New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930 (Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature, 1)

New Woman Hybridities

Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe and Japan. The key concept of ‘hybridities’ is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the ‘modern woman’ as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing. The book is structured around four key themes. ‘Hybridities’ examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. ‘Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass’ is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. ‘Communities of Women’ interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. ‘Race and the New Woman’ inspects white New Women’s investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the ways in which black and nonWestern women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women’s Studies and Women’s History. Ann Heilmann is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea. She is the author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (2000) and New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird (2004), and the editor of Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century (2003). Margaret Beetham is Reader in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 (1996) and editor (with Kay Boardman) of Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology (2001).

Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature Edited by Susan Castillo University of Glasgow

In an age of globalization, it has become increasingly difficult to characterize the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable to influences from beyond its territorial borders. As a result, Americanists in recent years have begun to reconceptualize and reconfigure the discipline of American literary studies, theorizing the ways in which American literature emerges from complex interrelationships between different national traditions, languages and cultural practices. This new series, Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature, will focus on American literary figures as part of a wider international community of writers and intellectuals. 1 New Woman Hybridities Femininity, feminism and international consumer culture, 1880–1930 Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham 2 Don DeLillo The possibility of fiction Peter Boxall 3 Toni Morrison’s Beloved Possible worlds Justine Tally 4 Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Gesa Mackenthun

New Woman Hybridities Femininity, feminism and international consumer culture, 1880–1930

Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Editorial matter and selection, Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-64321-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67016-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-29983-7 (Print Edition)

For Mark and other New Men of the twenty-first century

Contents

List of figures Notes on the contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

x xii xvi 1

ANN HEILMANN AND MARGARET BEETHAM

PART 1

Hybridities 1 Bertha Thomas: the New Woman and ‘Anglo-Welsh’ hybridity

15

17

KIRSTI BOHATA

2 A Hungarian New Woman writer and a hybrid autobiographical subject: Margit Kaffka’s ‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’

35

NÓRA SÉLLEI

PART 2

Through the (periodical) looking glass 3 Writing women’s history: ‘the sex’ debates of 1889

49 51

LAUREL BRAKE

4 The American New Woman and her influence on the Daughters of the Empire of British Columbia in the daily press (1880–95) FRANÇOISE LE JEUNE

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Contents

5 Locating the flapper in rural Irish society: the Irish provincial press and the modern woman in the 1920s

90

LOUISE RYAN

6 Subverting the flapper: the unlikely alliance of Irish popular and ecclesiastical press in the 1920s

102

MARYANN GIALANELLA VALIULIS

7 Riding the tiger: ambivalent images of the New Woman in the popular press of the Weimar Republic

118

INGRID SHARP

PART 3

Communities of women 8 Romance, glamour and the exotic: femininity and fashion in Britain in the 1900s

143

145

HILARY FAWCETT

9 Charged with ambiguity: the image of the New Woman in American cartoons

158

ANGELIKA KÖHLER

10 The day of the girl: Nell Brinkley and the New Woman

179

TRINA ROBBINS

11 ‘The woman of the twentieth century’: the feminist vision and its reception in the Hungarian press 1904–14

190

JUDIT ACSÁDY

12 The New Woman in Japan: radicalism and ambivalence towards love and sex

205

MUTA KAZUE

PART 4

Race and the New Woman

221

13 ‘Natural’ divisions/national divisions: whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs

223

JILL BERGMAN

Contents 14 The birth of national hygiene and efficiency: women and eugenics in Britain and America 1865–1915

ix 240

ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON

Index

263

Figures

7.1 7.2

‘Eine Schreckensnachricht’ (‘A Grim Warning’) ‘Gib Mutti einen Gute-Nacht-Kuß’ (‘Kiss Mummy Goodnight’) 7.3 ‘Weinbrand’ (Advertisement for Brandy) 7.4 ‘Weinbrand’ (Advertisement for Brandy) 7.5 ‘Ein guter Witz kann zur Katastrophe werden’ (‘A Good Joke Can Turn into a Catastrophe’) 7.6 ‘Rahma Margarine Buttergleich’ (‘Rahma Margarine – Just Like Butter’) 7.7 ‘Vicki Baum, die Verfasserin des Romans “stud. Chem. Helen Willfüer”, mit ihren Kindern’ (‘Vicki Baum, Author of the novel “Helen Willfüer, Student of Chemistry”, with her Children’) 8.1 Miss Marie Studholme, actress, veiled and exotic 8.2 Ellalaine Terris and daughter 9.1 ‘The Gibson Girl’ 9.2 C.D. Gibson, ‘Advice to Caddies’ 9.3 C.D. Gibson, ‘In Days to Come the Churches May Be Fuller’ 9.4 ‘The Search For the Great Cause’ 9.5 Life, 9 June 1906 9.6 ‘A Lesson in Ancient History’ 9.7 ‘I Feel Two Natures Struggling Within Me’ 9.8 ‘Looking Backward’ 9.9 ‘Two Sisters of the Future’ 9.10 ‘When the Husband and Wife are Both Professionals There Comes the Question as to Whose Time is the More Precious’ 10.1 Art by Charles Dana Gibson and Nell Brinkley: a comparison 10.2 ‘Tug of War’ 10.3 ‘Too Busy’ (1) 10.4 ‘Too Busy’ (2)

125 126 128 129 130 131

135 151 155 159 161 163 170 170 171 172 173 173

174 180 182 183 184

Figures 10.5 10.6 13.1

13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5

‘Fame’ ‘Clothes Don’t Always Make the Woman’ ‘Mrs. Geo. W. Forbes, Boston, Mass.’, ‘Famous Women of the Negro Race XII: Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges’ ‘Mary A. Rector, New York’ ‘Miss Florence A. Aytes, Richmond, VA’ From ‘Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman’ From ‘Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman’

xi 185 186

233 234 235 236 237

Contributors

Judit Acsády is a sociologist at the Sociology Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her first degree was on Hungarian and English literature. Her previous research includes the history of first-wave Hungarian feminism, fin-de-siècle feminist authors, women’s movements in the transition (1990s) and qualitative research on the interpretation of emancipation among women in the public life in contemporary Hungarian society. She has published studies and articles about these subjects, and is currently completing her PhD studies. Recently she taught a course on the ‘Impact of Feminism on the Social Sciences’ as a guest lecturer at the Cultural Anthropology Department of the ELTE University, Budapest. Margaret Beetham is a Reader in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is author of A Magazine of her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 (Routledge 1996) and editor (with Kay Boardman) of Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology (Manchester University Press 2001). She has published widely on nineteenth-century popular print and on feminist theory and pedagogy. Jill Bergman is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana, where she teaches courses in American literature and women’s studies. She is working on a book on motherhood and nationalism in the work of Pauline Hopkins, and is co-editing a collection of essays entitled Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women. Kirsti Bohata is a Grants Officer at the Welsh Book Council. She has published on subjects including fin-de-siècle women’s writing, postcolonialism and Welsh literature in English. She is currently preparing a monograph on post-coloniality in Welsh writing in English. Laurel Brake is a Reader in Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests take in all aspects of nineteenth-century print culture. She has published on journals,

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gender, Walter Pater and the sociology of texts. Her books include Subjugated Knowledges (Macmillan 1994), Walter Pater (Northcote House 1994) and Print in Transition (Macmillan 2001). Recently she has coedited Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (ELT Press 2002) with Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams, and Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Palgrave 2000) with Bill Bell and David Finkelstein. She is currently working on a biography of Walter Pater, and co-editing a volume on nineteenth-century print journalism, Victorian Encounters, with Julie Codell. Hilary Fawcett is a Senior Lecturer in Design History at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has published on issues of gender and representation in fashion history. With Dr Cheryl Buckley she has recently co-written Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women’s Fashion from the Fin-de-Siècle to the Present (I.B. Tauris 2002). She is currently editing and contributing to a special edition of the journal Studies in the Literary Imagination which focuses on issues of women and age in visual and literary cultures. Ann Heilmann is a Senior Lecturer in English and the Director of the Centre for Research into Gender in Culture and Society at the University of Wales Swansea. She is the author of New Woman Fiction (Macmillan 2000) and New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird (Manchester University Press 2004), and has edited two anthologies, The Late-Victorian Marriage Question (Routledge Thoemmes 1998) and (with Stephanie Forward) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand (Routledge 2000), a collection of essays on Feminist Forerunners (Pandora 2003) and two special journal issues on the New Woman and women’s suffrage (Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, vol. 4, 2001 and Women’s History Review, vol. 11–12, 2002–3). She is the general editor of Routledge’s Major Works ‘History of Feminism’ series. Current editorial work includes two anthology sets on Anti-Feminism in the Victorian Novel and (with Lucy Delap) Anti-Feminism in Edwardian Literature for Thoemmes Press. Françoise Le Jeune is a Senior Lecturer in British History at the University of Nantes, France. She has published several articles on middle-class women in the British Empire and more specifically in Canada. She is currently working on a book on published women’s colonial autobiographies. She recently edited a volume, The Contribution of Female European Emigrants to Canada (Peter Lang 2003). She is also editing a collection of essays on women’s studies (in French and English) under the title Paroles de Femmes/Female Voices for the University of Nantes (Vol. 1, Paroles de Femmes, Histoires de Femmes 2003, Vol. 2, Female Voices in World War 1 2004). Muta Kazue is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Osaka University in Japan. She is the author of Senryaku toshiteno kazoku (Family Politics in

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Modern Japan, Shin’yo-sha 1996), Jissensuru feminism (Feminist Practice, Iwanami 2001), and numerous articles including ‘Images of the Family in Meiji Periodicals: The Paradox Underlying the Emergence of the “Home” ’, US–Japan Women’s Journal, No. 7 (1994). Angelika Köhler studied English/American and German Literatures and Linguistics at Humboldt University Berlin. She taught courses on American literature at the University of Rostock and received her doctoral degree with an investigation of Robert Lowell’s poetry. From 1984–92 she worked as an assistant at the Center of Applied Linguistics of the Technical University Dresden. Since 1992 she has been teaching courses on American literature at the Department of British and American Studies in Dresden. In 1994/95 she received an ACLS fellowship for the University of California at Los Angeles; in the Spring Semester 1996 she worked as a visiting lecturer at Belmont University Nashville, TN. In 2001 she finished her Habilitation on images of the New Woman in different discourses of turn-of-the-century American literature. Her research interests focus on turn-of-the-century American literature and on contemporary ethnic, in particular Chicana/o, writing. Angelique Richardson is a Senior Lecturer in English at Exeter University. She has published widely on nineteenth-century science and culture and is currently writing a book on Hardy and the subconscious, and coediting a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on Boundaries with Regenia Gagnier and a special issue of New Formations on Eugenics with Carolyn Burdett (2005). She is the author of Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford University Press 2003), editor of Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914 (Penguin 2002), co-editor of The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Palgrave 2001), and is on the Editorial Board of Critical Quarterly. Trina Robbins is a feminist writer and pop culture herstorian. She has written histories of women cartoonists (The Great Women Cartoonists, Watson-Guptill 2001), superheroines (The Great Women Superheroes, Kitchen Sink Press 1996), and girls’ comics (From Girls to Grrrlz, Chronicle Books 1999). She has also written about dark goddesses (Eternally Bad, Conari Press 2001) and women who kill (Tender Murderers, Conari Press 2002). Her biography of Nell Brinkley, Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century, was published by MacFarland Press in 2001. The women cartoonists exhibit she curated, She Draws Comics: Great Women Cartoonists, is the largest collection of American women cartoonists ever shown. It travelled through Europe for two years, exhibited in Germany, Portugal, Austria and Spain, and finally returned to America, where it was shown at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum from February to June 2003.

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Louise Ryan is a Research Fellow at University College London. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish women’s history. Her books include Irish Feminism and the Vote (Folens 1996) and Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 1922–37: Embodying the Nation (Edwin Mellen Press 2002). She is currently co-editing a book (with Margaret Ward) on Irish women and nationalism, to be published by Irish Academic Press in 2003. Nóra Séllei is a Reader at the Department of British Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her areas of research and teaching include feminist literary theory, gender studies and British women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has published three books, one in English (Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond, Peter Lang 1996), and two volumes in Hungarian. Her 1999 monograph interprets six major English novels by nineteenth-century women writers (Lánnyá válik, s írni kezd, Kossuth University Press), whereas her more recent volume, which was also her postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) dissertation, analyses early-twentiethcentury autobiographical texts by women writers (Tükröm, tükröm . . ., Kossuth University Press 2001). She is the editor of the Hungarian feminist series ‘Artemis Books’ and the Hungarian translator of Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being and Jean Rhys’s Smile Please (Csokonai, 1999 and 2001). Ingrid Sharp studied at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and York University and is a Senior Lecturer in the German Department of the University of Leeds. Her areas of interest are in women’s history, ranging from the birth and development of the women’s movement in Germany, gender and culture at the fin-de-siècle, to the position of women in the German Democratic Republic. She is currently exploring the influence of Abolitionist ideas on attitudes to the regulation of sexuality in Germany from 1898–1933 and, together with Jane Jordan, has produced an edition of Josephine Butler’s works in five volumes under the title Diseases of the Body Politic: Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns (Routledge 2003). Maryann Gialanella Valiulis is the Director of the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She specializes in modern Irish history and has published extensively in this area. Among her publications are Women and Irish History, which she edited with Mary O’Dowd, and Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, which she edited with Anthony Bradley. She is also the author of Portrait of a Revolutionary: General Richard Mulcahy and the Founding of the Irish Free State. Currently she is completing a study of gender relations in the Irish Free State, 1922–37.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book was born at the international ‘Feminist Forerunners’ conference hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University in conjunction with the University of Wales Swansea at Manchester in July 2000. We wish to express our thanks to all the speakers and delegates who contributed to the profoundly stimulating and often ground-breaking exchange of ideas. Some of these are developed and extended in the fourteen essays in this volume. We are also grateful to Susan Castillo for her helpful advice as series editor, to Amritpal Bangard for her editorial work at Routledge, to Carl Gillingham at Wearset Publishing Services for his careful copy-editing and to our production editor Sarah Coulson. Special thanks go to Mark Llewellyn for his unfaltering support and help with indexing. Some of the ideas discussed in Trina Robbins’s essay are discussed in further detail in her biography Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century (McFarland & Company 2001).

Introduction Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham

‘The New Woman’ with her short haircut and practical dress, her demand for access to higher education, the vote and the right to earn a decent living, her challenge to accepted views of femininity and female sexuality, this ambiguous figure was the focus of much media debate and of intense anxiety as well as hope in the decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century. She was – and still is – the subject both of history and fantasy. At the start of the twenty-first century scholarly interest in the New Woman in the anglophone world has been manifest in a range of recent books and articles.1 These work across as well as within the disciplines of history, literature, cultural studies and women’s studies. The ‘advanced’ or ‘modern’ woman has been rescued from the margins of literary and historical study and her importance has been recognized. Indeed, this may seem to be a topic on which it is difficult now to say anything ‘new’. However, we believe that this book can make just such a claim. Not only do we seek here to contribute to the growing body of scholarly work on the New Woman but also to offer something genuinely new to the continuing debates on her significance. There are four particular aspects of this collection which extend those debates into new territory. In the first part of this Introduction we set these out in some detail. In subsequent sections we discuss the groupings and specific chapters at greater length.

New women, new hybridities The first and perhaps most important new aspect of this volume is that it is international not only in the provenance of its contributors but, crucially, in the topics they address. The New Woman has been understood almost exclusively within national boundaries or sometimes, as Angelique Richardson points out, as a ‘transatlantic phenomenon’ (p. 243).2 Chapters in this collection situate the New Woman in a much wider geographical and cultural context, dealing as they do with Hungary, Japan, British Columbia, Germany, Ireland and Wales, as well as England and the United States of America. This international dimension not only brings

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Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham

new knowledge into work written in English, it also enables us to revisit our understanding of existing work by seeing it in a comparative light. Comparison across the different nations and cultures in which the New Woman appeared enables us to identify continuities and discontinuities across time and space. The common feature which recurs again and again in different cultures is the identification of the New Woman with the modern and with the disruptive, that is with challenges to existing structures of gendered identity – challenges which on the textual and literary level, as Nóra Séllei explains in her discussion of the Hungarian writer Margit Kaffka, typically take the form of fragmentation, heteroglossia and modernist experimentation. Resistance to the New Woman frequently calls on traditional cultural or national identities. We return to this discussion below. As well as identifying common ground, the comparisons which this book suggests also enable an understanding of the historical and cultural specificities and therefore the differences between the various manifestations of the New Woman. Perhaps the most striking example of this discontinuity within continuity is the debate about female sexuality in Japan, which Muta Kazue explores in the latter part of her chapter. As she argues, Japanese New Women’s stress on marriage and the importance of female virginity before marriage seems at first utterly at odds with the New Woman’s questioning of marriage in Britain and the United States. However, in each case the demand that women control their own sexuality and their own bodies underpinned the New Woman’s demands. Because of the very different cultural situation in which each group of women found themselves, this demand for sexual control gave rise to radically different ideas and strategies. Second, this collection specifically signals the importance of the periodical press in the New Woman phenomenon. During the 1890s in Britain it was something of a journalistic cliché that the New Woman did not exist outside the pages of the periodical press. She was, detractors claimed, simply a product of the fevered brains of journalists, a creature purely of ink and paper.3 The mirror image of this contemporary concern is, of course, the temptation to use the rich resources of the newspapers and magazines of the day as though they could give us a window onto the past, giving us the historical or ‘real’ New Woman in an unmediated fashion. We want to eschew both these approaches. Instead this volume takes as its premise the understanding that the New Woman and the periodical press were inextricably bound up together. However, that relationship was never simple, static or one-dimensional. It was, as Angelika Köhler says, ‘multivalent’ (p. 158). The periodical provided a discursive space in which the meanings of femininity were contested and which spanned the public/private divide. It therefore provided a forum in which women, not all of them professional writers, could find a voice even when they were derided as strident and unwomanly. New Women were thus the subjects as well as the objects of debate in the press and so were able to challenge the

Introduction

3

traditional discourses on femininity, masculinity, sex, marriage and the family. Creating new kinds of hybrid identity in and through the press, New Women and the New Woman debates were also instrumental in developing the periodical press in all its diversity and polyvocality during the decades discussed in this volume. Third, we link both the New Woman and the press to the theoretical concept of hybridity. Hybridity is a term which has become familiar in recent years mainly through its deployment in postcolonial theory and criticism, where Homi Bhabha’s work has been crucial (see Bhabha 1994). The term literally refers to plants or animals which are the products of cross-breeding or mixed inheritance. In post-colonial work, hybridity has been used to refer to the new kinds of identity which arise from migration and within diaspora communities. The unsettling of fixed identities based on gender, class or race can lead, according to Bhabha and others, to a creativity which is made possible precisely by inhabiting the spaces between the old fixed categories. This volume seeks to explore how far this concept, so important in post-colonial theory, can be usefully related to a rather different set of contested identities. Many of the chapters in this volume discuss the processes by which the new gendered identities emerging at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century brought together elements of the traditional and the radically new. Reading back from the present into that earlier period, we are sometimes surprised to discover apparently contradictory attitudes and beliefs held together in the same piece of writing, the same programme, or even apparently the identity of a single individual. We do not expect, for example, to find progressive arguments for women’s access to the suffrage to be linked to eugenicist beliefs in the way Angelique Richardson describes in her chapter about the United States. Nor do we expect women active in public life to organize petitions saying that women are unfit to have the vote, as explored in Laurel Brake’s contribution. This ‘conservative feminism’, a formulation which Brake borrows from Martin Pugh, might be described from the vantage point of the present as a hybrid identity. In claiming the hybrid as a positive and potentially creative identity, modern critics and writers are seeking to reverse the discourse which has almost universally stigmatized those of mixed race or those who transgress the boundaries demarcating class, religious and national boundaries. Attacks on the New Woman often mobilized this stigmatizing discourse and invoked the ideals of a pure identity which had to be defended. In Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan and America, for example, as Ingrid Sharp, Judit Acsády, Maryann Valiulis, Louise Ryan, Muta Kazue and Angelika Köhler outline, New Women were seen as departing from the national character of their country’s womanhood. Women have usually been the bearers of tradition in patriarchal cultures, whereas modernity has been implicitly gendered male (see Scott 1990; Felski 1995). As the

