New Woman (Feminism)
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The term New Woman (English New Woman ) was a feminist ideal of an independent woman that emerged in the late 19th century and had a significant influence on feminism in the 20th century.
This self-reliance and independence was not simply a spiritual matter: it also involved an external change in the way women behaved and dressed. By being active as a cyclist, for example, she increased the opportunity to deal with the world and its problems more widely and more actively. The New Woman broke the limitations imposed on her by a male-dominated society. This was particularly shown in the pieces by the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906).
Origin of the term
The term New Woman was coined by the writer Charles Reade in his novel A Woman Hater , which was originally reprinted as a serialized novel in Blackwood's Magazine and then appeared in three volumes as a book in 1877. In an important article in 1894, Irish writer Sarah Grand used the term new woman to characterize the independent women who sought radical change. And in response to this, the English writer Maria Louisa Rame (pseudonym Quida ) used this expression as the heading of a follow-up article. The term became popular through the British-American writer Henry James , who used it to describe the increasing number of feminist, educated, and independent career women in Europe and the United States.
Changes in the social role
The writer Henry James was one of the authors who popularized the term New Woman . It was a person embodied by the heroines of his novels. Among them was the title character of the novella Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer from the novel Portrait of a Lady . According to historian Ruth Bordin, James intended the term New Woman to characterize the ex-Americans living in Europe: rich and soulful women who, despite or perhaps because of their wealth, demonstrated an independent spirit and were used to acting on their own responsibility. The term always referred to women who were in control of their own lives, be it in the personal, social or economic sphere.
Higher and professional education
Although the New Woman was more and more common in real life as an active participant in social and working life, she was often portrayed in literature, drama, and other arts as showing off her independence in the domestic or private sphere. The suffragette movement to achieve women's democratic rights had the most significant influence on the term New Woman . Education and employment opportunities increased as western countries became more urban and industrialized. The women's professions sector gave women access to the areas of business and administration. The proportion of women in non-agricultural professionals has increased steadily in developed countries.
And more and more women were given the opportunity to take their Abitur, to attend college or university. Some also received qualified professional training there and became lawyers, doctors, journalists and university lecturers. The new woman had turn of the century a growing share in the field of higher education.
Sexuality and Social Expectations
Self-employment and independence were fundamental goals for women at the end of the 19th century. Historically, it is a truism that women have always been legally or economically dependent on their husbands, male relatives, or social and benevolent institutions. The development of educational and professional career opportunities for women in the late 19th century meant - much like the new legal rights to property (though not yet the right to vote) - that they could take on a new position of freedom of choice when it came to women Selection of marriage and sexual partners went. The New Woman placed great emphasis on sexual autonomy; but this was difficult to put into practice, as society was still loudly disapproving when it came to any signs of female frivolity. Any sexual activity outside of marriage was judged to be immoral among women in the Victorian Age.
Changes in divorce law in the late 19th century created a new woman who could survive a divorce with intact economic independence. An increasing number of divorced women remarried. Maintaining social standing while exercising her legal options, which were still viewed by many as immoral, became a challenge for the New Woman. In the novels of Henry James it was clear that his heroines - however free they felt in exercising their intellectual and sexual independence - had to pay a price for their decisions in the end.
Class differences
The New Woman was the result of the growing prestige of higher education and the higher professions among women belonging to the privileged upper class of society. At the turn of the century, university education in itself was still a sign of wealth for men. Less than 10 percent of the people in the United States had such a college education.
The women who went to college were generally white middle class. As a result, working class women, blacks and immigrants have been left in the lurch in the race to achieve the feminist model. Authors belonging to this fringe group often criticized this fact. While they recognized and respected the independence of the New Woman , they could not ignore the fact that the standards for a New Woman of the "Age of Progress" were largely only met by white middle class women.
Literature and Fine Arts
literature
A few examples are intended to illustrate how one has dealt with the problems in literature and in theater that the new role model of the New Woman brought with it.
In the field of stage and drama, the late 19th century saw such "new women plays" as Henrik Ibsen's plays Nora or Ein Puppenheim (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890), Henry Arthur Jones play The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894 ) and George Bernard Shaw's controversial dramas Mrs. Warren's Trades (1893) and Candida (1898). Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) made a telling joke in this regard by writing: "The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain" (Eng. The New Woman sprang from Ibsen's brain in full armor. An allusion to the birth of Athena . )
On the pages of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula , the New Woman is mentioned in important places . The main female characters discuss the changed roles of women, especially the New Woman. Mina Harker embodies several characteristic traits of the New Woman, she can write on a typewriter and reasonably argue deductively, to the amusement of the male characters. Lucy Westrenra wonders whether the New Woman might marry several men at the same time, which in turn shocks her friend Mina. Feminist studies of Dracula consider masculine fear of the feminine question and feminine sexuality as central problems of the book.
During the Weimar Republic, the New Woman was depicted in works by Elsa Herrmann (1893–1957, So ist die neue Frau , 1929) and Irmgard Keun (1905–1982, Das Kunstseidene Mädchen , 1932).
art
At the end of the 19th century, Charles Dana Gibson portrayed the New Woman in his painting The Reason Dinner was Late ; it is "a sympathetic portrait of artistic aspiration on the part of young women" (Eng. a sensitive representation of artistic ambition on the part of young women). The young woman is painting a visiting policeman and dinner has to wait.
Artists "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplyfying this emerging type through their own lives" (German: Artists played an essential role in the representation of the New Woman, both through the depiction the role model as well as an exemplary life in the sense of this new type of woman.) Around the turn of the century, 88 percent of the subscribers of countless magazines and journals were women. Once women became part of the artistic community, publishers employed women to create the illustrations that depicted the world from a woman's perspective.
