Contesting/Consuming Femininities

‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’ asked the Humanitarian in 1896, some three years after the term had become a password on the British cultural scene. 5 The proliferation of articles, books, pamphlets, satirical verse and cartoons in the 1890s indicates that, in the media at least, the New Woman was ever-present. The many terms with which the fin de siècle sought to capture the phenomenon of the New Woman are an indication of how firmly forty years of feminist activism had established the notion of the ‘Modern Woman’ 6 in the public consciousness. Some terms — ‘Novissima’, 7 ‘the advanced woman of to-day’ 8 and ‘the Woman of the Period’ 9 — stressed her avant-gardist and trend-setting effect, and could connote praise or censure. Those sympathetic to the New Woman saw her as a positive force for social change. Her opponents stressed her superficiality and love of sensation; the term ‘Woman of the Period’ was a belated attempt to revive the one-time furore over the ‘Girl of the Period’, whom in 1868 Eliza Lynn Linton had berated as selfish, funloving, ‘fast’, and immoral. 10 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.