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Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham

chapters in this volume show, New Women defended themselves by protesting that they brought together the best of the national character with the modern in a new and hybrid identity. Thus Hungarian New Women argued that they were not simply reproducing English or American activism but were developing a specifically Hungarian and ‘gentle’ feminism (see Acsády, Chapter 11). In Japan the concept of ‘Western techniques with Japanese spirit’ (see Muta, Chapter 12) was one which New Women could claim for themselves against the argument that Japanese femininity must be defined in rational terms. Similarly in Catholic Ireland the modern girl was seen as foreign and, as Ryan and Valiulis demonstrate, the forces of Irish national pride and conservative Catholicism combined to attack her. In Britain the anti-New Woman writer Eliza Lynn Linton actually used the word ‘hybrid’ (or ‘sport’) with its derogatory power to describe the ‘wild women’ and ‘shrieking sisterhood’ who had, in her view, abandoned traditional femininity (Linton 1891: 79; see Richardson, Chapter 14). Ironically, of course, Linton herself represented precisely that conservative feminism which Brake describes. Kirsti Bohata in her examination of the Anglo-Welsh New Woman writer Bertha Thomas explicitly draws on the post-colonial debates to show how a contested femininity is perceived as a threat to national identities and national culture. Fourth, the concept of hybridity not only sheds light on the national and ethnic factors underlying the multiple constructions of the ‘modern woman’ but also helps to locate this figure within international consumer culture. As the chapters in this volume by Ingrid Sharp, Angelika Köhler and Hilary Fawcett illustrate, in its discursive valorization of ‘trendy’ femininities within the context of high fashion, the periodical press sought to harness ideas of gendered modernity for the consumption of an affluent middle-class female clientele. In this process the New Woman turned into an object of desire, a commodity that, like the products her image was used to advertise, was to be possessed by the public gaze. Cultural anxieties about the threat of feminism and the impending masculinization of women were warded off by the dissemination of fetishized, at times Orientalized, representations of the modern woman’s erotic allure. As Trina Robbins suggests in her assessment of the cartoonist Nell Brinkley, this emphasis on glamour and the body beautiful made it possible for women artists to reinvest popular iconography with feminist overtones by circulating images that stressed physical and professional agency as the hallmark of the New Girl. Whereas some New Women were happy to celebrate the possibilities of traditional femininity and the modern living together, hybridity – as we are defining it here – remained a difficult and fragile identity and one not always possible to maintain. This is perhaps most clearly shown in Jill Bergman’s discussion of the way white American women in the Club Movement rejected mixed-race clubs. As Bergman points out, there was a

Introduction

5

moment when a racially hybrid movement was about to be born with all its creative possibilities, but the claims of a pure identity, in this case racial, triumphed and separate development on race lines was the result. The use of the term ‘hybridity’ in these instances extends the way in which it has been used in post-colonial theory. However, we suggest that there is another way of thinking of hybridity in relation to this volume, and that is in relation to the media. The periodical press which is the focus of this volume is a pointedly hybrid form. The newspaper and the magazine, even the serious journal, are characterized by a mix of genres and in some cases by a mixture of printed text and illustration. Each periodical also exists in a double relationship to time – both of its moment and extended over the time span of its publication, the years or even decades during which it appears at daily, weekly or monthly intervals. Though each periodical has to remain sufficiently consistent to keep its readers, the heterogeneity of the form and this relationship to time means that even the same periodical becomes subject to shifts and changes of shape. Taken as a whole, the periodical press is an extraordinarily diverse form in which, as Brake shows, journals whose political positions are diametrically opposed may borrow elements from each other. Crucially, as Françoise Le Jeune suggests in her discussion of the subversive spaces the women’s page could open up in the conservative press, the periodical is also a mixed form in terms of voices. Even anonymous journalism assumed a variety of writers in any single issue. Among the voices in many of the journals discussed here were those of ordinary readers who might write in for advice or to take part in debates or even to sign petitions. The heterogeneity of voice and the openness of the form made it, as we have argued, a crucial site in which the identity of the New Woman was shaped and articulated. In its exploration of the complex factors which underpinned the formation of New Woman identities, this collection is organized around four interconnecting sections. Part 1, ‘Hybridities’, examines the discursive instabilities in relation to both national and ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. Part 2, ‘Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass’, concentrates on the periodical press production and circulation of New Woman images. Part 3, ‘Communities of Women’, interrogates women’s efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation and dissemination of New Woman subjectivities. Finally, Part 4, ‘Race and the New Woman’, inspects white New Women’s investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which African-American women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. To what extent did the idea of the hybrid appeal to New Woman fiction writers because it reflected their own often ambivalent and fluid subject positions? In Chapter 1 Kirsti Bohata examines the ‘multiple points of

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identification’ (a phrase she adopts from post-colonial critic Charlotte Williams) which shaped the negotiation of insider/outsider positions in the work of the Anglo-Welsh writer Bertha Thomas. Of the first New Woman generation but not in it, Thomas did not fit the British (English) paradigm of the big-headed, bicycle-riding, unambiguously middle-class, young and urban ‘modern girl’ she mocked in her fiction (‘The Madness of Winifred Owen’ and ‘The Only Girl’, Picture Tales from Welsh Hills, 1912). Nor did she reflect the conventional markers of ‘authentic’ Welshness. Rather, Thomas’s work problematizes the figure of the outsider in novels (In a Cathedral City, 1882) and stories like ‘An Undesirable Alien’ and ‘The Way He Went’ (Picture Tales). Stranded between different cultures, classes and gender roles, many of her characters survive only if they learn to ‘pass’ successfully. At the same time, however, Thomas invested the category of the hybrid with creative potential and valorized traditional female occupations within domestic settings. Her own hybrid identity and cultural sensitivity made her critical of the political implications of ideological formations which, as Angelique Richardson shows, tempted so many of her English and American contemporaries to embrace eugenicist positions. If the thematic focus on hybrid identities opens up a space for sociocultural and political interrogation in Bertha Thomas’s writing, Nóra Séllei, in her chapter on the Hungarian writer and journalist Margit Kaffka, focuses attention on literary experimentation and the hybrid autobiographical subject. In its dynamic interplay of lyricism and fragmentation and its conjunction of private (autobiography) and public (war) discourses, the narrative instability of Kaffka’s ‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’ (1915) can be seen to exemplify the instability of the category of the New Woman more generally in the time before and at the outbreak of the First World War. The ‘heteroglossic fragmentation’ of Kaffka’s text, Séllei argues, ‘reflects and textually recreates the social discourses of the pre-war years that provided, and at the same time contested, the discursive space of the New Woman’ (p. 36) Textual hybridity here invokes female resistance to phallocentric discursive structures and totalizing regimes in the sinister context of the Great War.

Through the (periodical) looking glass The chapters in Part 2 of this volume examine the hybrid nature of the periodical press’s response to the cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Because it was a public space to which women could get access, even if they were largely confined to the domestic, the periodical press provided a forum for debate, for the sharing of ideas and for an entry into public life. Indeed, journalism was one of the important new professions into which women began to enter at the turn of the last century. The intricate relation between the periodical press, the construction of

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political identity, and New Woman agency (New Womanhood being defined here as active involvement in public debate, hence ‘male space’, irrespective of ideological location) is the subject of Laurel Brake’s ‘Writing Women’s History’ (Chapter 3). Brake concentrates on a wide range of periodical press contributions to ‘the Sex’ debates of 1889, the year that saw the publication of the anti-feminist ‘Appeal Against Female Suffrage’ and its rejoinders, prompting an extended public controversy on the issue of woman suffrage. This, as Brake argues, wrote women (as journalists, readers, activists) into history even as it exposed them to the commercial strategies of male editors who, targeting a specifically female readership, deployed women journalists and celebrities in order to rally support for the political stance of their journals. The periodical press’s coverage of the suffrage debates, Brake concludes, ‘is historically determined and . . . historically specific, an epistemic moment when public prints and discourses, party politics, dissonants, personalities and gender formations converge to form a detailed socio-political map of a moment’ (pp. 56–7). The socio-cultural configurations of women’s journalistic contestation of late nineteenth-century gender taxonomies are explored further in Chapter 4, in Françoise Le Jeune’s contribution, ‘The American New Woman and her Influence on the Daughters of the Empire of British Columbia in the daily press (1880–95)’. Whereas in Britain, as Brake’s chapter shows, the controversy about women’s political rights developed within the context of tight editorial control and expert editorial manipulation, Le Jeune examines the subversive strategies adopted by women journalists in the staunchly conservative Victoria Daily (British) Colonist. Feminist dissent, she suggests, was given a largely uncensored public platform because, voiced as it was from within the ‘separate sphere’ of the woman’s page, it was considered to be politically irrelevant by the male editor. This made it possible for a special issue of May 1895, edited exclusively by women, to promote the political demands associated with the New Woman movement, including women’s educational and professional selfadvancement, equal pay and the female franchise. It was this debate, conducted in mostly moderate tones in the pages of a conservative periodical, which, Le Jeune contends, prompted British Columbian women to define themselves as political subjects. The resonance of the women’s page in its interplay with and subversion of conservative discourses is also scrutinized by Louise Ryan and Maryann Valiulis in their chapters on the Irish New Woman of the 1920s. In ‘Locating the Flapper in Rural Irish Society’ (Chapter 5), Ryan examines the conflicted constructions of femininity in the secular press which posited Irish womanhood both as the symbol of nationalist and Catholic principles and as a commodity in the marketing of modern lifestyles and their attendant consumer products. ‘Within the specific context of the Irish Free State’, Ryan argues, ‘the flapper embodied the tensions between, on

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the one hand, cultural nationalists and the Catholic church working to minimize foreign tastes and fashions and, on the other hand, commercial interests and popular consumer demand which continued to promote and enjoy them’ (p. 99). As Valiulis illustrates in Chapter 6 (‘Subverting the Flapper’), the advice columns of the ecclesiastical press therefore sought to reinvest the image of the flapper with traditional values in order to ‘construct an ideal which accorded with the designs of Catholic Ireland’ (p. 103). The secular press, more attentive to the actual conditions of Irish women’s lives after the First World War, cultivated a moderate tone of enlightenment which encouraged ‘Bachelor Women’ to feel valorized in society, yet ultimately reaffirmed conventional virtues like modesty, purity, domesticity and good housekeeping. Ingrid Sharp’s chapter, ‘Riding the Tiger’ (Chapter 7), analyses similarly ambivalent images of the New Woman in the popular press of the Weimar Republic. In the volatile socio-political and economic climate of this unstable democratic state which followed the collapse of the German empire in the wake of the First World War, only to find its demise in the totalitarian regime of Hitler’s Third Reich, the relationship between the sexes was the battleground for the conflicting desire for experimentation and regeneration, individualism and collectivism, and therefore stood as emblematic of the nostalgic impulse to reaffirm ‘order over growing chaos, . . . tradition against modernity, . . . the old morality against the new’ (p. 118). As in the case of republican Ireland, the periodical press invested in images of fashionable modernity and the body beautiful in order to invoke an iconographic femininity which returned women to the safe parameters of marriage and motherhood. Writers like Vicki Baum, who combined the daringly modern with the reassuringly domestic and maternal, were instrumental in bolstering the popular appeal of New Woman images even as they contributed to the domestication of the more radical aspects of this figure.

Communities of women As Sharp’s discussion of Vicki Baum indicates, women were both co-opted by, and skilfully inserted themselves into the discourses of, the popular media, and as such held considerable influence on the formation and transformation of public opinion. One of the questions addressed by the chapters in Part 3 is therefore how, in their role as artists, journalists and consumers, women interacted with, modified and politicized modes of mass communication. What connections, if any, can be made between feminine consumerism and the emergence of self-consciously feminist counter cultures? In ‘Romance, Glamour and the Exotic’ (Chapter 8) Hilary Fawcett examines women’s participation as consumers and producers of the discourses of pleasure and desire which moulded the fashion industry in

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early twentieth-century urban Britain. Whether as actresses (Lily Langtry), popular fiction writers (Elinor Glyn), fashion designers (Lucile), editors or readers of up-market magazines (The Lady’s Realm), women were actively engaged in the construction of fantasies which validated women’s bodies and bodily appetites. While the liberatory potential of Orientalized femininities and iconographic representations of maternity may have been limited, Fawcett argues that the escapist frisson of indulging in ‘a feminine world expressive of exotic sensibilities and new horizons of bodily pleasure’ marked ‘the last moment before the sexual and reproductive were pulled apart’ (p. 156). That the fin-de-siècle offered a space for the exploration of subversive desires which came to be considered rather reprehensible in the early twentieth century is also illustrated in Chapter 9, in Angelika Köhler’s discussion of Charles Dana Gibson’s cartoon representations of the American New Woman. Assertive, college-educated and athletic, the ‘Gibson Girl’ was ‘charged with ambiguity’. She appeared to be an independent agent of her destiny, yet the cultural momentum she gained as the ‘ideal’ representation of American femininity signals the tensions in this maleconstructed figure. As Köhler points out, it was her very Girlhood which pinpointed the temporality of her condition. Significantly, after the turn of the century, the figure of Cupid replaced the golf club as the symbol of Gibson’s womanhood. ‘What began as a humorous interpretation of young American women’s striving for self-reliance’, Köhler concludes, ultimately ‘turned into a sarcastic condemnation of professional women who try to find fulfilment outside of domestic duties’ (p. 175). As Trina Robbins shows in ‘The Day of the Girl’ (Chapter 10), the Gibson Girl found its feminist, if somewhat ‘sugar-coated’ (p. 179), counterpart in Nell Brinkley’s flamboyant construction of early twentiethcentury girl power. A self-made artist and businesswoman, Brinkley had a vested interest in establishing the shrewdly professional, adventure-loving, and yet seductively feminine woman as a role model for young Americans. Many of her cartoons are self-portraits or deflate the cliché of the ugly feminist. In the course of her thirty-year existence, the Brinkley Girl progressed from career woman to resourceful stooge, and was even figured as an intrepid freedom fighter in the Spanish Civil War. How does this populist–romanticized version of American feminism compare with developments in early twentieth-century Hungary? Judit Acsády’s discussion of ‘The Woman in the Twentieth Century’ in Chapter 11 refers to the title essay in a collection of feminist writings published in 1901 by the educational reformer and women’s rights activist Rozina Mársits, who sought to model the Hungarian New Woman on her British counterpart. Mársits’s vision of modern womanhood radically revised existing representations in contemporary fiction of the career-centred but love-starved and profoundly frustrated woman. As in Britain, the cultural feminism of the Hungarian New Woman was born from the political

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context of the women’s movement. Other writers soon followed Mársits’s lead; thus Rózsa Schwimmer edited the feminist monthly Nó és Társadalom (Women and Society) and in 1904 became a founding member of the Association of Feminists (Feministák Egyesülete), the leading organization of Hungarian first-wave feminism, while writers like Szsidónia Willhelm and Laura Polányi advanced a libertarian position on women’s sexual freedom. Acsády’s survey of the contemporary Hungarian press indicates the prominence of feminist debates and also the lively interchange between Hungarian feminists and celebrities of the international women’s movement such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Carrie Chapman Catt and Sylvia Pankhurst. In the concluding chapter of this section, ‘The New Woman in Japan’ (Chapter 12), Muta Kazue examines a radical feminism distinctly different from that of Western activists like Pankhurst. As in the West, women journalists and writers were instrumental in creating the concept and public image of the Japanese New Woman. The most prominent periodical, Seitô (Bluestocking), was founded in 1911. Though evocative of early Western feminism in its name, Muta stresses that Seitô’s New Woman developed along very specific cultural lines. The emphasis here was not so much on political but instead on emotional, and specifically sexual, liberation. New Woman poets and writers like Yosano Akiko, Hiratsuka Riachô, Itô Noe and Hara Asao openly celebrated their romantic attachments and scandalized their more orthodox contemporaries by embarking on unconventional relationships with younger or married men or embracing same-sex love. Whereas New Woman writers in the West sought to disentangle their protagonists from what they considered the fettering discourses of romantic love, Japanese feminists, writing from within a social system predicated on arranged marriage, promoted emotional and sexual self-fulfilment in marriage. At the same time, they radically revised the concept of virginity to assert women’s right to absolute bodily autonomy.

Race and the New Woman If it was a woman’s sovereignty over her own body which came to be the hallmark of Japanese New Womanhood, the body also proved to be the central battleground for contending ideologies in the British and American New Woman debates. What was at stake here, however, was not only the female body and the embattled question of ownership, but also, in a wider sense, the social body politic and the ‘hygienic’ measures adopted to safeguard, or endanger as the case might be, the health and betterment of the ‘race’. The final two chapters in this collection return to the transatlantic New Woman in order to explore the eugenicist and racist underbelly of Western historical feminism. In Chapter 13, ‘Whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs’, Jill Bergman scrutinizes the

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emergence of apartheid discourses which stressed the imperative of maintaining racial purity divisions in the American women’s movement. The exclusion, in 1900, of the Women’s Era Club from the federation on account of its predominantly African-American membership prompted a prolonged debate in The Club Woman, the official organ of the General Federation, and the African-American press. ‘A site of confluence for the rhetorics of progress and Americanness’, Bergman argues, ‘this debate evolved around the nature of American womanhood and constructed the New Woman as representative of a specifically white national identity’ (p. 224). In response to white women’s segregational policies, African-American women journalists like Pauline Hopkins began to celebrate the black woman’s achievements in regular columns and series which commemorated ‘Famous Women of the Negro Race’ (Colored American Magazine) and mapped the ‘Progress of Colored Women’ (Voice of the Negro). In circulating glamorous images of revered ‘race women’, African-American women journalists laid claim to the idea that the black club woman was the ‘real’ New Woman of America. Ironically, after its expulsion of African-American women, the General Federation welcomed (white) male members into its ranks. ‘What could have been a moment of gender solidarity’, Bergman concludes, ‘became instead a women’s movement divided along the lines of race’ (p. 236). The white imperialist premise of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was underpinned by eugenicist discourses which, in their wider ramifications, are the subject of the last chapter of this book. In ‘The birth of national hygiene and efficiency’, Angelique Richardson examines the national hygiene and efficiency movement of the turn of the last century and beyond. As the medical establishment sought to obstruct feminist demands for educational and political reform by defining women through their reproductive organs, white middle-class feminists adapted scientific discourses for social purity purposes, countering hegemonic claims with the argument that the real problem was men’s polluted and contagious bodies, not women’s aspirations. As Richardson shows, biologized models of sexual behaviour held great appeal for many feminists because they established women as the morally superior sex and authorized feminist eugenicist interventions for the purposes of racial regeneration. Thus it was a feminist, Sybil Neville-Rolfe, who founded the Eugenics Society (now Galton Institute) in 1907, and Virginia Woodhull, the first female presidential candidate in America, was a staunch supporter of the eugenic elimination of the ‘unfit’. With its distinctive racial purity agenda Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction makes for uncomfortable reading. Nor was this preoccupation with biology and the racial body limited to white women only, for as Richardson illustrates, the social and political claims of both white and black women were buttressed by biologistic beliefs. In America the rise of eugenic thought

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‘directly informed the new state sterilization policies’ implemented in the decade 1907–17 (p. 248). As Jill Bergman points out, it is ironical that the New Woman internationally espoused the principle of hybridity as a marker of progress and freedom, yet in conjunction with race, this same hybridity was often perceived as a threat to the nation. In bringing examples of the diverse, contradictory and ideologically unstable national discourses on the New Woman together in this collection, we wish to offer new perspectives on the hybrid voices of the international New Woman movement.

