction concludes with an outline of the following chapters and an explanation of the structure of the book.