Comments
"The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all the womanhood of past ages, has come to stay - if civilization is to endure. The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her - and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works. "
(German: The New Woman, in the sense of the best woman, the blossom of all femininity of the past times, can no longer be imagined if civilization is also preserved. The sufferings of the past have only strengthened her, motherhood has made her more profound made, education has broadened its horizons; and it now knows that it must become perfect if it wants to perfect humanity and thus leave its stamp on immortality, through its descendants or their works.)
"I hate that phrase" New Woman ". Of all the tawdry, run-to-heel phrases that strikes me the most disagreeably. When you mean, by the term, the women who believe in and ask for the right to advance in education, the arts, and professions with their fellow-men, you are speaking of a phase in civilization which has come gradually and naturally, and is here to stay. There is nothing new or abnormal in such a woman. But when you confound her with the extremists who want only disown the obligations and offices with which nature has honored them, you do the earnest, progressive women great wrong. "
(German: I hate the phrase New Woman . It seems to me to be the most dismissive of all tasteless expressions that vanish again. If that expression refers to women who believe in the law and ask for the law, in education to advance in art and in professional life equally with her male colleagues, one speaks of a phase of civilization that has developed gradually and naturally and which will remain. There is nothing new or abnormal in such a woman. But if you do confuses her with the extremists who dangerously reject the obligations and duties with which nature has bestowed them, then one is doing the serious, progressive women a great injustice.)
End of the era
Emma Wolf had already addressed the problem in the above comment that the development towards an independent and self-confident new woman was a phase in the development of civilization that would remain. And despite the two world wars (or because of them?) The development towards emancipation and equal rights for women could no longer be prevented, only temporarily hindered or inhibited. And the process goes in the 21st century on, world the woman is still far from gender equality away, and even in the highly developed democracies struggling Modern woman continue to full equality and equal opportunities .
Flapper 1920s
The emergence of the fashion-oriented flappers who took part in parties in the 1920s marked the end of the "era of the new woman" (which is now also referred to as the first wave of feminism ), but the development did not lead back to the old state.
Despite all the scandals caused by the mostly quite young flappers , the fashion also caught on in a moderate form among respectable older women. The most important innovations, which were soon adopted by all fashion-conscious women, were short haircuts and the abolition of the corset . And some of the actresses most closely associated with flapper fashion, Clara Bow , Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore , were role models for the mass audiences that flocked to theaters at the time through their film roles.
Despite their popularity survived fashion and lifestyle of the flapper not global economic crisis that began in autumn 1929th In the economically difficult period of the 1930s was in North America and Europe for the love of life and the hedonism of Flappers no more room. Nevertheless, in many ways they have the merit of creating the modern woman and introducing it to the western world as a permanent element .
The modern woman
The development of the modern woman is a separate chapter that goes far beyond the topic of the new woman at the end of the 19th century. At this point the New Woman was nothing more than the first step in the development of the Modern Woman . And this development has not yet come to a natural and satisfactory end, even in the highly developed democracies of the western world.
It is not just about fashion and lifestyle, but also about the self-determination of women before and within marriage, about equal educational and professional opportunities for girls and women, about the principle of “equal pay for equal work” and much more. The women's suffrage is almost implemented everywhere, but the participation of women in political life at all levels can probably only through the introduction of quotas to be regulated. It is often a task for women themselves, as modern women, to demand their equal treatment and to enforce the principles of equal rights for themselves.
See also
Web links
- Catherine Lavender: The New Woman. The College of Staten Island of CUNY, accessed January 1, 2019 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Jacob Roberts: Women's work In: Distillations 2017, Volume 3.1, pp. 6-11, accessed on March 22, 2018
- ↑ Adapted from Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle , Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
- ^ Hugh Stevens: Henry James and Sexuality . Cambridge University Press 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-08985-2
- ↑ Ruth Birgitta Anderson Bordin: Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman . University of Michigan Press 1993.
- ↑ Charlotte Rich: Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era. University of Missouri Press 2009. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8262-6663-7
- ↑ The New Woman
- ↑ Miriam Bjørklund: "To face it like a man": Exploring Male Anxiety in Dracula and the Sherlock Holmes Canon . Thesis, University of Oslo, accessed July 28, 2017
- ↑ Jürgen Nitsche, "Dr. Elsa Herrmann, a militant Jewish women's rights activist, and her book So ist die neue Frau : Not just an excursus on her femininity concept in the late 1920s", in: Jüdinnen und Psyche, Medizin und Judentum , ed. v. Caris-Petra Heidel (Mabuse Verlag, 2016), pp. 77-108.
- ^ The Gibson Girl as the New Woman . Library of Congress. accessed on March 15, 2014.
- ↑ Nancy Mowall Mathews. "The Greatest Woman Painter": Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, and Issues of Female Fame . The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. accessed on March 15, 2014.
- ↑ Laura R. Prieto. At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America . Harvard University Press; 2001. ISBN 978-0-674-00486-3 . Pp. 160-161.
literature
- Carolyn Christensen Nelson: A New Woman Reader . fiction, articles, and drama of the 1890s. Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ont .; Orchard Park, NY 2001, ISBN 978-1-55111-295-4 (English).
- Martha H. Patterson: Beyond the Gibson Girl . reimagining the American new woman, 1895-1915. University of Illinois Press, Urbana 2005, ISBN 978-0-252-03017-8 (English).
- Sheila Rowbotham : A Century of Women . the history of women in Britain and the United States. Penguin Books, New York 1999, ISBN 978-0-14-023282-0 (English).
- Martha H. Patterson: The American new woman revisited . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2008, ISBN 978-0-8135-4295-9 (English).