Notes 1 See Ardis 1990, Beetham 2001, Chotia 1998, Forward 2003, Gardiner 1993, Gardner and Rutherford 1992, Heilmann 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2004, Heilmann and Forward 2000, Hughes 2001, Kranidis 1995, Ledger 1996 and 1997, Mangum 1998, Miller 1994, Mitchell 1995, Nelson 1996 and 2001, Newlin 2000, Pykett 1992 and 1995, Richardson 2002 and 2003. 2 For transatlantic approaches to the New Woman, see Heilmann 2003, Marks 1990, Richardson 2002, Showalter 1993. 3 This argument was also mobilized by advocates of the New Woman and by feminist writers who challenged the conservative press’s construction of the ugly man-hater and contrasted it with their own vision of New Womanhood (see Morgan-Dockrell 1896: 340; Grand 1898: 466).

Bibliography Ardis, A. (1990) New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Beetham, M. (1996) A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914, London: Routledge. —— (ed.) (2001) The New Woman and the Periodical Press, special issue of Media History, 7.1. Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Chotia, J. (ed.) (1998) The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felski, R. (1995) The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forward, S. (ed.) (2003) Dreams, Visions and Realities: Short Stories by LateVictorian and Early Modernist Women Writers, Birmingham: Birmingham University Press. Gardiner, J. (ed.) (1993) The New Woman, London: Collins & Brown. Gardner, V. and Rutherford, S. (eds) (1992) The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grand, S. (1898) ‘The New Woman and the Old’, Lady’s Realm, 466–70, repr. in Heilmann (1998), vol. 2. Heilmann, A. (ed.) (1998) The Late-Victorian Marriage Question: A Collection of Key New Woman Texts, 5 vols, London, Routledge Thoemmes Press.

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—— (2000) New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism, Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (ed.) (2001) Masculinities, Maternities, Motherlands: Defining/Contesting New Woman Identities, special issue of Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, 4. —— (ed.) (2002–3) Words as Deeds: Literary and Historical Perspectives on Women’s Suffrage, special issue of Women’s History Review, 11.4 and 12.1. —— (ed.) (2003) Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century, London: Pandora. —— (2004) New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— and Forward, S. (eds) (2000) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, 4 vols, London: Routledge. Hughes, L. (ed.) (2001) New Woman Poets: An Anthology, London: The Eighteen Nineties Society. Kranidis, R.S. (1995) Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ledger, S. (ed.) (1996) Women’s Writing at the Fin-de-Siècle, special issue of Women’s Writing, 3.3. —— (1997) The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin-de-Siècle, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— and McCracken, S. (eds) (1995) Cultural Politics at the Fin-de-Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linton, E.L. (1891) ‘The Wild Women, No. 1: As Politicians’, Nineteenth Century, 30: 79–88, repr. in Heilmann (1998), vol. 1. Mangum, T. (1998) Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marks, P. (1990) Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Miller, J. Eldrige (1994) Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel, London: Virago. Mitchell, S. (1995) The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915, New York: Columbia University Press. Morgan-Dockrell, Mrs (1896) ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’, Humanitarian, 8: 339–50, repr. in Heilmann (1998), vol. 2. Nelson, C.C. (1996) British Women Fiction Writers of the 1890s, New York: Twayne. —— (ed.) (2001) A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, Peterborough: Broadview Press. Newlin, K. (ed.) (2000) American Plays of the New Woman, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Pykett, L. (1992) The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge. —— (1995) Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century, London: Edward Arnold. Richardson, A. (ed.) (2002) Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914, London: Penguin. —— (2003) Love and Eugenics in the late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— and Willis, C. (eds) (2001) The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Scott, B. Kime (ed.) (1990) The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Showalter, E. (1991) Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, London: Bloomsbury. —— (ed.) (1993) Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle, London: Virago.

Part 1

Hybridities

1

Bertha Thomas The New Woman and ‘AngloWelsh’ hybridity Kirsti Bohata

The New Woman, and her associations with the English middle and upper classes, may at first appear to be a difficult figure to place in a Welsh context. Binary constructions of national identity in Wales – where Welsh identity is constructed in opposition to ‘Englishness’ so that one’s ‘Welshness’ is eroded in more or less direct proportion to the degree one becomes anglicized – have led to the problematic marginalization of a rather anglicized Welsh middle class, and especially middle-class women, in literary and historical accounts of the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find a number of active and politically committed ‘feminist forerunners’ operating through the media of Welsh and English whom we may confidently label as Welsh New Women, including Ellen Hughes, who wrote a feminist article entitled ‘Y Ddynes Newydd’ (‘The New Woman’) in Y Gymraes (1896/7).1 Indeed, such women have been described, in Welshlanguage criticism, as ‘[C]ymraes Newydd ’ (Aaron 1998: 211) – literally ‘New Welsh woman’ – a term which confers a distinctly Welsh cultural authenticity upon these feminist forerunners. Attempting to ‘place’ those Englishlanguage, or ‘Anglo-Welsh’,2 New Women who do not have the marker of language or who do not provide an explicit declaration of national allegiance as ‘proof ’ of nationality and who often moved between England and Wales is, however, more complex.3 Within the narratives of anglocentric British feminist histories, and in relation to the cultural and literary canons of Welsh-language writing, Anglo-Welsh women writers tend to be marginalized or else their complex cultural and literary allegiances are obscured. This chapter will suggest that theories of cultural hybridity – and specifically the figure of the hybrid individual – may offer new ways for us to approach (Anglo-) Welsh women who have been overlooked, excluded or misrepresented by narrow assumptions about their class and perceived national identities or affiliations as well as being further marginalized by their gender. Focusing on Bertha Thomas (1845–1918) – novelist, short-story writer, satirist, feminist, biographer of George Sand – this chapter will address some of the problems of ‘placing’ this unjustly ignored ‘New Woman’ writer. Hybridity is one of the most important and versatile concepts to emerge from post-colonial and cultural studies, yet what we may infer

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from its coupling with the New Woman may not, at first, be obvious. What is a hybrid New Woman? What, for that matter, is a non-hybrid New Woman? Of course, this second question is inseparable from the first – one of the implications of discussing cultural or other hybridities is to invoke and perhaps reinforce the idea of an essentialized cultural authenticity.4 That is, to invoke the possibility of hybrid New Women, one inevitably bolsters the stereotype of the New Woman – the (upper) middle-class, bicycle-riding, androgynous (or ultrafeminine), feminist writer, speaker and political campaigner. This iconic, if multiple coded, figure (Heilmann 2000: 44; Ledger and Luckhurst 2000: xvii) is both reinforced and complicated by recent academic research, as critics and historians look beyond the central suffrage campaigns and ‘canonical’ writers to consider differences in class and allegiances to other local or national causes, as well as lesser-known authors. In its discussion of New Woman hybridities, this chapter inevitably and self-consciously makes use of what is essentially a stereotype (a variously coded but clearly recognisable image) of the New Woman in order to consider how Bertha Thomas’s fascinating writing might be illuminated by paradigms of hybridity and ambivalence. The engagement with hybridity functions on a number of levels in this chapter, and I will suggest that hybridity offers useful models both in terms of locating, or rather making a space for, Bertha Thomas within contemporary academic discourses and also, in a different way, in the interpretation of her fiction. With reference to the former intervention, we might conveniently understand the theoretical use of hybridity as a strategic model which resists narrow and exclusive categorizations. With reference to the second approach, an awareness of the discourses of hybridity allows us to focus on Thomas’s sustained interest in the outsider, the alien, the criss-crossing of boundaries of culture, nationality and language as well as those of class and gender. For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate on Thomas’s short stories, of which she published two volumes: Camera Lucida; or, Strange Passages in Common Life (1897) and Picture Tales from Welsh Hills (1912), and specifically on those stories set in Wales, although I also consider how the themes identified therein may be traced through her other writing, fiction and non-fiction. Before going on to discuss Thomas as a New Woman and an AngloWelsh writer, it is necessary briefly to outline the theoretical background which informs this chapter. Elements of Homi K. Bhabha’s work which highlight the centrality of hybridity in terms of cultural production, where it is ‘the inbetween space’ which ‘carries the burden of the meaning of culture’, are of course crucial (Bhabha 1994: 38). However, more recent work by Charlotte Williams offers an equally complex but rather more accessible means of understanding the fluidity of culture. Williams’s work is also particularly relevant here as she writes with direct reference to Wales and Welsh culture. Williams is a mixed-race academic – the daugh-

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ter of a white Welsh (and Welsh-speaking) mother and a black Guyanese father – whose own experiences of growing up in Wales informs her work in this area; indeed, some of her writing might best be described as ‘biotextual’.5 In her essay ‘“I going away, I going home”: Mixed-“Race”, Movement and Identity’, Williams stresses the problems of narrow constructions of cultural authenticity, especially in Wales, and shows identity to be ‘a process of becoming as a perpetual movement, rather than any singular or static statement of being’ (Williams 2000: 179). Drawing on the work of Wilfred Cartney and fiction of Pauline Melville, Williams creates a space for her own mixed-race, culturally marginalized identity by adopting the idea of moving away and moving back as a continual process of border crossing [which] allows for a recognition of multiple points of identification. . . . This positioning also acts as a counter-discourse to depictions of home and belonging that posit rootedness in specific locations and places and times. So the art of negotiating self lies in managing this dynamic where there is a constant mixing of heritage and traditions and a constant movement towards their identification and reformulation. It is within the remix that the spaces open up for the claiming and negotiation of multiple identities. (Ibid.: 180, my emphasis) Williams’s negotiation of her experience of cultural hybridity and of multiple belongings (and unbelongings) highlights the centrality of ‘instability, shifts, repositionings, loss, ambivalence and movement’ (ibid.: 182) in the process of constantly ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ (ibid.: 183). She makes effective use of an image from one of Pauline Melville’s short stories, where the narrator’s British–Caribbean identity is expressed through dreams of criss-crossing the Atlantic, or more precisely of being suspended between the two places: Once . . . [she] dreamed she returned by walking in the manner of a high-wire artist, arms outstretched, across a frail spider’s thread suspended sixty feet over the Atlantic attached to Big Ben at one end and St. George’s Cathedral, Demerara, at the other. (Melville 2000: 193) This sense of being constantly in-between reveals a very real and lived appreciation of Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as ‘a passage between fixed identifications’ (Bhabha 1994: 4). Charlotte Williams’s project to make a space within (while simultaneously interrogating and deconstructing) Welsh cultural ‘authenticities’ is mirrored in recuperative literary projects which aim to expand the Welsh canon and to challenge narrow and misleadingly exclusive literary and

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historical constructions of women’s Welsh, Anglo-Welsh and British identities. It is from this critical and theoretical perspective that I approach Bertha Thomas’s writing. Unfortunately, very little is known of the biography of Bertha Thomas. She was born in 1845 to a well connected English mother, Maria Sumner, and a Welsh father, the Reverend John Thomas. On her mother’s side, Bertha Thomas was related to several bishops and her grandfather was John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848–62, while the founder of the Mother’s Union, Mary Sumner, was her aunt. Her father was from a line of relatively minor Carmarthenshire gentry, although John Thomas’s mother was originally from Gloucestershire. All of Bertha Thomas’s stories with a Welsh setting reflect the countryside just outside Llandeilo near the Black Mountains, where her grandmother and several maiden aunts ran the family estate. Despite Bertha Thomas’s strong Welsh connections, so evident in her stories, there is no evidence that she ever lived in Wales, her father holding positions in Devon and London during her childhood and becoming canon of Canterbury in 1862 when Bertha Thomas was just seventeen. Nevertheless, as a study of Thomas’s work reveals that there is an important, if ambivalent, connection with (a firmly Welsh-speaking) Wales. Thomas began publishing her work in the early 1870s, and her last volume appeared in 1912. She never married and thus might be categorized as an Odd Woman, but with the significant advantage of being financially independent, she did not have to rely on her writing to earn a living (Blain et al. 1990: 1074). Thomas was at least ten years older than most of the women we would label as New Women writers and all but one of her novels were published before Sarah Grand coined the term ‘New Woman’ in 1894. The figure of the New Woman is nevertheless an important feature of her later work (see below, pp. 25–30), while her committed feminism is evident in her earliest work. One of her best-known pieces of non-fiction is a satire on the arguments against female suffrage, published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1874. The article is referred to in Charlotte Carmichael Stopes’s 1894 book, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege, along with John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women, as a milestone in the education of the nation.6 ‘Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus’ describes the struggle of men to gain the vote, on a planet almost identical to our own, and details with sharp wit the reasons why men are unfit to sit in parliament or even to concern themselves with the running of the country: ‘The notion of admitting young cornets, cricketers, and fops of the Dundreary pattern to a share in the legislation, the prospect of Parliamentary benches recruited from the racecourse, the hunting field, and the billiard-room was a picture that proved too much for the gravity of the [all female] Commons’ (Thomas 1874: 763). Although Thomas is all but forgotten today, her novels were popular in her own day and published in multiple editions on both sides of the Atlantic, while several were first serialized in London Society. She also

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contributed a biography of George Sand to the Eminent Women Series, edited by John Henry Ingram (1842–1916). In terms of this scant biography, then, we may identify Bertha Thomas as a cultural hybrid. The daughter of a Welsh father and an English mother, Thomas’s ambiguous relation to ‘authentic’ or conventional Welsh culture is further complicated by her father’s religious affiliations – that is as a member of the (established) Anglican Church which was generally viewed as a foreign and imposed institution in an overwhelmingly non-conformist country.7 Her class, and indeed her education, further distance Thomas from the majority in Wales. Yet this social and cultural distance from the majority of the Welsh population is not an uncommon feature amongst Welsh women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her introduction to an anthology of short stories by women from Wales, in which one of Bertha Thomas’s stories appears, A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales c.1850–1950, Jane Aaron recognizes the ‘atypicality’ of most women writers of this period. She discusses the economic as well as the social circumstances that prohibited most Welsh women from achieving either a room of their own or three guineas, or, for that matter, the education and confidence required to write. Thus, those women who did manage to amass the necessary levels of education, leisure and confidence to become writers tended to come from the middle rather than the working class, and consequently – in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – to be more anglicized than the majority. (Aaron 1999: xi–xii) Jane Aaron goes on to argue that ‘Their atypicality with regard to the mass of the Welsh population . . . does not of course in itself render their view of Wales inauthentic’ (ibid.: xii).8 The retention of the notion of authenticity, albeit one expanded to include such writers, is perhaps problematic – although in this context it is also clearly strategic and invoked in the context of refuting ‘inauthenticity’ as a pejorative label. Charlotte Williams also stresses the problems and narrowness of some Welsh constructions of authenticity, as well as the ‘fragility of many of the exclusionary markers of Welsh ethnicity – the language, accent, locality, name – and the ways in which these categories are constructed to create smaller and smaller sites of authentic identity’ (Williams 2000: 194). Clearly, many if not most of the earlier Welsh women writers of literature in English do not fit easily into any of these exclusive sites of authenticity, although, interestingly, Bertha Thomas shows an acute awareness of what Williams describes as the fragility of these markers and explores the implications of cultural assimilation and hybridity in Wales quite explicitly in her last published work, Picture Tales from Welsh Hills (1912).

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In Picture Tales, the figure of the outsider is a significant presence in each of the nine stories – sometimes as the narrator, but also as a more ambiguous, even sinister intruder into the otherwise harmonious Welsh settings. One attribute of the hybrid, and one most disturbing to those concerned with ‘racial’ or cultural purity, is the possibility that he or she may ‘pass’ unnoticed. This shape-shifting ability of the hybrid is given an interesting twist and an explicitly Welsh and linguistic dimension in a story that is apparently unambiguously entitled ‘An Undesirable Alien’. This story is concerned with misleading identities, and the plot is simple enough – an elderly couple are lifting the potatoes from their garden when a passing stranger, who makes a point of claiming to be English, begs board and lodging for a night in return for his labour. During an afternoon rest the couple, apparently safe in the use of their native Welsh, make reference to where their savings are hidden, but that night their guest tries to make off with the cash. He is outwitted by the old woman who has suspected his duplicity. Thus it is revealed that far from being the ‘alien’ of the title he is in fact a Welsh-speaker and confidence trickster. The identities of the old couple are, moreover, anything but self-evident. The opening of the story goes to great lengths to set up an overlyromantic image of the cottage and its inhabitants only to undermine this superficial image as the folly of the outsider-perspective – the narrator describes how the pair were once sketched as ‘Philemon and Baucis’9 only for the visiting artist to be astounded to discover of his idyllic rustic couple that the husband was once a collier in Glamorgan and the wife, herself originally from ‘a distant border county’ (Thomas 1912: 149), was formerly married to, and raised a family with, an Englishman. The ease with which a Welsh person may ‘pass’ as English by simply speaking English without a Welsh accent and altering the details of their birth has been and continues to be an issue of great significance in the national(ist) debate over what constitutes Welsh identity. The cultural imperialism which England has exercised within the United Kingdom has been facilitated by the fact that the assimilation/annihilation of Welsh distinctiveness is not complicated by any obvious visual differences between the English and Welsh, such as skin colour. However, cultural assimilation and the creation of Anglo-Welsh hybridity is nevertheless shown to be an intensely difficult experience in Thomas’s most explicit study of the cultural hybrid, ‘The Way He Went’. This (lengthy) short story follows Elwyn Rosser, the son of Welsh tenant farmers who wins a scholarship to Oxford and marries an English woman named Aline (whose ‘very name . . . [was] strange to [Elwyn’s Welsh family]’ (Thomas 1912: 111) is a barely disguised anagram of alien). Elwyn’s education leaves him distanced from his Welsh origins and yet unable fully to assimilate into the English middle classes. He realizes he is ‘the dupe of a huge educational mistake. The true account now rendered of his scholarship was that it had unfitted him past redemption for the life that lay before him. Never could he again be

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understanded [sic] of his own people, never be at home in his real home again’ (ibid.: 84). Elwyn is left in a dangerous cultural no-man’s-land, pulled in different directions by his various allegiances and able to settle nowhere. In this story, cultural hybridity is not a viable option and for Elwyn it proves to be fatal. The location and the manner of Elwyn’s death are both highly significant: an accident occurs whilst Elwyn is staying in the colonial outpost of South Pembrokeshire, alluded to in the story as the ‘Little England beyond Wales’, where he sickens suddenly having suffered a severe drenching at sea after the boat in which he is a passenger is caught between two dangerous cross-currents during a storm (ibid.: 129). These same cross-currents, reminiscent of Melville and Williams’s crisscrossing ocean journeys, are highlighted elsewhere in the story during an earlier, more playful but no less significant symbolic drenching, while Elwyn’s dual, or multiple, identities are described as ‘cross-working on Elwyn’ and paralysing his mind.10 Bertha Thomas’s interest in the misfit, the outsider, the hybrid, in one form or another manifested itself in her writing long before the story about Elwyn Rosser’s disastrous attempt to negotiate his way between two cultures and classes was published in 1912, and one might see her depiction of Anglo-Welsh hybridity as the culmination of a long engagement with the outsider in a variety of guises. In In a Cathedral City (1882) the central character – who has fallen foul of an unreliable and exploitative middle-class marriage and who subsequently supports herself as a gifted seamstress – finds herself a perpetual outsider in terms of class and gender. At one point she risks losing her home due to her ‘shameful secret’ and the husband who still plagues her when he needs more money, while her job as seamstress also contributes to her uncertain, borderline social status. She is described, while attending a lavish party where she is making last-minute adjustments to the dresses of fashionable but exploitative young women, as feeling ‘so small, so impotent, so out of rapport with everything here, high and low, mistress and maid, salon and servant’s hall’ (Thomas 1882: 225, emphasis in original). A later novel which might be regarded as a New Woman text, Elizabeth’s Fortune (1887), is unusual and noteworthy for its first-person narrator, who at the beginning of the novel is an orange-seller and who slowly works her way up to a career as an actress in a company directed by an ambiguously gendered, cross-dressing, woman. Thomas’s outsiders are not only excluded from society by class divisions and conventional gender roles. The confusions of multiple national affiliations are highlighted in ‘A Compelling Occasion’, a story from Camera Lucida. Not one of her best efforts, it is a story about a young man of obscure and lowly origins who has been picked out by a wealthy benefactor because of his gift for singing and is being trained in Europe. His first name is Evan, his surname, Briant, he has borrowed from a French grandfather. The quotation below is from a scene where Evan is being patronized and

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taunted by a young woman (one of Thomas’s many ‘fast’ New Women) who is his social superior and intent upon letting him know: ‘. . . pray tell me, for I hear such different accounts. What are you? Are you English or French or Dutch or Italian or Japanese or what?’ ‘Well, Mademoiselle Mila,’ he looked at her crisply, ‘I’m a mixture – like you.’ Born on Swiss territory, [the narrator continues] of an Italian father and a Russian–French mother, Mila Oligati’s nationality was indeed difficult to decide. (Thomas 1897: 100, emphasis in original) The possibility that Evan, like his first name, may be of Welsh origin is not explored in this story, although, as we have seen, the theme of Welsh hybridity was to be central to Thomas’s final collection of stories. If Thomas is acutely aware of the difficulties of cultural hybridity – of occupying an in-between space – then she also implies that this space may be a privileged and productive site. In her biography of George Sand, Thomas suggests that her subject’s particular genius is a product of her mixed heritages, expressed here in biological terms: The origin of much that is distinctive in the story of her life may be traced to the curious story of her lineage. George Sand was of mixed national descent, and in her veins ran the blood of heroes and kings. The noble and the artist, the bourgeoisie and the people, all had their representatives among her immediate ancestors. (Thomas 1883: 1, emphasis in original) At present, we can only speculate as to whether Bertha Thomas may have felt to have been similarly blessed by her own mixed heritage; however, it is significant that Thomas explicitly links feminist figures, talents and unconventional lifestyles with hybridity. Thomas’s writing itself also, at times, displays a certain generic hybridity which seems to have been a result of her search to (pedagogically) articulate some of the social constraints under which women laboured. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a ‘feminist’ writer of her era, Thomas was particularly concerned with the relationship between parents and children, although not only between mother and daughter. As may be discerned from the discussion in this chapter, while there are very many strong and varied female figures in Thomas’s writing, a number of her central characters are male and she often approaches the issue of inter-generational conflict and the constrictions of gender roles through inventive inversions of gendered roles and literary conventions. In her last novel, The Son of the House (1900), the central character – the heir to the family estate – is incarcerated in a

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lunatic asylum by his mother when she fears that his newly adopted socialist ideals will induce him to give away his estate. The story of a man reduced to sickness, confined to his bed and imprisoned in his room, his loyal servants dismissed by his mother, and finally ‘diagnosed’ as mad by doctors hired by her, is the stuff of sensation fiction or gothic horror and yet the unusual (inverted) sex of both victim and oppressor opens up a whole new set of questions. The mother is an undeniably odious character, while the son of the house is clearly ideologically ‘correct’, if naïve, having been educated by a local socialist professor (although the alliance between socialism and feminism is questioned here). However, his mother’s villainy cannot merely be reduced to aping the role of the patriarch of more conventionally gendered plots. Her actions are necessitated by the fact that by the terms of her late husband’s will, she finds herself dependent upon her son’s inheritance and so she is reduced to manipulating her son and, when this fails, to usurping him by force. Thomas’s writing itself, then, might be described as hybrid in that it adopts and adapts a variety of genres – in the above example experimenting with gender, madness, sensationalist plots, and fin-de-siècle feminist and socialist politics. The ‘placing’ of Thomas’s work within nineteenthcentury women’s writing as well as in relation to New Woman texts and Welsh writing in English in particular, constitutes a much bigger project than can be attempted here. Since, however, I suggested in the opening paragraphs of this chapter that the New Woman may be perceived to be an ambivalent figure in a Welsh context, it is relevant and interesting briefly to consider Thomas’s depiction of New Woman figures in relation to Wales as they appear in her later writing. Thomas’s work is always feminist in content, and displays many of the concerns and features common to New Woman writing, yet she clearly displays some ambivalence towards the younger New Women of the fin-de-siècle. The cumulative impression is that Thomas finds herself outside of, or detached from, fashionable New Women, whom she depicts as rather absurd, perhaps even a little coarse – there are plenty of peripheral ‘fast’ New Woman characters who, while they provoke fascination from those around them and whose actions are vital to the plot, are nevertheless little more than sketchy, two-dimensional characters: Gerty King, in ‘The Way He Went’ (1912); Mila, in ‘A Compelling Occasion’ (1897) which is discussed above; Edith in ‘The Only Girl’ (1912), which is discussed below, are just a few examples. Yet, as already mentioned, Thomas gives voices to characters such as Elizabeth, the orange-seller and actress in Elizabeth’s Fortune, to the resourceful and intelligent, if socially disgraced, heroine of In a Cathedral City, and to characters such as Winifred Owen in the short story ‘The Madness of Winifred Owen’ in Picture Tales, the (now elderly) woman who has risked her sanity to marry the man of her choice, who runs her own successful business and who is described as intellectually towering by the young (and not at all absurd) New Woman to whom she tells her life story.11 There seems to be

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some differentiation, in Thomas’s fiction, between women who struggle alone, surviving by their own skills, and the metropolitan, vocal, opinionated and fashionable New Woman. Thomas goes to some lengths to show how female resourcefulness, ingenuity and perseverance may be found in traditionally female spheres of home and marriage (absent, abusive or useless husbands also abound) as well as in guises more immediately associated with the New Woman. If Thomas’s sometimes ambivalent response to fashionable young New Women complicates the construction of this author as a New Woman writer, even while her literary preoccupations and stylistic experimentation support this label, attempts to position Thomas within the canon (if such a thing can be said to exist) of Welsh writing in English can also be difficult. The fact that the bulk of her fiction is set outside Wales along with her residence outside the principality means that, in terms of contemporary academic interest in Welsh writing in English – which tends to focus on writing with explicitly Welsh subject matter or setting – her writing is inevitably marginalized. Thus we have a writer who does not fit neatly into the categories of ‘authentic’ Welsh writer in English, nor one who belongs unproblematically to the New Woman writers. As we have seen, however, the important themes of alienation, cultural hybridity and an interest in the outsider which are central to her ‘Welsh writing’ (and, indeed, central concerns of Welsh writing in English in general) are also to be found in her ‘non-Welsh writing’, and it is important that as critics we do not allow our own contemporary cultural and national perspectives to distort our approach to Welsh women of Thomas’s generation who may, indeed, have claimed dual or multiple cultural/national allegiances. For instance, attempts to assert Welsh difference from England can lead to the minimization of shared history and culture, yet it is vital that we remain sensitive to the divergence between our present national imaginings and past understandings of what it meant to be Welsh and/or British. Welsh nationality in the second half of the nineteenth century was frequently constructed not as an alternative to a British or imperial identity, but as co-existing with these other roles. Our recuperative literary projects, the construction of a canon of Welsh writing in English and studies of such literature, ought not to try to sketch in borderlines and boundaries that simply did not exist when many texts were conceived and written. Hybridity creates a space in which it is possible to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Wales, and to explore the mixed heritages of Wales, including dual Welsh-British identities or Welsh-English identifications. Significantly, while it is obvious that Bertha Thomas owes much to the English-dominated suffrage and women’s movement of her time, for Thomas, as for other Welsh writers who felt strongly that women deserved independence and equality with men, there was no conflict between an ‘authentic’ Welsh identity and independent and competent womanhood, and there is no shortage of able female characters scattered across her

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writing. In ‘Hand in Hand’, the ‘gypsy faced’ (Thomas 1897: 10) Madge (nicknamed ‘Wild Wales’ by her London cousins (ibid.: 15)) is ‘the guardian of the family in mind, body and estate’ (ibid.: 10) – this estate being a country house and a dozen or so farms. ‘Madge understood Welsh, arbitrated between rent-collector and tenant, and imparted music and morals to the younger Celts [sic]’ (ibid.: 10). This model of female industry and competence within a domestic setting is given an explicitly feminist message in another short story in Camera Lucida, ‘My Friend Kitty’, where the skills required in the management of a household (let alone a working estate) are given their true value – much in the vein of those women who argued that women’s domestic experiences would stand them in good stead if they were allowed to participate in national and imperial government, which was depicted as a variety of housekeeping writ large. Kitty at home found no difficulty in killing time, nor had she been a Napoleon in petticoats would scope for her universal genius have been wanting, if she proposed to be perfect in all her parts: social treasure, medical companion, mentor to six servants older than herself, special providence to a curly-headed imp, and mistress of all the knowledge – chemical, mechanical, sanitary, aesthetic, ethical and economic – whose practice we disrespectfully lump together as ‘good housekeeping’. (Ibid.: 280–1) In a short story from the later collection, Picture Tales from Welsh Hills, Bertha Thomas seems to question the devaluation of more traditional, yet no less challenging or fulfilling roles which women might pursue. In ‘The Way He Went’, the narrator describes how Elwyn’s sisters remain loyal to a traditional, rural, Welsh way of life without sacrificing their intelligence and industry: Gwladys and Gwen, of their own freewill, [were] walking the wise old Welsh ways. Other mothers’ girls rushed blindly into school teaching and spectacles, or millinery establishments, regardless of the expense to their parents, shirked the care of the house, and had discovered that farm work was not fit for women. The Miss Rossers had a higher opinion of their sex, and could see in Trearavon at least as fair a field as any other for the display of feminine energy and intelligence. (Thomas 1912: 58) Here, as elsewhere when women apply their efforts to a task, the two girls have made a noticeable impact on the farm, with their particular care for the young livestock having proved especially profitable. While there is no question of Thomas’s belief in the capabilities of women, we may discern a

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certain ambivalence in her ideas about how women ought to go about exercising their abilities and rights, with her earlier radicalism perhaps becoming a little conservative with age. If some of Thomas’s pictures of a ‘wise old Welsh’ version of female genius and independence might arguably be regarded as comparatively reactionary and overly romantic and selective in their portrayal of rural Wales as conserving some older, honest lifestyles, while rejecting Welsh women’s rush to become teachers or milliners,12 it should also be remembered that Thomas’s writing valorizes and raises these occupations from the mundane and unnoticed drudgery of domestic toil. Nevertheless, while thus valorizing traditional women’s work, she also shows that the unquestioned burdening of women with such tasks is unacceptable, and the main point of the story ‘My Friend Kitty’ is that Kitty sacrifices her writing talents to the less visible and generally unappreciated accomplishment of looking after her father and brothers: Kitty never pined for a ‘higher life’. She was what is called ‘a true woman’, by which I do not mean that she had no sense of humour and was incapable of thought, but that the natural affections came first with her and their all embracing demands swallowed her all up. She read at odd times, just as her brothers smoked, but no more dreamt of writing for the press for instance than they of manufacturing tobacco. (Thomas 1897: 281) It is perhaps not insignificant that this story is set in the comparatively urban Canterbury, rather than in one of Thomas’s exclusively rural Welsh settings, nor should we forget how Thomas’s more stereotypical New Woman characters tend to be explicitly associated with the urban. This is not, however, to suggest that because the immediately recognizable New Woman figures in Thomas’s writing are generally urban and English, her rural Welsh women are necessarily less inspiring ‘feminist’ characters. Perhaps the most interesting point to observe is the way Thomas presents stereotypical New Woman characters alongside other strong female figures in the same stories, exploring and testing the different constraints and achievements of women within a variety of different social and cultural circumstances. Thus Thomas peoples her fiction in Welsh and nonWelsh settings with resourceful women whose occupations vary according to setting and class, but her writing clearly shows women as strong and independently-minded characters whatever their occupation or social standing, recognizing these features in circumstances which do not conform to our fairly narrow view of the characteristics of the essential New Woman. Following Bertha Thomas, then, it is important to remain sensitive to the social and cultural circumstances which allow different and necessarily hybrid varieties of New Womanhood.

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Bertha Thomas’s treatment of the generation of the young New Women of the 1890s and early twentieth century is at times scathing and, as mentioned, she often satirizes the stereotypical figure of the New Woman (although such criticisms are far from the hostile anti-suffrage and anti-feminist criticism of the time). In Picture Tales from Welsh Hills, while the stereotypical New Women characters are always outsiders, aliens, visitors to Wales, crucially they are also observers and recorders – positions which raise their narrative status significantly. In ‘The Madness of Winifred Owen’, the narrator who frames Winifred’s own narrative is a woman who in the summer of 1899, ‘when the cycling fever was at its height in all spinsters of spirit’ (Thomas 1912: 9), has bicycled from London to Wales (although even this tourist has ‘forgotten Welsh ancestors’ buried in the area [Ibid.: 9]). The narrator is portrayed as an explorer in a strange land, bringing back tales of the exotic for a metropolitan audience, and she enjoys a certain authority and power derived from the role of mediator. But it is the older, Welsh, Winifred Owen who has most to teach about life and of whom the New Woman cyclist is in awe. In other stories, however, the outsider status of these women in Wales and their distance and isolation from the rural is gently mocked. In ‘The Only Girl’, the nameless narrator who acts as a mediator between subject matter and audience is clearly educated and independent but, equally, she is as informed and at home in rural Wales as she is with her (presumably English) readership. This narrator is entertaining a visiting friend, Edith, who is a deliberately, comically, stereotyped representation of an English urban New Woman. She ‘is a specialist in Social and Educational Reform when in town, an indefatigable amateur landscape painter when in the country’ (ibid.: 36). On a quest for an ideal landscape, the two women are lost in a fog and eventually seek help at a local farm, Glascarreg, where Edith ‘shakes her hygienic head’ (ibid.: 41) over the cow shed and dairy, but wants nothing more than to sketch the ‘picturesque’ water-wheel which serves the farm. She and the narrator are shown round the well-cultivated garden, where with silent veneration we beheld a score of thriving growths of various vegetables; Edith, a vegetarian on principle, trying hard to look as if she knew a growing carrot from a parsnip; celery, spinach, and artichoke by sight. (Ibid.) Before leaving, Edith empties the hen house – her ‘hobby, when in South Wales, is buying up all the new-laid eggs to send to girls in London flats’ (ibid.: 42). Edith’s array of beliefs and pursuits, typical of the English middle-class New Woman, are gently mocked and presented as sometimes ill-informed, if no less sincere. However, another of Edith’s ultra-modern, supposedly progressive beliefs – the necessity of eugenics – which was

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popular with feminists in the late nineteenth century, as Angelique Richardson discusses in this volume, is challenged a little more seriously by the story. ‘The only girl’ of the title is the hard working but simpleminded, superstitious and other-worldly daughter of the farm, Catrin, who also suffers from fits and asthma and seems, at times, to speak in tongues. Edith, ‘a eugenicist’, remarks that she would be ‘better dead’ (ibid.: 39), and goes on to espouse how the new dawn heralded by the New Woman will prevent such aberrations of nature: Ah, but we are coming to an age of light and leading when such hapless creatures will not be born – or not permitted to exist. Where is the humanity – the sanity even – of rearing and helping them to live out a life of misery? (Ibid.) Edith’s dubious opinion is not only rejected by the narrator, but also belied by Catrin’s obvious zest for life and enjoyment of hard work and an emphasis on the fragility of human life. Significantly, when Catrin dies from a fit induced by an especially powerful religious revival (something of an occupational hazard for religious Welshwomen, if turn-of-the-century Welsh fiction in English is to be believed), her true worth is revealed. When Edith, ‘on her way to an educational congress in a chief city’ enquires after the ‘old folks at Glascarreg’, she is informed that they could not manage without Catrin nor replace her: ‘without her the whole fabric of their farm life had come tumbling round their ears’ (ibid.: 50). Thus Edith, the social reformer, the educationalist, vegetarian, traveller and eugenicist is rather undermined, her beliefs questioned and shown wanting. Much of the ambivalence Thomas displays towards the New Woman may be seen to arise from a tension between urban and rural values as well as, perhaps, from Thomas’s belonging to a slightly earlier generation. This tension might be seen to echo the problematic oppositional dichotomy that has long been presented as existing between (rural) Wales and (urban) England. Thomas’s writing, however, does not support such an extreme simplification where the urban (and English) is allied with the modern, while the rural (and Welsh) embodies the backward. Thomas’s settings, both English and Welsh, are consistently what might once have been described as ‘provincial’, while London is presented as a foreign and often dangerous place; interestingly, however, continental Europe, which features regularly in her fiction, is not at all alien or threatening – thus we find what might be described as an alternative map of Britain, which denies that London, as the imperial metropolis, must be the focus of urban feminism, drawing instead on a different set of axes of identification and interconnections not uncommon in other Welsh writing. In conclusion, then, I have tried to suggest that it is not only possible but desirable to locate Bertha Thomas as both a ‘New Woman’ and an

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Anglo-Welsh writer. An exploration of Thomas’s outsider figures as well as the more easily identifiable New Woman characters reveals a profound and consistent engagement with women’s social exclusion, and especially a concern with those non-conformist characters who, through misfortune, circumstance or deliberate rebellion, place themselves beyond social norms and consequently experience an often profound sense of dislocation. If this concern with the outsider is closely bound up with Thomas’s feminist concerns, then it is also linked to an awareness of cultural and national hybridities, which are explicitly expressed in her explorations of Anglo-Welsh hybridity. Furthermore, Thomas’s critique of the younger, fashionable New Women of the fin-de-siècle, along with her representation of able and intelligent, if domestically burdened, women is revealing of a writer who seems to straddle the positions of the earlier feminists of the 1860s while yet looking forward and engaging with the New Women and contemporary issues of the 1890s. This, together with Thomas’s consistent engagement throughout her writing with the problems and constraints of Victorian gender roles, as well as her metaphorical ‘return’, later in her career, to the issues of cultural hybridity and assimilation in Wales, ought to justify Thomas’s status as a feminist forerunner and an Anglo-Welsh writer and to warrant a much larger study of her work than has been possible here.

Notes 1 I am very grateful to Jane Aaron for drawing my attention to this article. I would also like to thank her for reading and making some invaluable comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2 The term ‘Anglo-Welsh’, as used to refer to the anglophone Welsh, or Englishlanguage Welsh literature, has been eschewed as wrongly emphasizing cultural anglicization, where in fact Welshness, it is contended, may be expressed and lived through the medium of English. Consequently the rather cumbersome phrase ‘Welsh writing in English’ is now used to refer to English-language Welsh literature. I use the term Anglo-Welsh here, however, to refer to those Welsh whose multiple allegiances to Wales and England (brought about through factors such as anglocentric education, class, birth or residence outside Wales, mixed parentage and so on, not to mention other complex socio-cultural conditions arising from the hegemony of England over Wales and the wider United Kingdom) are reflected in this hyphenated title. Its echoes of colonialism are not out of place, although the cultural and historical specificities of the Anglo-Welsh are markedly different from the Anglo-Irish or Anglo-Indians, since the Anglo-Welsh were often the indigenous but anglicized, English-speaking Welsh rather than colonial settlers. 3 Welsh-speaking New Women also, of course, moved between England and Wales, or beyond; Gwyneth Vaughan, for example, worked for the British Women’s Temperance Association and was aware of the influence of the larger English/British Woman Question on her ideas which she brought back with her to Wales. Another Welsh-speaking New Woman, Eluned Morgan, was actually from Patagonia and eventually returned there. (I am grateful to Jane Aaron for drawing my attention to Eluned Morgan and for reminding me of Gwyneth Vaughan’s British influences.)

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4 Neil ten Kortenaar writes that ‘Hybridization, like authenticity, is unintelligible without a notion of cultural purity. . . . [Of course] neither authenticity nor [hybridization] has ontological validity, but both are valid as metaphors that permit collective self-fashioning’ (ten Kortenaar 1995: 40). 5 Williams’s recent ‘bio-text’, Sugar and Slate (2002) is one of the most important Welsh books to have been published in recent years and also makes an invaluable contribution to the fields of Black British Writing, Axial Writing, and Postcolonial and Cultural Studies. 6 Stopes wrote: The publication of John Stuart Mills’ ‘Subjection of Women’, in 1869, educated many minds. The humorous treatment of the question in Fraser’s Magazine in the article entitled, ‘Latest News [sic] from the Planet Venus’, where logical objections against Male Enfranchisement are supposed to be urged by women, taught others that there were two sides to the principles of exclusion, and that those against the Enfranchisement of men, were, to say the least of it, quite as valid, as any that have ever been brought against the Liberty of Women. (Stopes 1894: 147–8) 7 In 1895, Nora Philipps wrote: ‘a Church must be national, and the Church of England in Wales is certainly not national. It is the Church of the few and the wealthy, not of the many and of the poor in Wales’ (Philipps 1895: 37). In Bertha Thomas’s short story ‘The Way He Went’, Mrs Rosser is considered an outsider because of her (family) loyalty to the Anglican Church and her (related) use of the English language (Thomas 1912: 57–8). 8 This is a statement that raises some tangential, but interesting, issues. First, the argument that atypicality need not mean inauthenticity suggests a certain expectation that these texts should be somehow representative. Of course, this is revealing of the prominence of cultural study, and a cultural materialist critical approach, in the field of Welsh writing in English, and it is worth noting that this consideration may influence the kind of texts that are foregrounded. However, the issue of a single text, or voice, fulfilling a more or less representational role has been recognized as rather problematic in post-colonial studies. It is interesting to note in this context that the contributors to Lynne Pearce’s Devolving Identities (2000), in which feminists from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales contribute essays on ‘home and belonging’ and nationality, are at pains to stress their reluctance to have their voices considered in any way representative of either gendered or national experience. 9 Philemon and Baucis are figures from Greek mythology. A pious and loving couple, when Zeus and Hermes, disguised as wayfarers, had been turned away by the couple’s richer neighbors, Philemon and Baucis extended them hospitality. As a reward they were spared when a flood swept the countryside. Their cottage was turned into a temple, and they became priest and priestess of it. Years later they were granted their wish to die at the same moment, and they were turned into trees. (Britannica Concise Encyclopaedia 2003) 10 In a lengthy commentary on Elwyn’s tortured state of mind, part of which is quoted below, Thomas, or at least the omniscient narrator of the story, claims an ‘insider’s’ perspective of the nature of Welsh identity.

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True, he had been drawn out of his native medium, charmed into a vaster nationality and a still vaster world, a world where there are glories of many sorts and of all scales, and he had become in it and of it too, till the glory of a small, however peculiar nationality, was to him a thing ridiculously unsufficing. But a remnant of him was there, and its clutch on the secret places of his heart he could not altogether escape. He had never thought much about Welsh patriotism, and would never have any thought to give it now. Still, that ancient, traditional virtue of a cherished, indestructible nationality, of which none outside the fold, whether scoffer or admirer, can appreciate the peculiar sanctity and importance to insiders, its indirect or cross-working on Elwyn showed itself thus; prohibiting the shaping or thinking out of his own sentiments to himself. How then should he word them to another? His intercourse with kith and kin remained strictly amicable, but limited to trivial passing matters. No communion nor desire for it, on either side, regarding the things filling their minds – the things next their hearts. It was silence. The door was shut. (Thomas 1912: 126–7) A fuller discussion of this short story and how it demonstrates Thomas’s concern with assimilation and hybridity can be found in Bohata (2000b). 11 A discussion of Thomas’s ‘The Madness of Winifred Owen’ can be found in Bohata (2000a). ‘The Madness of Winifred Owen’ is the only example of Thomas’s writing currently in print, and can be found in Jane Aaron’s anthology, A View Across the Valley (1999). A selection of Thomas’s stories, published by Honno, is forthcoming. 12 The swipe at teachers and milliners in ‘The Way He Went’, quoted above, is repeated in ‘The Only Girl’ in the same collection: Gladys and Muriel Llewellyn Evans, of Bryn Farm yonder, were slim and pretty, and dainty in attire, and studying respectively for the teaching and dress-making professions. But they broke down over the churning, caught cold if they got wet, and were strictly forbidden to lift heavy weights. (Thomas 1912: 46)

Bibliography Aaron, J. (1998) Pur Fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwared Ganrif ar Bymtheg [Pure as Steel: Representations of Welsh Women in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing], Cardiff: University of Wales Press. —— (ed.) (1999) A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales, c.1850–1950, Dinas Powys: Honno. Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Blain, V., Clements, P. and Grundy, I. (eds) (1990) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, London: Batsford Books. Bohata, K. (2000a) ‘Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Images of the Racial and Gendered Other in Gothic Writing in Wales’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 6: 119–43. —— (2000b) ‘Beyond Authenticity? Assimilation and Hybridity’, in T. Brown and R. Stephens (eds) Nations and Relations: Writing Across the British Isles, Cardiff: New Welsh Review, pp. 89–121.

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Heilmann, A. (2000) New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hughes, E (1896/7) ‘Y Ddynes Newydd’ (‘The New Woman’), Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman), 1: 28–9. Ledger, S. and Luckhurst, R. (2000) The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melville, P. (2000) Shape Shifter, London: Bloomsbury Books (first published in 1990, London: The Women’s Press). Pearce, L. (ed.) (2000) Devolving Identities, Aldershot: Ashgate. Philipps, N. (1895) Young Wales, 1/2: 37–9. Stopes, M.C. (1894) British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege, London: S. Sonnenschein & Co. Ten Kortenaar, N. (1995) ‘Beyond Authenticity and Creolization: Reading Achebe Writing Culture’, PMLA, 110.1: 30–42. Thomas, B. (1874) ‘Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus’, Frasers Magazine, 10: 763–6. —— (1882) In a Cathedral City: A Tale, London: R. Bentley & Son. —— (1883) George Sand, Eminent Women Series, John H. Ingram (series ed.), London: W.H. Allen and Co. —— (1897) Camera Lucida; or, Strange Passages in Common Life, London: Sampson Low & Co. —— (1912) Picture Tales from Welsh Hills, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Williams, C. (2000) ‘“I going away, I going home”: Mixed-“Race”, Movement and Identity’, in L. Pearce (ed.) Devolving Identities, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 179–95. —— (2002) Sugar and Slate, Aberystwyth: Planet.

2

A Hungarian New Woman writer and a hybrid autobiographical subject Margit Kaffka’s ‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’1 Nóra Séllei

The New Woman was not a very popular figure in early-twentieth-century conservative Hungary. Yet, as Judit Acsády shows in Chapter 11, she did exist,2 particularly among artists and writers. Among them, Margit Kaffka (1880–1918), the author of novels, novellas, several volumes of short stories, some poetry and autobiographical texts, is the most canonized and most widely read. Her reputation neither declined nor increased in the past century, which is partly a symptom of Hungarian literary criticism, where feminist reinterpretation, or the rediscovery of (lost) texts by women writers hardly exists even today. In this way, Kaffka has remained what she was: the token woman writer of the most prestigious Hungarian literary journal Nyugat (West), which undertook the challenge to renew Hungarian literature and to represent the most European, including modernist, trends in its pages. It is more than telling that Margit Kaffka was the only woman on the editorial board, and in all the critical evaluations of her works, either by her contemporaries or by later generations, she is always designated as the woman writer, implying all the ambiguities and the double edge of this label and of the double critical standard as defined and elaborated by Elaine Showalter (1991: 73–99). Kaffka’s oeuvre is notoriously characterized by its ‘feminine’ qualities: lyricism, fragmentation and autobiographical origins, and these three basic features merge and ‘reinforce’ each other in a critical discourse which, in essence, is that as (and because of being) a woman writer, all she could produce was autobiographical, lyrical and fragmented texts, which, as a result, are declared to be ‘naturally’ inferior to her more ‘robust’ male contemporaries’ textual production. In the light of this critical discourse, her autobiographical text ‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’ [‘Lírai jegyzetek egy évro ˝l’], first serialized by Nyugat in 1915, provides a good basis for scrutiny in terms of lyricism, fragmentation and autobiography, and how all these notions are related to the New Woman and to her literary equivalent, female modernism. My contention is that this autobiographical text, which evokes the first year of the Great

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War, is symptomatic in that it betrays several ambiguities and tells of some apparently irreconcilable binary oppositions that the New Woman had to face in 1914 and 1915. In spite of its title emphasizing the lyrical quality of the text, this autobiography is far from being homogeneous in style. The Bakhtinian term heteroglossia, implying hybridity as well, seems to provide a key since it can give us an answer to how the autobiographical narrator and the autobiographical subject are created, what kinds of text(s) produce(s) them, and how both the narrator and the narrated ‘I’ are pulled apart, even in absolutely opposite directions, by the various textual levels of ‘Lyrical Notes’. In my opinion, this heteroglossic fragmentation, so unusual in Kaffka’s oeuvre, reflects and textually recreates the social discourses of the pre-war years that provided, and at the same time contested, the discursive space of the New Woman. The various cultural and stylistic layers, sometimes in tension with one another, function in the same way as the discursive diversity in which the notion of ‘woman’ demonstrated an instability at the beginning of the twentieth century. The roots of this instability can be derived from the coexistence of ‘woman’ conceptualized in the most traditional notions and that of the New Woman. This contestation is made more complex by the war conditions and emerging nationalism as represented in the text. In this way, my approach to hybridity is not that of post-colonial theory as in the case of Kirsti Bohata’s chapter on Bertha Thomas (Chapter 1), nor is the focus on national identity, but rather on the oscillation between various images of femininity, mostly due to the text’s representation of the specific historical (pseudo-feudal, pseudo-modern) social circumstances prevalent in early twentieth-century Hungary in the wake of the Great War. Yet, in spite of the differing theoretical frameworks, one can observe the instability, shifts and repositionings of the autobiographical subject similar to that of the characters in Thomas’s texts. At the same time, several further links can be established to other chapters in the volume since the image of the New Woman, particularly in periods of great national crises like the First World War, seems to have brought general questions of the ‘nature’ of femininity and national identity to the surface in almost all the cultures and societies discussed. Considering Kaffka’s text in this light, I propose that this fragmented hybridity (or hybrid fragmentation) is not so much the ‘natural’ result of the subject position of the woman (as several of her contemporaries and later critics argue), but is much more the consequence of the antagonistic power discourses of the early twentieth century as they are represented in the text. Furthermore, because of the obvious confluence of the public (the war) and the private (autobiography), this hybrid text offers the possibility for exploring the inevitable interrelationship between these spheres and seems to confirm the argument that the maintenance of this neat division between the private and the public is a central issue in patri-

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archal discourses. Thus, this apparently ‘innocent’ autobiographical text by a Hungarian New Woman and female modernist reveals some aspects of how power and the subject are interrelated, how textual fragmentation can be connected to the discursive formation of the subject and how both these aspects are related to female modernism. In terms of objective, chronological time, ‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’ covers a very short period spanning from July 1914 to August 1915, that is, the first year of the Great War, which, at the same time, is the period when Kaffka’s husband served as a doctor in the army, partly on the front. Comparing the text with other documents, one can safely draw the conclusion that it is an autobiographical text, and that all the major plot elements can be validated from external sources. As much as the text has a plot, it starts with the pseudo-honeymoon in Italy before the wedding, disrupted by the outbreak of the war; and it is followed by her partner’s enlistment. Then, just as in Kaffka’s life, the man gets wounded and is treated in an army hospital in a far-away northern town where she visits him. This is where she makes contact with the partner’s batman, Péter Fekete. On return to Budapest, the speaker undergoes all the frustrations and anxieties caused by the absence of letters from the front for ten days, and by the lack of proper food supply in the cities. This is why, on the plot level, the food provided by the batman’s wife, Rozál Gányó, is vital (on another level, as we will see, this rural woman’s story is crucial from the point of view of gender as well). As the plot goes on, the partner of the narrator contracts typhoid fever and is treated in Budapest, which, like the narrator’s increasing pacifism, or the casual appearance of some public figures of Nyugat in various sections of the text, is also an autobiographical element. Beyond this autobiographical validity, what seems more exciting is how the narrator is created, how she posits herself rhetorically and textually, and what subject positions both the narrating and the narrated ‘I’ take. In spite of its obvious autobiographical quality, the text defies generic definitions: it is far from being a coherent autobiographical narrative with the narrated autobiographical ‘I’ in the centre. The sections follow each other in an apparently incoherent way; both the tone and the topic change abruptly and unexpectedly from one section to another; we are presented with a mixture of first-person confessions and reflections, and stories by and about characters who seem to be only casually related to the narrator. With its complexity, featuring narratorial voice, stylized oral tales (‘skaz’), ‘semi-literary’ written genres like letters and diary, extra-literary discourses on morality and philosophy, the individualized modes of speech of the various characters, ‘Lyrical Notes’ constitutes an example of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and its characteristics: hybridity and dialogic qualities (Bakhtin 1978: 358–9). As if to illustrate Bakhtin’s theory, Kaffka’s text is decentred by these centrifugal forces, and the various levels are often engaged in a polemic dialogue with each other. This polemic dialogue, in turn, can be related to modernism, and to female modernism in particular,

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with its decentred and decentring, subversive, non-definable mode of narration. This dialogic and thus hybrid quality of the text has always been conspicuous for reviewers and critics, but its evaluation and reception varied from the pointedly positive to the pointedly negative in the past century (see Ágoston 1934: 140–1; Földes 1987: 192, 194). The main butt of the critical remarks is a story – or, rather, the stories – of Péter Fekete’s adulterous affair with a housekeeper told in two ways: by the man as a cherished and confessed memory, and by the woman in a more polemic way. This embedded story of the Feketes seems to be the rub of reading ‘Lyrical Notes’ as a heteroglossic text since the stories told by the husband and the wife are relatively long and may be read as disruptive in the negative sense of the word. Before forming such a concise value judgement of the function (or lack of function) of these two stories, however, it is worth considering ‘the unity of structure and tone’ missed by some critics (see Földes 1987: 194), that is, to pose the question as to why this autobiographical narrative is so markedly fragmented, decentred and heteroglossic. One can shed light on this question by reference to the most emphatic, self-reflexive comment of the autobiographical narrator, found in the last paragraph: ‘At home, finally – at home, and – together . . . But how awfully bad this writing would be if this was what I were writing about’ (Kaffka 1968: 641).3 As one can see, the narrator of the autobiography consciously speaks about and out of a text which cannot contain idyll, homeliness, peace and what is related to it, a stable identity. Quite the contrary, the basic movement of the text is towards the loss of idyll, safety and stability: the first sentence, expressing an idyll, seems to be there only to be lost in the course of the text. The passage recalling the arrival in Perugia during the pseudo-honeymoon is idyll embodied: ‘never milder, nicer and more homely. [. . .] Here, finally, we can have a rest for a couple of weeks. We have been wandering and looking around quite enough, but here it’s nice and all right. Here, it’s so simple!’ (ibid.: 617).4 This homogeneous idyll, however, is blown up and away by the news of the outbreak of the war – not only as a piece of information, but also as textual structure, since from this point on the autobiographical narrator assumes several languages and speaking positions. The text is invaded by a foreign language (‘la guerra’), and this foreign word explodes the homogeneity and monolingual feature of the text – in the same way as the war explodes the ‘honeymoon’. The narrator positions herself – and situates the narrated ‘I’ – in various, even conflicting, modes of speech following each other in quick succession, and alternately distinguishes between and merges the narrator and the narrated ‘I’ by using various forms of indirect speech and free indirect speech: Finally, I was struck by a word [of the telegrapher]; he said it several times, and even some of the audience were humming it: la guerra . . .

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What is it? What are they saying? . . . We called the German-speaking waiter of Hotel Belle Arti. Is it true? Is it really possible? . . . At home, in the lounge, we had a look at Corriere della Sera. (What a musical name if Florence newspaper boys sing it to the tune of soft and melting yet moving melodies!) We were browsing it, with a dictionary in our hands, our terror still stifled in jokes. ‘All the cafés in Belgrade are closed down’ . . . we managed to get a clue. Well, do we necessarily have to go there for an afternoon coffee? . . . – So suddenly, so close, we could not see yet: what has happened, what is going to happen? What part will we have in it? Slowly, our throats were being grasped by anxiety . . . (Ibid.)5 Falling out of homeliness is accompanied thematically by becoming an alien, an enemy: where they were guests and where they could be part of a serviceable and harmoniously functioning system (they could order money from home by telegraph without any official permits, they could feel at home and could travel freely and safely by train), from one moment to another they are dislocated out of all forms of homeliness since they are alien and penniless, and politics invades the personal. Furthermore, they are turned into outsiders and aliens in another sense as well: they can no longer identify with what they find at ‘home’, in their home country either, where the crowds loudly cheer the war. Nothing can provide a safe haven any more, not even the jointly imagined story told to themselves in which the two lovers fancy themselves as a disguised prince and princess and try to exclude the outside world and sleep through the war (ibid.: 619). Thematically, all this means that the narrating ‘I’ is almost fully defined by the dominant discursive power, put most succinctly in the often quoted passage: ‘it’s just bayonets, uniforms, and prohibitions. “They have the right to thrust all this into my body, without any explanation! – this is how I felt every time I saw one. – This is the world that is coming” ’ (ibid.).6 This theme, however, is present also on the level of textual organization: they fall out of their commonly used language codes as well, the usual mode of speech of the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ becomes unusable: But here, now – how shall we call each other in cloying, courtly language, on the wooden bench of this grove with withered bushes, where we took some rest, we, exhausted, homeless, in our gloomy temporariness, after a nasty pub meal, before a tiring journey. (Ibid.)7 The storytelling language, the possibility of a comforting, coherent and continuous narrative, that is, the wholeness and self-containedness of the ‘prince’ and the ‘princess’, are replaced by another mode of speech which is characterized by dislocation and fragmentation created by heteroglossia.

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Heteroglossia comes about as a result of the narrator’s varying distances both from the narrative and from the characters. Obviously, there are numerous passages which can be considered as the direct speech of either the narrator or the narrated ‘I’. One can, however, observe further levels of Bakhtinian heteroglossia in the text, in compliance with Kaffka’s style in general: there appear ‘various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech’ (Bakhtin 1978: 262) which consist in reflections on the war, and, in an even more removed way, as a ‘foreign language’: there appear Lao Tse’s philosophical reflections, aphorisms, morals and teachings. They are in perfect harmony with the narrator’s mental notes, but at the same time they are of a different emotional content compared to the narrator’s direct responses. These passages, however, function perfectly: they appear in the almost idyllic part of the text when she stays in the North, attending to the sickbed of the wounded partner, where they can build up a universe of their own, independent of the outside world, which is in line with Lao Tse’s teachings – this is a world where even in the middle of the war they can restore homeliness and wholeness by celebrating a birthday, and by putting a tea kettle on the stove to boil. Perhaps these are the layers in the text that are most ‘naturally’ present in autobiographies since they are the ones that are most closely related to the narrating ‘I’ and to the ‘self-expressive’ mode of speech.8 Less evident is the presence of two other Bakhtinian layers: ‘the stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (‘skaz’)’, and ‘the individualized speech of characters’ (Bakhtin 1978: 262) – particularly if there is such a great distance between the register of speech of the autobiographical narrator (and, in general, the autobiographical ‘I’s) and that/those of the characters, as in the case of Péter Fekete, the batman, and his wife, Rozál Gányó. It is, perhaps, not accidental that their two versions of the story of the husband’s adulterous affair and the letters written by the wife are evaluated negatively by the critic Anna Földes: in her opinion, it is their story that makes the tone and the structure of the text incoherent (Földes 1987: 192). Instead of this sweeping negative evaluation, however, it is worth examining what the respective stories are about, how these two narratives are structured, in what dialogic relationship they are with each other and how they fit the other levels of the text. If the only problem with the narratives of Péter Fekete and his wife is that they ‘burden and pry apart’ the structural unity of the text (Földes 1987: 194), one can safely state they do fit in since the whole text is much less characterized by structural cohesion than by an apparent lack of structure, fragmentation and abrupt beginnings: by the nominal beginnings of sentences, by the lack of conjunctives, the result of which is the loose link between the semantic units, and a fragmented, lyrical and episodic text. This lyricism is rooted just as much in the montage-like, mosaic structure of the text as in the denotation of the words, and at the same time, it is this fragmented structure that creates the autobiographical subject that

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takes various, and often contradictory, positions in the narrative: the narrator oscillates between the poles of the inside and the outside, the ‘they’ and the ‘we’, harmony and chaos, love and hatred, acceptance and rejection. Even within this fragmented textual structure, which is dialogic enough in the apparently direct self-revelations of the autobiographical ‘I’, the stories told by Péter Fekete and Rozál Gányó are still conspicuous for several reasons. First of all, to return to Bakhtin’s terminology, they can be best defined as ‘skaz’; second, they are excellent examples for the individualized speech of characters, and as such their speech is essentially different from the mode of speech of any other characters in the text (not only from that of the ‘I’). Whereas all the other modes of speech are educated, standard language, the batman and the wife’s speech is in a dialect, expressing also a lower level of education and social status, thus raising questions of class and the urban–rural dichotomy as well (but, similarly to Bertha Thomas’s text as analysed by Kirsti Bohata, this does not lead to easy simplifications of bipolarity, as we will see). To make differences even sharper, these stories are the most coherent ones in the whole text since both have a clearly definable place and time. The two narratives are rooted in the framing situation, but of the two stories, it is rather the wife’s narative that is structured in a causal way, as opposed to the husband’s elliptical narrative that stimulates guesses, a narrative that is not exempt from misrepresentations and seems to conceal more than it reveals. With all these differences, I still claim that these stories do not pry apart the text; quite the contrary, they are in a dialogic relation with the other layers of the text which are more directly related to the autobiographical ‘I’. Furthermore, this dialogic relation does not only consist in dissonance, but also in parallels as well. The story – or rather, stories – of adultery, as presented both by the husband and the wife about the husband’s affair with the housekeeper in the castle, are told in situations in which momentary repose, intimacy and idyll are possible, or at least should be possible. The husband tells the story when he and the narrator are expecting her partner home for the birthday celebration, whereas the wife tells her story when she brings some flour to wartime Budapest for the narrating ‘I’ and stays for the night. In both situations there is an emphasis on an idyllic atmosphere: in one case, the boiling kettle and the birthday present, in the other case the child sleeping in the adjacent room and the two women of opposed social, regional and cultural backgrounds talking as best friends in the intimacy of the night. But what is the story, or rather, what are the two stories about? In the husband’s narrative, it is a forgivable and insignificant event that was brought about by the wife’s mother who incited her daughter against the husband – an element not left uncommented by the narrator: ‘Realizing that he has gone too far, he would go back on it a little, but the cocksure

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masculine smirk cannot be wiped from below his brown moustache. [. . .] Oh, oh, these men!’ (Kaffka 1968: 628).9 As opposed to this, the wife’s narrative is the story of an exposed and humiliated woman whose husband keeps telling her: ‘Lor’ love you, Madam, if a woman, with her load of children, has all her food and provision, fitted up with all this by her man, if she does not have to go skivvying, and goes around in clean clothes, what else does she need?’ (ibid.: 627).10 But if food and provision come from the very housekeeper who is, at the same time, the husband’s lover, then the feeling of safety is replaced by insecurity. This is paralleled by the narrator’s story: as we can recall, the whole text opens with a glimpse of the idyll only to be disrupted and swept away by the war that at first seems remote and impossible, but must be realized right away and turns safety and homeliness into absolute alienation and insecurity. The story of adultery, thus, replicates – on the level of the batman and his wife – the insecurity and destabilization that in the narrator’s story is caused by the war. Besides this structural parallel, the narrator, too, makes it clear that there is a similarity between both the mode of narration and the theme of the stories told by the autobiographer and Rozál Gányó: both recall memories, but the gesture of remembering makes the memories of the past indirect and mediated. To my mind, the narrator’s comment on Rozál’s story is valid as a self-reflexive remark on the whole of this autobiographical text as well: ‘Thus, in remembering, everything is toned down, and politely tellable – everything that used to be tears, curses, and deadly shame while fresh and alive! You see, humour can air old tragedies!’ (ibid.: 634).11 At another point in the text, there is a sentence about the metaphors of war destruction which echoes the narrator’s comment on Rozál’s story: how much can be achieved by the symbolic, toned down use of words: ‘enlisted’, ‘fell’, ‘we’ll beat them’, ‘we’ll dust their jacket’. They evoke commonplace, mild, even humorous associations, and are not accompanied by the awful shudder that goes with the idea of violent death and bloodshed. (Ibid.: 622)12 As Rozál’s story becomes toned down by recalling and telling it, the same happens to the past(s) of the autobiographical narrator: on the one hand, she transposes her own anxiety over her partner’s possible adultery into Rozál’s story,13 on the other hand, with this remark, the narrator makes a link between the two ‘feminine stories’ – the fear of the loss of the partner either because of deceit or because of the war, or, put another way: both possible losses appear as two sides of the same coin, the vulnerability and lack of safety of a woman caused by the war and masculine self-confidence. The interrelatedness of these two lines is reinforced by another aspect of Péter Fekete’s and Rozál Gányó’s stories as retold by the autobiographical narrator. Whereas the narrator follows Péter’s story from a distance

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and with ironical comments, the wife is allowed to speak, and the only narratorial comment at the end of the story expresses perfect identification. Thus, one can state that several layers of this dialogic text reflect an emphatically feminine point of view because the autobiographical ‘I’ comes about as a result of the discursive power and discursive practices that inscribe the notion of ‘woman’: she is forced to play feminine gender roles, similarly to Rozál Gányó, exposed to a multiple vulnerability which is due to the war and war conditions: undeniably, the most explicit – I suppose because more utterable – sentences about vulnerablity are directly related to the war. Beyond the general war experience, however, there is the feminine experience of existence in the context of the war: One is but a woman; deprived, unasked, neglected, one just stays here, runs errands, sometimes in a dull, sometimes in a mad way, one is then torn into pieces by one’s increased worries, and is waiting . . . each day with more and more monomaniac hopes, with a more and more dreary desperation. (Ibid.: 628, emphasis in original)14 This (womanly) act (or non-act) of waiting and vulnerability, in turn, threatens the subject with madness – a classical metaphor for the total disintegration of the ‘I’ – , for which the example in the text is the widow in mourning who is not willing to acknowledge and accept her husband’s death. This is the very disintegration caused by passivity and powerlessness that the narrating ‘I’, too, fights against: after a ten days’ wait for a letter, she bursts out, saying: ‘now, I must have a rest, and hope against madness’ (ibid.: 629).15 In this text, however, the vulnerability and ontological insecurity of feminine existence is not only attributed to the war, but also to the patriarchal inscriptions of what is a woman, to her discursive place and to the possible modes of (self-) representations. The disintegration of the narrating ‘I’ and of a stable identity – beyond the metaphor of madness and textual fragmentation – surfaces in the various possible readings of the (self-)images of the ‘woman’ and of the autobiographical ‘I’. This is why Rozál Gányó’s story is central to the whole narrative because it implies a range of patriarchal exploitations (from the economic to the sexual). This narrative, however, proceeds from the direction of woman as a passive object (as created by the partner’s story) into the direction of a speaking subject whose narrative is capable of rewriting and resisting the husband’s rhetorical moves. This emphatically anti-patriarchal perspective is replicated and projected upon two sisters who appear at the end of the text, when the narrator’s partner is in hospital in Budapest. The two sisters live across the road, facing the hospital window, and their father wants them to marry

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one of the wounded soldiers treated in the hospital, whereas the potential ‘husbands’ make them the butt of their misogynistic jokes – their own versions of patriarchal readings. It is significant, though, that the narrator, who is inside the hospital ward, listening to these remarks while tending to the bed of her partner, clearly distinguishes herself and her partner from these men who are ‘swaggering, loud, weird and strange fellow-travellers’ (ibid.: 638)16 – the adjectives and the noun draw attention to the complexity of the situation, which consists in necessary but random identification and in conscious distinction. This very same expression by the narrator, at the same time, multiplies the number of perspectives in the text, thus the dominant discourse as represented by the other men in the room is dislocated from its apparently stable position. This multiplication, however, functions in various ways: not only does it distinguish the ‘I’ or the ‘we’ from the others, but it also questions the homogeneous reading of the narrating ‘I’, who seems to be fully aware of the contesting versions of the (feminine) ‘I’. Among others, she is longing for a bucolic idyll (the image of a farm with books, vegetables and poultry appears several times) because ‘now, [she] would have come to know [her]self in new, and more pleasing forms! Happiness . . . full equity . . . after all, that is a way of life as well’ (ibid.: 623).17 In contrast with the apparently homogeneous ‘I’, longing for the idyll, there stand the other ‘I’s: the New Woman, experimenting with her life and way of living, which, for a moment and in this context, appears like utter vanity and meaninglessness; and we also have the present ‘I’ created by the war, on the verge of disintegration, afraid of losing all the traces of identity and individuality: Where is the security of superior airs and slightly bitter pride gone from our world view? Where are the exclusivity of the ‘I’s, solitude, refinement, separatedness and irony gone? . . . We are animals whimpering under the whip; the churches are crowded, and among other, more painful losses, we have lost our style. [. . .] In the more recent past, they say, we have been ‘overcomplicated’ with all our subtle dissonances, with our distinctiveness, with our very internal stories, and our ‘silent crises’ – (Now, all those for whom we were scandalous should rejoice!) [. . .] What we feel, our terrors, our mourning, our longing, are those of everyone, and what is even worse: those of anyone. (Ibid.: 641, emphases in original)18 In the phrase ‘anyone’ there resides the same danger as in madness: the total loss of the self, and the cause is the powerlessness and the passivity, that is, the loss of the subject: Now, our state of mind depends on huge and raw, ten-ton events, on things coming from the outside which have got no more to do with

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the character of our inner features than as if a gross and rotten piece of rock had fallen on it. The hammer of our fate has fallen out of our working hands – so they should be clasped either in naïve prayer or in theatrical gestures. (Ibid.: 641, emphasis in original)19 The subject previously capable of shaping and controlling her life is now forced into prescribed forms and formulas as all other possibilities are gone. Thus, her escape to intimacy offers only the possibility of a last and final resort: the discovery of a new world, shared by the partner, ‘two accomplices against the world’ opposing ‘the swaggering, loud, weird and strange fellow-travellers’ (ibid.: 638).20 The narrator’s escape into intimacy with her partner can be interpreted in various ways: as the escape of the individual from the social problems; as a return to ‘True Womanhood’ after her experimentation with the lifestyle of the New Woman; but it can also be interpreted as a pacifist protest against the war. The first two interpretations could be easily dismissed as conservative positions, yet they may be worth some scrutiny because ‘Lyrical Notes’ situates the early-twentieth-century ‘I’ in the Great War and in a discursive system that is difficult to resist, in which the ‘I’ is incapable of controlling and shaping her own story in the face of the tenton rock power mechanism. Here, she cannot even escape into intimacy since her partner – and this is the closing sentence of the text – ‘has to return to the front within a week’s time’ (ibid.: 642).21 With this final rhetorical move, even the very last – apparently conservative and almost cliché-like – individual solution (intimacy) to oppose and escape the war ceases to exist. With this, the subject, in the Foucauldian sense of the word (capable of resistance), also almost ceases to exist: the (autobiographical) subject and her partner cannot in reality be accomplices resisting the dominant discursive power and the dominant system of institutions since there is hardly any space for them to establish and sustain a perspective that could subvert the androcentric world view. It is all the more significant because throughout the text, their intimacy emphasizes that they are subversive accomplices. The final resort is the avoidance of the Symbolic – i.e. non-naming: the text avoids naming their relationship as marriage, or naming the partner as ‘husband’ although in real life Margit Kaffka married Ervin Bauer in August 1914.22 In my opinion, this silence about, and the non-naming of, this partnership can be interpreted as evidence of scepticism and reservations concerning the established and patriarchal institution of marriage; it can be interpreted as a sign that there is no proper word yet for this relationship; but it can also be interpreted as the defence of the final resort of the subject, covering it by non-naming. The text, thus, in its complexity, can be interpreted as an attempt by the female autobiographical subject to resist the objectifying and totalizing

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discursive system, and this resistance subversively rewrites, even if only for a short while, the patriarchal institutional system in which one of the basic questions is the meaning of ‘woman’. Furthermore, as we have seen, in this text the answer is provided by a heteroglossic and dialogic text in which the ‘languages’ and discourses contradict each other. These contradictions, in turn, make the homogeneous and stable autobiographical ‘I’ impossible, which, in this way, becomes a perfect example of Kaffkaesque female protagonists, who ‘all live a fragmented and maimed life’23 as her contemporary and fellow-editor Aladár Schöpflin puts it (cited in Fülöp 1980: 317). The question, however obviously remains how and whether a (new) woman at the turn of the century, or at the time of the Great War, either as a flesh-and-blood person or as a protagonist, could have had a ‘full’ and non-contradictory, non-hybrid life. Or, rather, we should consider this text, with all its apparently self-contradictory, incoherent and dialogic textual organization that defies generic definitions, as an example of the subversive nature of female modernism that creates an emphatically hybrid female subject, reveals the interrelatedness of the private and the public, and dislocates patriarchal assumptions from their stability, even in the face of war.

Notes 1 I wish to acknowledge, and express my gratitude for, the support provided by the Bolyai János Postdoctoral Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences while doing this research on Margit Kaffka. 2 For a detailed analysis of the contradictions of the New Woman discourse within both feminist and conservative circles in Hungary, see Judit Acsády’s chapter in this volume: she analyses the period that can be regarded as Kaffka’s formative years in terms of her becoming both a writer and a New Woman. 3 ‘Itthon végre – itthon és együtt . . . És milyen szörnyu ˝ rossz írás volna, ha erro ˝l írnék!’ 4 ‘és soha enyhébbet, otthonosabbat, kedvesebbet [. . .]. Itt most megpihenhetünk pár hétre. Eleget jártunk és néztünk, itt szép, jó. Itt egyszeru ˝!’ 5 ‘Végre megütött [a telegráftiszt] egy szava; többször mondta, a közönségbo ˝l is hümmögték: la guerra . . . Mi ez? Mit mondanak? . . . Hívtuk a Belle Arti némettudó pincérét. Hát igaz? Hát lehetséges? . . . Otthon a hallban elo ˝vettük a Corriere della Serát. (Milyen dallamos név, ha firenzei rikkancsok éneklik lágy, olvadó, mégis patetikus melódiára!) Szótárral böngésztük, még-még tréfába fullasztott megrettenéssel. “Belgrádban minden kávéház csukva” . . . sikerült kiértenünk. Ej, hát okvetlen oda kell menni nekünk délutáni feketére? . . . – Ily hirtelen, ilyen közelro ˝l nem tudunk látni még: mi történt, mi lesz? Mi részünk benne? Lassankint tette torkunkra kezét az aggodalom . . .’ 6 ‘csupa szurony, uniformis, tilalom. “Ezt mind joguk van a testembe ütni, magyarázat nélkül! – ez volt az érzésem, ahányat láttam. – Most ilyen világ lesz! . . .” ’ 7 ‘De most itt – hogyan szólítsuk egymást negédes, udvari nyelven az aszott bokrú liget kis fapadján, ahol megpihentünk, elcsigázott hajléktalanok, bús ideiglenesek már: rossz kiskocsmai ebéd után, nehéz út elo ˝tt.’

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8 In her hermeneutic approach to autobiography, Linda H. Peterson makes the point that a basic feature of the genre is the inevitable intertwining of presentation and interpretation (Peterson 1999: 4). These are the two levels a Hungarian critic of Kaffka’s also refers to when he points out that the most important feature of this Kaffka text is recalling and pondering upon the events (Fülöp 1987: 181). 9 ‘Észreveszi, hogy nagyon belement, szépítgetné is; de az öntelt férfimosoly nem tud elsimulni a barna bajusza alól. [. . .] – Ajhaj! Férfiak!’ 10 ‘kérem, ha egy asszonynak megvan a gyerekeivel együtt az élelme, ellátása, az ura kiszerzi neki, nehéz dógot nem teszen, tisztán jár, mi kell egyéb?’ 11 ‘Így emlékezésben minden lefokozott, illedelmesen elmesélheto ˝ minden – ami könny, átok és halálos szégyen volt eleven korában! Lám, humor szello ˝zi a régi tragédiát!’ 12 ‘milyen sokat lehet elérni a szavak szimbolikus, letompított használatával: “bevonult”, “elesett”, “megverjük”, “kiporoljuk az ellenséget”. Közkeletu ˝, enyhe, so ˝t, humoros képzeteket keltenek, nem kíséri ˝ oket az a borzadály, mely az ero ˝szakos halál, a vérontás gondolatát.’ 13 ‘Lyrical Notes’ has a parallel autobiographical text entitled ‘August 1914’, in which jealousy and the fear of deceit by the husband are central elements: missing from ‘Lyrical Notes’, they are implicitly present in this hidden and disguised form in Rozál’s story. 14 ‘Az ember asszony; kisemmizett, kérdetlen, mello ˝zo ˝tt, az ember itt marad, és járkél a dolgai után, néha tompán, néha tébolyultan, máskor agyontépve a megszaporodott gondtól, és vár . . . mindennap monomániásabb reménységgel, sivárabb kétségbeeséssel.’ 15 ‘most pihenni kell, remélni a téboly ellen!’ 16 ‘ágáló, hangos, furcsa, idegen útitársak.’ 17 ‘most új és eddigieknél tetszo ˝bb formában ösmertem volna meg magam! Boldogság . . . teljes méltányosság . . . végre, az is csak egy életforma.’ 18 ‘Hová lett világnézetünkbo ˝l a fölény, kissé kesernyés go ˝günk biztossága, az “én”-ek exkluzivitása, a magány, a finomság, az elkülönültség és az irónia? . . . Korbács alatt szu ˝kölo ˝ állatok vagyunk; a templomok tömve vannak, és sok értékesebb veszteséggel együtt elvesztettük a stílusunk. [. . .] A közelmúltban, mondják, “túlkomplikáltak” voltunk finom disszonanciánkkal, megkülönböztetett voltunkkal, nagyon belso ˝ történeteinkkel, “csendes válságainkkal” – (Most örüljenek, akiknek botránykövei voltunk!) [. . .] Amit érzünk, rettegésünk, gyászunk, áhításunk mindekié; s ami ennél sokkal rosszabb: “akárkié”.’ ‘Silent crises’ is most probably an allusion to the title of a volume of short stories by Kaffka. 19 ‘Most lelkünk állapota nagy, nyers, százmázsás eseményeken múlik, külso ˝ dolgokon, melyeknek nincs több közük belso ˝ vonásaink karakteréhez, mint egy redves, otromba szikladarab rázuhanásának. Sorsunk kalapácsa kiesett dolgos két kezünkbo ˝l – naiv imára vagy teátrális gesztusokra kell kulcsolnunk e kezeket.’ 20 ‘két cinkostársak a világgal szemben’, az ‘ágáló, hangos, furcsa, idegen útitársak[kal szemben].’ 21 ‘egy hét múlva vissza kell mennie a harctérre.’ 22 An ample, and rather reserved, comment on the institution of marriage can be found in another autobiographical text by Kaffka already referred to, ‘August 1914’, where the narrator says that not even marriage can do any harm to them. 23 ‘mind töredék, csonka életet élnek’.

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Bibliography Ágoston, J. (1934) Kaffka Margit, Budapest: private publication. Bakhtin, M.M. (1978) ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in M. Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin and London: University of Texas Press, pp. 259–422. Földes, A. (1987) Kaffka Margit – Pályakép (Margit Kaffka – An Overview of Her Work), Budapest: Kossuth. Fülöp, L. (1980) ‘Kaffka Margit a regényíró’ (‘Margit Kaffka the Novelist’), Irodalomtörténet (Literary History), LXVII.2: 297–325. —— (1987) Kaffka Margit, Budapest: Gondolat. Kaffka, M. (1968) ‘Lírai jegyzetek egy évro ˝l’ (‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’), in Regényei (Her Novels), ed. and intr. Gy. Bodnár, Budapest: Szépirodalmi. Peterson, L.H. (1999) Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetic and Politic of Life-Writing, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, Showalter, E. (1991) A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing, 4th revised edn, London: Virago.

Part 2

Through the (periodical) looking glass

3

Writing women’s history ‘The sex’ debates of 18891 Laurel Brake

It is extremely difficult to realise the point of view of those who are passionately opposed to the granting of the parliamentary franchise to single women and women who are householders, and fulfil all the qualifications demanded by law of the male voter. (Fawcett 1889b: 555)

Although Millicent Fawcett and the politics she represents are predictably visible in our post-suffrage world, they constitute only one strand of ‘the sex’ debates in the press of the late nineteenth century. I shall explore the range of responses prompted by the Women’s Suffrage Bill of 1889 in a clutch of British monthly magazines to contextualize these diverse responses in the media history of the day. If some of these articles are familiar from anthologies, their context is not. In the history of suffrage, the Bill is one of many that were regularly put to Parliament, and one of three in 1889. Its distinction is that fear of its anticipated success prompted the first women’s anti-suffrage petition. In the event, the ‘occasion’ of the Bill proved to be largely rhetorical, as it was knowingly allocated a date in the Parliamentary calendar after the Easter Recess normally begins, thus effectively scuppering it. The Bill was finally withdrawn in June, and public debate took place in the press rather than Parliament. ‘Played’ by the Government and teased out in the press, the Bill provoked the organization of anti-suffrage men and women, as well as serving the purposes of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS). This chapter will focus on a dialogue between two periodicals that published petitions against and for female suffrage, respectively the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review. This exchange prompted replies from other liberal and conservative journals, the Westminster Review and the National Review. I propose to approach this material from several directions, from the brandmarks of journal titles and of journalists, and from the links of the journals with external political groups. I shall assess the gender politics of the journals in the context of their politics on other issues and on other coverage of ‘the sex’ in that year.

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The ambience of neutrality and authority attached to the higher journalism of the late nineteenth century represented by these titles is interestingly dispelled by the gendered subject of ‘the sex’ or the ‘woman question’. Journalists – those emerging figures of the day – need to figure here alongside journal titles and not only as named individuals in keeping with the enhanced attention to the personal in the ‘New Journalism’ of 1889, but as gendered writing subjects. I shall scrutinize the range of views among nineteenth-century women journalists and their dialogue on this issue, as well as that of male journalists who often choose to address the rights of men as well as women. Lastly, I want to look at the links between the journals and political groups, and the relation between media and the construction of cultural and political identity. For the purposes of argument, I shall regard all women writing in the press at this time as falling within the compass of ‘new’ women as, whether their views are against or for suffrage, their status as women writing in the public prints of the day suggests that they are activists, even if they do not self-identify as ‘New Women’. Martin Pugh’s notion of ‘conservative feminism’ (Pugh 2001: 102) is helpful here in establishing space for twenty-first century recognition of a cross-party activism that was acknowledged in the period by supporters and non-supporters of suffrage. As both petitions show, some advocates of higher education for women did not support the vote at this stage, nor did some women actively engaged in writing for the press, or doing organized and complex philanthropic work. There is a notable diversity of activist women of all kinds on both sides in this journalism campaign, as writers, signatories and as subjects. I also want to represent the collusion of a number of cultural institutions and individuals across the political spectrum in mounting the 1889 debate – the deployment of the male press and the range of activist women and men, for example, and to support twentieth and twenty-first century accounts of early feminism and the history of journalism that acknowledge the breadth of the category of female activists which emerges in this 1889 campaign.2 I am also interested in how the monthlies positioned themselves on the issue of suffrage. In 1889 the earliest and most intensive coverage of suffrage is found in the newer, less partisan titles (the Fortnightly, the Nineteenth Century) rather than the older, more radical Review (the Westminster). Why in 1889 is expectation reversed? In this zone of the press, intensive coverage of suffrage and the impending Bill, which was expected in mid-April, seems to have been sparked by a dialogic piece in the Fortnightly Review in its April issue, published at the end of March. The first part, in favour of the Bill, was called ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’, and the second, against it, ‘The Proposed Subjection of Men’. This juxtaposition of opposing opinions was matched and reinforced by the gender of the journalists, Millicent Fawcett and J.S. Stuart Glennie respectively. A variety of contextual elements of contemporary press history lend colour to this apparent statement of nat-

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uralized fact. The identity of the writers was known because, unlike much journalism of the time, the pieces were signed; this policy of signature is in keeping with the avowed commitment to signature of the Fortnightly from its inception in 1865. That the gender of the journalists is a feature is in accord with the topicality of ‘the sex’ debates, and the gendered nature of the subject, with women still configured generically as ‘outside’ Parliamentary politics, despite evidence to the contrary since 1866–7.3 New Journalism’s contemporary propensity for the personal in journalism, and indeed ‘the personality’ were additional ingredients in these overdetermined signatures. That the opposing pieces were paired in a single issue originated in a periodical structure established by James Knowles, editor of the chief rivals of the Fortnightly, first of the Contemporary Review (1866–77) and then of the Nineteenth Century (1877ff.). Commissioning and publishing juxtaposed pieces of diverse views, Knowles made this ‘Symposium’ structure – which reproduced the pattern of a debating society4 to which he and many of his contributors belonged – the brandmark of his newly reconstituted journal, the Nineteenth Century. In its new setting, the refinements that accompanied the naming of the dialogic structure were set out as rules (Editor 1877: 331n). While publicizing the Symposia as one of the ‘new’ features of his new journal, Knowles also stabilized the form, making it more recognizable and uniform than in the past. As a structure of controversy, its potential to stimulate sales was recognized in the increasingly commercial industry of journalism, and the format was taken up by a number of Knowles’s rivals, from the conservative National Review to the liberal Fortnightly. When Frank Harris replicated it in the Fortnightly of April 1889, the piracy was blatant, given the extreme anti-suffrage position represented by Stuart Glennie against Fawcett’s position known to be favoured by this liberal journal. Perhaps stung by the appropriation of his structure and alerted by Glennie, husband of one of the anti-suffrage organizers, Knowles was the first of these editors to respond to the Fortnightly pieces on suffrage. We know that he had conferred with one of his collaborators on a petition as early as January, the month he had published Lady Katie Magnus’s vituperative denunciation of ‘The Higher Education of Women’ (1889), which had perhaps fuelled this initial prompt.5 However, we also know that the Nineteenth Century signature campaign was hastily organized in May (Vogeler 1984: 211). Knowles’s ‘reply’ to the Fortnightly was energetic and ingenious: not to be outdone, he published successive pieces over three issues – in June, July and August 1889. These were sustained not only by a running Symposium, but by the clever device of using the journal to rally a neglected portion of the readership of his intellectually heavyweight title, women readers. The sensational element of his riposte also established the notoriety necessary to keep his monthly’s lead over its rivals, the Fortnightly and the Westminster. The Nineteenth Century had

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increasingly marketed celebrity names as its hallmark, and by launching an anti-suffrage petition with a modest number of notable signatures in June, it made the enlargement of the petition its serial engine, to which were attached a series of articles on suffrage in the ensuing two issues. That this opportunistic campaign occurred in the summer months is also likely to attach to conditions of journalism. These months are ‘quiet’ – Parliament is in recess and readership is normally down. Moreover, the absence of Parliamentary reports and associated political articles means that each summer space is released for other matter, most famously book reviews. The Fortnightly ran its own – pro-suffrage – petition in July, and coverage of suffrage in both the National Review and the Westminster extended to two summer issues, in July and September, and August and September respectively. The delayed intervention of the radical Westminster stands out in this chronology. However, when the incidence of more general coverage of ‘the sex’ and the deployment of women journalists in 1889 in these four titles is tallied, their profiles change. The liberal Fortnightly and the radical Westminster include articles either about or by women nearly every month, whereas the allegedly non-partisan Nineteenth Century and the Tory National Review are more sporadic in these respects. Such articles on diverse topics include Emilia Dilke’s ‘Benefit Societies and Trades Unions for Women’ and Grant Allen’s ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’ in the Fortnightly; the anonymous ‘St Paul and the Woman Question’ (by Elizabeth Rachel Chapman) and ‘Excess of Widows over Widowers’ in the Westminster; Maude Stanley’s ‘Clubs for Working Girls’ and Eliza Priestley’s ‘The Mysteries of Malaria’ in the Nineteenth Century; and Clementina Black’s ‘Some East End Work Woman’ and Mary Jeune’s ‘Women of Today’ in the National Review. To produce a context for these articles, for the trajectory of their coverage of ‘the sex’, and for the more detailed consideration of the suffrage material to follow, I want to say more about the four journals. The Westminster Review is the oldest. Having begun as a quarterly, it was the last of the great quarterly reviews of the early nineteenth century to be founded, but distinctive in its southern, London origin. Financed by Jeremy Bentham and other Philosophical Radicals, it had a distinguished roster of contributors over the years, including both James and John Stuart Mill, the latter notably with Harriet Taylor, having contributed ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ in July 1851. Later in the 1850s George Eliot acted as co-editor and re-launcher of a new series of the journal with the free-thinker John Chapman as the named editor/proprietor.6 By 1889 it had capitulated to the speeding up of time, brought about by developments in transport, printing technology and telecommunications, and become a monthly. Still edited by Chapman, who no longer owned it, its monthly pieces were shorter and more journalistic than its former quarterly content, and its contributors more obscure. In its weakened form,

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anonymity continued to suit it, even late in the century when signature and the personal seemed important ingredients of the recipe for commercial success. In 1889 several factors may have contributed to the late entry of the Westminster into the suffrage debates, among them the editor’s age and domicile. In 1889 Chapman was 68 and had lived abroad, in Paris, for fifteen years. Moreover, he already had commissioned gender-related articles for May and June. By August and September pieces specifically related to suffrage appear – ‘Liberty of the [female] Subject’ and ‘Women in Public Life’ – by three unremembered journalists. But a clear trajectory of articles on the woman question in Chapman’s Westminster from the 1850s onwards shows his commitment as editor and contributor to issues around gender. What became a national marriage debate in 1888 kicked off with Mona Caird’s pieces on ‘Marriage’ and ‘Ideal Marriage’, featured in the Westminster’s ‘Independent Section’ in August and November. A year later Chapman follows the suffrage articles of 1889, with a review (by Havelock Ellis) of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft in January 1890. Still, in this instance of the Suffrage Bill of 1889, the Westminster’s intervention is notably late, initially disappointing and only latterly robust. Over forty years separates the founding of the pre-first Reform Bill Westminster and the pre-second Reform Bill Fortnightly Review. Whereas the 1820s quarterly stemmed from clear political interest in providing a progressive alternative to extant Tory and Whig rivals, the mid-century monthly was founded primarily by literary men such as George Henry Lewes and Trollope. They were keen to combine the political commentary and weightiness of old quarterlies such as the Westminster with the fiction and literary content of new shilling monthlies such as the Cornhill and continental journals.7 They were bent on re-invigorating the Review genre, as represented by its leading liberal exemplar, the Westminster. Moreover, by initially conceiving of publication at fortnightly intervals – an experiment necessarily abandoned by the non-compliance of the trade – the editors of the Fortnightly attempted to interject it into the gap between the weeklies and monthlies. Not quite a newspaper with respect to topicality, yet not as removed from day-to-day politics as a monthly magazine, fortnightly publication seemed halfway between these distinctive serial locations in time. This hybridity was an experiment that fared better in Britain in the format of the evening daily; founded in the same year as the Fortnightly, the Pall Mall Gazette also set out to merge the qualities of Reviews and newspapers. If in 1865 the Fortnightly’s initial policy was political neutrality, it appeared increasingly liberal after John Morley became editor in 1867. Morley’s departure fifteen years later broke the formal links with the Liberal Party, but the journal remained progressive. A youthful Frank Harris assumed the editorship in July 1886, injecting it with a renewal of energy and a change of direction. Attention to literature and criticism

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increased, while the monthly commentary on current events was dropped. Indicative of this enhanced arts coverage in 1889 is the publication of two pieces on the controversial plays of Ibsen, by Edmund Gosse ( January) and William Archer ( July). It was Harris who created the high profile of the Fortnightly with respect to suffrage and related gender issues in 1889. During that year he published gender-related pieces and/or articles by women in every issue. Beside the timely symposium on the Suffrage Act in April, which set the agenda for other monthlies, he had published a two-part series by Eliza Lynn Linton on ‘The Characteristics of English Women’ in February and March, two articles by Emilia Dilke in June and September, two by Flora Shaw on foreign affairs in September and November, and two by Marie Blaize de Bury in March and December on French culture. The ironic ‘A Modern Correspondence’ by the novelist Lucy Clifford appeared in the same November number that included pieces by Flora Shaw and Clementina Black. He also commissioned male writers on gender questions such as a piece on Eastern Women by Horace Victor that appeared in October, alongside the sensational intervention by Grant Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, that prompted articles in other journals. While there was no serialized fiction in this run of the Fortnightly, there was much distinguished literary criticism, much of it with gender dimensions. J.A. Symonds, Swinburne, Wilde, Arsene Houssaye, Pater and Dowden were among the aesthetes and future decadents that Harris published in 1889, and one of de Bury’s pieces was on French decadence. It is not an exaggeration to claim that gender was among the issues of the Fortnightly in 1889. Undoubtedly, it was this profile that attracted the approach of the NSWS to this monthly with their petition, rather than any other.8 The initiation of the strand of articles on the Suffrage Bill and the inclusion of the pro-suffrage petition are part of a clear predisposition to such issues under Harris’s direction, and part of his wider interest in sex and gender issues.9 This attention to gender in Harris’s Fortnightly is distinctive of his editorial reign rather than of the title. As Mark Turner argues (2001: 74–82), the gender orientation of the early Fortnightly under Lewes was masculinist, and while the primary political and literary interests of his successors ( John Morley and T.H.S. Escott) allowed scope for change, neither the nurturing of gender as a subject nor of women contributors seem to have been among the priorities of these editors, at least from the evidence of their respective runs. It is a reminder that journals are seldom reified, that the contents, meanings and politics of titles may change significantly over time and that, in short, the location of culture is always moving. So, I would argue, the distribution of coverage of ‘the sex’ in 1889 is historically determined and, indeed, historically specific, an epistemic moment when public prints and discourses, party politics, dissonants, personalities and

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gender formations converge to form a detailed socio-political map of a moment, with the two petitions functioning similarly to the biographies of the dead produced by the journalism of our own time in the wake of ‘9/11’. In 1877, a dozen years after the launch of the Fortnightly, that of the Nineteenth Century attempted another update of the Review genre. However, its formation is more closely related to the early Fortnightly than this account suggests. For the character of James Knowles’s Nineteenth Century is, without any doubt, a secular recension of a journal of a different title founded in 1866, just after the Fortnightly, as a religious alternative to the pronounced secularity of Lewes’s Fortnightly stable of contributors. Most of the basic structures of the new Nineteenth Century, including the Symposia, stem from the Contemporary Review, of which Knowles had been the editor since 1870. The gestation of the Nineteenth Century is well documented,10 but the principle on which Knowles separated his periodical project from that of the owner of the Contemporary in 1877 is germane; it was right to publish a robust variety of points of view, a policy of openness which itself verged, it was alleged, on free-thought and the undermining of Christian doctrine, rather than from the neutrality that Knowles claimed. In his new secular space, Knowles was in direct competition with the Fortnightly. The initiation and publication of the inaugural petition of the antisuffrage camp by Knowles may be counted as one of the various occasions that the Nineteenth Century breached neutrality, despite its formal attempt to balance its publicity for the anti-suffrage cause by the inclusion in the next ( July) issue of a team of pro-suffrage pieces by women journalists (Margaret Dilke11 and Fawcett). The cluster and disposition of pieces in the Nineteenth Century in the three summer numbers clearly delineate a favoured politics – of female anti-suffrage, a politics enhanced by its novelty. The mobilization of this group in the Nineteenth Century was the first public intervention of this kind undertaken by anti-suffrage women, ending a remarkable silence of twenty years in face of the public profile and organization of pro-suffrage politics. The Dilke–Fawcett defence of suffrage in July is isolated in the journal, among Knowles’s June ‘Appeal against Female Suffrage’ and his further invitation to subscribe to the petition in July, both of which are accompanied by a trailer of notable signatories and a tear-out petition for the collection of anti-suffrage signatures, to be returned to the Editor. In August a further anti-suffrage piece is offered as a rejoinder to Dilke and Fawcett, followed by a list of signatories twenty-eight pages in length. Its author is another ‘name’ – Louise Creighton, wife of Mandell Creighton, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge and a renowned clergyman, on his way to a Bishopric. Through its use of names to publicize its cause and sales, and through its dedication of space, there could be no mistaking either the politics of the journal on suffrage on this occasion, formulated in part and publicized by

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its male editor, nor of the strength of feeling among largely married, middle-class women, many of whom are recognizable as family members of putative male readers and writers of the Nineteenth Century, and indeed other journals of apparently different persuasion. Taken together, the signatories and the contributors to the Nineteenth Century identify numbers of middle-class women who are opposed to suffrage but involved actively with other manifestations of the struggle for women’s rights. The collective shadow of their famous but uncharacteristically silenced fathers, brothers and husbands is powerfully inscribed in the march of the successive surnames of recognizable males, whose surnames they articulate and whose voices they displace. The petition itself, though opposed to the vote, should be counted among the events of the era of the ‘new women’. Knowles’s collaborators on this project – Mary Ward, Louise Creighton and Frederic Harrison – further thicken the periodical culture aspect of this debate. Together the group constitutes a broad constituency. Ward represents activist Oxbridge women who had been involved in the establishment of higher education for women as well as women novelists; Louise Creighton represents the Church and the wives of clergymen; and Frederic Harrison represents male higher journalism and the Positivists. According to Ward’s biographers, Janet Trevelyan (1923: 224–5) and John Sutherland (1990: 198), the Nineteenth Century petition originated at an encounter in late January 1889 at the French Embassy, at which Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward, fresh from the wars around her novel Robert Elsmere and convinced of the evil of female suffrage, put to Knowles, editor of the journal, the notion of an anti-suffrage petition. For his part Knowles ‘was very anxious for it, but thinks it might not be done except at the exactly right moment’ (Ward, cited in Harrison 1978: 115), and to be published ‘when the critical time comes’ (cited in Sutherland 1990: 198). It is Knowles who suggests the process and keeps Ward’s idea in play: that meanwhile Ward and Creighton should develop a list of the names of ‘sympathisers . . . ready for use later on’ (Harrison 1978: 115). At this time, Ward was hot property for Knowles, though she was not one of his regular contributors. What periodical writing she did tended to appear preponderantly in the more staid Macmillan’s, the house magazine of one of her publishers. However, in keeping with the eclecticism of his journal and the Symposium principle of neutrality, Knowles was preparing to publish, in the March edition, Ward’s defence against Gladstone’s 10,000 word critique of her novel, which Knowles had scooped spectacularly for the May issue of the previous year. Ward’s response promised to be another reader-seducing scoop. Along with Ward and Creighton, Frederic Harrison, the Positivist, was a crucial part of the group, and it was at his house that the meeting in May, at the ‘critical time’, took place. As an early member of the Metaphysical Society (from 1869) and a contributor to the earliest of the Symposia (Vogeler 1984: 148), Harrison was a longstanding friend of the Knowles

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(Sutherland 1990:198) and of Ward (Vogeler 1984: 211). He was one of Knowles’s regulars. However, as a contributor to the Fortnightly from its inception, Harrison continued to write for this publication as well. It is possible then that Harrison’s pro-active work for the Nineteenth Century on anti-suffrage – a cause which the Fortnightly was actively opposing – alienated the Fortnightly editor from his contributor. Certainly, after the appearance of the Nineteenth Century petition against suffrage in June, Harrison’s contributions to the Fortnightly stopped abruptly, and did not resume until January 1891. During that period he published five articles for Knowles in the Nineteenth Century. The publishing trajectories of Ward and Harrison indicate how politics about ‘the sex’ cut across cultural and longstanding professional alliances, causing both editor and contributors to bond for the moment over this single issue (Harrison 1978: 123). For Ward and her female allies, and for Knowles and his journal, the support of the Positivists was crucial. The triumvirate of two men and a woman further limns the shadowy male power behind the female signatures, a gendering of a cultural formation which matches the masculinity of the Nineteenth Century’s production and readership. Indeed, as a Positivist, Harrison was against the formation of a League that would involve women in the political sphere (Trevelyan 1923: 228) and was doubtful if, for Positivists, a public petition by women was acceptable (Sutherland 1990: 198). These are women from whom Knowles was attempting to recruit readers, and Ward signatures! Harrison’s aversion to women’s visibility through signature may have helped determine the anonymity of the preamble to the Petition in the Nineteenth Century, however tempting the use of Ward’s name was to Knowles. Moreover, the decision of both the Nineteenth Century and the Westminster to present the petition as exclusively associated with women mirrors the dominant ideology of separate spheres. By so doing, both periodicals put their male editors and principal readership in a position that renders them inadmissible and invisible. Anonymity for the preamble is a necessary strategy in the case of the Nineteenth Century, where it is known that Ward’s collaborators included men. In comparison with Ward and Creighton, Harrison is doubly displaced by appearing only in the inscription of his wife’s name among the first set of celebrity signatories. Sutherland’s suggestion that Ward functioned as a token woman for the two men, to front their own opposition to female suffrage, seems arguable. Ward had just become a famous public figure. Conscious of her fame, she may have justifiably felt that she had become a player, exercising power behind the scenes in getting the Nineteenth Century to front this campaign, and to serve as a vehicle for the mobilization of an anti-suffrage political group. Letters show that Ward and Creighton collaborated in the drafting of the first statement of principles accompanying the Nineteenth Century petition in June; in so far as Ward’s draft is ‘too long and too much in the style of an article’ (Ward, cited in Harrison 1978: 115–16), it

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is likely that Harrison and Knowles also helped finesse the manuscript. So, just as the project was haunted by unnamed male luminaries, it was also determined by women, whose names the statement suppressed. This reading is borne out by the history of the women’s suffrage movement from the 1860s (Bostick 1980), and the parallel resort of the NSWS to the Fortnightly for their petition in 1889. The successful appropriation by women of this sector of print media – the predominantly male space of monthly higher journalism – for purposes of gender politics shows the extent to which editors of this class of journal were alive to the potential of enhancing their readership to include women in numbers. It also illustrates the ways in which women’s political groups deployed the male press, in addition to house publications,12 to help construct their own identities and to reach male readers of the governing classes, much in the way male politicians and newspapers have routinely done throughout media history. That the Suffrage Bill had fallen in mid-April, well before either petition was published, and was withdrawn in mid-June, is indicative of agendas on the part of the journals and the women activists that clearly went beyond the Bill itself. The National Review, the newest of this cluster, had been founded earlier in the decade, with a political agenda, as a counterpart to other leading journals of the day. As argued in Wellesley, the protestations of ‘no programme’ in the first number of the Review in March 1883 were ‘exaggerated’ (Wellesley 1972, II: 529–35). Alfred Austin, its editor, had twice stood for Parliament as a Tory, the journal was launched in a Tory club, its sponsors included members of Disraeli’s cabinet and other prominent Tories, and its contributors were to be ‘all Conservatives who have anything to say, and who know how to say it’ (National Review 1 [1883]: 26, cited in Wellesley 1972, II: 529). The motto on the title page of the first volume (March–August 1883) is more party oriented: attributed to Disraeli, it reads: ‘What is the Tory Party, unless it represents National feeling?’ It is noteworthy that in this conservative space the first two contributions to the suffrage debate were presented unabashedly in terms of threats to man rather than rights of woman. The headings are dramatic: ‘The Threatened Abdication of Man’ and ‘A Conservative Plea for the Rights of Man’. This sensationalism is in keeping with the cut and slash rhetoric established by Austin from the first. In comparison, ‘The Woman’s Part in Politics’, a late (November) riposte to these anti-suffrage pieces, from within their own ranks, is mild. Written and signed by a woman contributor, it wryly turns the debate to the female subject, beginning ‘Ought women to be allowed any active part in politics?’ (Payne 1889: 401). I want to turn now to some aspects of the debate itself. The April number of the Fortnightly is clearly linked with the Bill, going to press as it did without certain knowledge of whether the adjournment debate in

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Parliament would (unexpectedly) agree to sit the extra day. That this round of the higher journalism debate is kicked off by Millicent Fawcett, the Secretary/Treasurer of the NSWS, and twinned with a virulent denunciation of women and female suffrage, both suggest that at the time of writing and perhaps publication, the Bill was still regarded, at one level at least, as a possible runner (Smith [1913]: 221). While the Symposium is titled overall, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Bill’, making its topicality unmissable, the opposing of positions determines the headings of the juxtaposed pieces: ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ versus ‘The Proposed Subjection of Men’. Fawcett’s argument is strategic, attacking its recent opponents – Eliza Lynn Linton in the Fortnightly itself, and Goldwin Smith13 – delineating the benefits of female suffrage to women themselves and society, and carefully delimiting the extent of the reform. Presented as a mere ‘extension’ of male electoral requirements to single women householders and widows only, it is shown explicitly to exclude married women and women taking seats as MPs. The measure and logic of Fawcett’s case do not deter Glennie from an intemperate and intellectually bizarre series of allegations. These include a bitter attack on the utter ignorance of history by J.S. Mill in ‘The Subjection of Women’, an essentialist characterization of women as emotional and devoid of logic and a pervasive rhetoric of crisis, arising from the alleged ‘critically revolutionary conditions’ that are deemed to characterize present-day England. He nails his case to science – ‘the continuous triumphant vindication of the masculine and scientific’ (Glennie 1889: 573) – and the stupidity of women – ‘not one woman do we find in all history originating new ideas’ (ibid.). In this climate, it is not surprising that Glennie views the possible approval of female suffrage as carrying with it the spectre of universal male suffrage, enhanced by the overwhelming of male votes by hordes of redundant women. In his view female suffrage would introduce nothing less than ‘social and political disaster’ (ibid.: 578). The virulence of this attack on suffrage, alien to the politics of the Fortnightly, inscribes a keen competition between niche titles that necessitates publication of such an article in a liberal journal. The June edition of the Nineteenth Century opens with the Petition against the vote. The few preceding pages of anonymous prose14 take the form of five points to which the signatories are subscribing, with the initial supporters comprising an invited group of nobility and other renowned women. This apparently seamless continuity between principles and subscribers is exposed as a problem later in the debate, both in the Nineteenth Century itself and in the Fortnightly. Even here, although the petition is titled ‘An Appeal against Female Suffrage’, the preamble immediately attempts to establish that the signatories are not misogynists, reactionaries or opposed to women’s rights. The first proposition makes clear that the signatories support the ‘fullest possible development of the powers, energies, and education of women’ (Anon. 1889a: 781). It goes on to aver

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that women’s ‘physical difference’ (ibid.), from which both custom and ‘the disabilities of sex’ stem (ibid.), prevent women from full participation in those aspects of national activities which involve ‘force’ – administrative, military and financial (ibid.: 782), and thus from national suffrage. This initial staging of the anti-suffrage petition is organized loosely in terms of social hierarchy and then celebrity; a cluster of nobility appear first – dowagers, Ladies, Viscountesses and Honorables; among them are names recognizable today, such as Lady Randolph Churchill and Viscountess Halifax. The celebrities that follow depend on their suffixes rather than prefixes. ‘Mrs. Creighton, Cambridge, and The College, Worcester’ is the wife of a Cambridge Professor and a well-placed Churchman; ‘Mrs Church, The Deanery, St. Paul’s’, the spouse of Richard William Church, Dean of St. Paul’s and a leading member of the High Church party (H.C.B. 1921/2); and ‘Mrs. James Knowles, St. James’s Park’, the wife of the Editor. Almost all of these women included in this first foray would be recognizable to the male readers of the journal, bearing as these women do the names of some of the most famous men of the day. Even at this early stage, however, the petition displays the unprofessional, amateur randomness that its later version exemplifies, a characteristic that distinguishes it from the more professionalized order of its Fortnightly Review counterpart. For, scattered among the celebrity names, are other Ladies, Viscountesses and Honorables, suggesting that the ensuing sequence inscribes the migration of the petition, or at least clusters of migration, given that ‘signatures’ were most likely variously gathered by numerous persons through social networks. Working with the richness of names and addresses that the unordered portion of the Nineteenth Century petition offers and the New DNB, a useful map of female networks might emerge. These could supplement extant knowledge of social and cultural networks of those who have already entered history, and introduce some of the many Missing (female) Persons15 who as yet have not. Readers of this chapter will recognize many of the names on this first tranche of signatures, for the very reason that they or their spouses were, remain and/or are now famous: thus Mrs Leslie Stephen, Mrs Frederic Harrison, Mrs Huxley, Mrs Alma Tadema, Mrs W. Bagehot, Mrs Kegan Paul, Mrs Matthew Arnold and Miss Beatrice Potter are all here. However, so are women we know to be activists, such as Mrs Lynn Linton and Charlotte Green (‘Mrs. T.H. Green, Oxford’), Emily Beesly, recent President of the Women’s Liberal Association in Paddington and Lucy Garnett, a folklorist. Many of the women signatories are clergymen’s wives and daughters, a sector of the nineteenth-century female population normally involved in a wide range of work in the community, but this is imperfectly clear from the Nineteenth Century listings, since readers would need to be familiar not only with the names of clergy, but also of their office to

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identify the names as wives of clergymen. Some are among the early graduates of the women’s colleges. Moreover, for these women signing the petition, which additionally is to be published, is itself a political act, bringing oneself and the phalanx of women as a group into visibility. As well as topical, female suffrage was truly controversial at this time. The disclaimer in the July Fortnightly of the link between the signatories of the petition and the principles of the anonymous article that precedes it also suggests that the supporters of suffrage were a pluralist group, as well as socially vulnerable. Sticking with the petitions for the moment, the extension of the antisuffrage petition in the August Nineteenth Century to twenty-eight more pages of signatures illustrates the potential of this document for further research. Not only is there a multiplication of names in August, but some include more specific (street) addresses, thus facilitating nuanced demographic research into neighbourhoods and class. This document again invokes social hierarchy, with an additional two pages of nobility at the beginning of the document, and more scattered among the commoners. There are far more names here, both noble and common, which I take to be those of ‘ordinary’, non-celebrity women. They include women who are defined not by their husband’s names or jobs, but by a common group (eleven students from LMH, Oxford, twelve students from Girton, Cambridge and five from The King’s High School for Girls, Warwick) or their own livelihood (Mrs Henry Sandford, The Queen’s School, Chester, nurses from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge and Lorenza Roddick, Head Mistress of Board School from Reading). The names are not alphabetically arranged, but rather pasted together from separate petitions to form a single list. Thus, the dominant grouping is geographical (eighteen consecutive signatures from Ventnor, Isle of Wight), which makes it possible to do further research on the female networks inscribed here, the breadth and meanings of the geographical distribution of the petition (which includes signatures from Scotland, Ireland and Wales) and the journal, and also to approximate how many petitions were returned. Certain concentrations of signatures, such as seven from the Deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, are readily explicable: Christ Church is both the Cathedral Church of Oxford, and the College of that name that harboured the Anglican Anglo-Catholic descendants of the Tractarians. However, most of the thousands of names here remain unrecognizable along with the basis of their politics. An important difference between the August signatories and the first June tranche is the text of the circulated petition. The discursive explanation of the five points of the June petition was prefaced by a measured and short sentence: ‘We the undersigned, wish to appeal to the common sense and the educated thought of the men and women of England, against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women’ (Anon. 1889a: 781). The signatories of the second instalment are endorsing a raw

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single sentence of opposition, not the diffuse, reasoned argument of the five points: ‘The undersigned protest strongly against the proposed Extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to Women, which they believe would be a measure distasteful to the great majority of the women of the country – unnecessary – and mischievous both to themselves and to the State’ (ibid.: 788). This statement is of ambiguous provenance, apparently – given its location – emanating from the periodical formation itself rather than from the anonymous contributors (Ward, Creighton and Harrison) who composed the preamble. It appears first in the June number after the list of signatures but also after an address to readers signed by the Editor. In his appeal to the readers, he makes a bald plea to muster their forces to ‘save the quiet of Home life from total disappearance’ (Editor 1889: 788). As the voice of the journal, he alludes to the hegemonic suppression of women’s voices and attempts, like other editors of his time,16 to rouse this potential readership to cultural and party politics: The difficulty of obtaining a public expression, even of disapproval, about such a question from those who entirely object to mixing themselves up in the coarsening struggles of party political life, may easily become a public danger. Their silence will be misinterpreted into indifference or consent to designs they most dislike, and may thus help to bring them about. (Ibid.) He ends this short piece by constructing them, through addressing them as educated women and as readers of the Nineteenth Century: ‘The deliberate opinion of the woman readers of the Nineteenth Century might certainly be taken as a fair sample of the judgement of the educated women of the country, and would probably receive the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of their fellow countrywomen’ (ibid.). Apart from the five points attached to the June petition in the Nineteenth Century, nothing discursive appeared in the monthlies after the Fortnightly’s foray in April (Parliamentary Easter Recess) until July (Summer Recess begins), when three of the monthlies devoted sustained attention to the subject. These comprised the two titles already embroiled (the Fortnightly and the Nineteenth Century), both of which publish pro-suffrage pieces, and a newcomer, the National Review, which, sensationally, opposes it. In a version of its Symposium format, the Nineteenth Century invited two supporters of suffrage to reply to the case put against it the month before; these pieces are signed, with celebrity names, enhancing the notoriety of the topic, which alone would sell the edition to readers sympathetic to the journal’s stance. The added ingredient of the names alerts us to one of the great commercial advantages of the ‘neutral’ strategy of Knowles’s policy: that is, it maximized the readership, not only on the basis of fair-

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ness, openness and intellectual integrity, but because partisans of diverse persuasions might subscribe. This line-up of celebrity suffrage writers is calculated to sell to supporters of female suffrage, who might not be counted among the habitual readers of the journal. Moreover, this is a trough month for the Nineteenth Century with respect to this campaign, as their decision to re-publish the petition tear-out some pages later17 shows: they are gathering their forces for the publication of the lengthy petition in their August number. The Fortnightly also ‘replied’, mirroring the June Nineteenth Century’s anonymity with its own, and their petition – 104 signatures – with its own, of ‘[u]pwards of two thousand names’ (Anon. 1889c: 131). Its formulation of the statement to which its signatories subscribe also mirrors, in its dissent, that of the Nineteenth Century: ‘The undersigned desire to express their approval of the proposed extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to Women, which they believe would be beneficial both to them and to the State’ (ibid.: 132). It is a simplified and negative version of the Nineteenth Century wording. The anonymous piece in the Fortnightly serves as a useful context for the signatories of the Nineteenth Century petition. First of all, it insists that many of the Nineteenth Century signatories are already political and activists: Women form a part of ‘the machinery’ already; and the very same ladies, or some of them, who deprecate, in The Nineteenth Century, the introduction of women into political controversy, are presidents and vice-presidents of political associations, urging among their fellowcountrywomen the duty of mastering difficult and complicated political problems. (Ibid.: 124) This bears out my point that many of the signatories of the anti-suffrage petitions are activist and political women, and in that sense they are ‘New Women’, not unlike the signatories and sponsors of the Fortnightly petition. Second, the Fortnightly deploys a similar insistence on the link between women and domesticity as the Nineteenth Century, but argues that consciousness of domesticity on the part of male MPs whose electorates would include women under the proposed reform might change legislation for the better. This conversely indicates the imprint of domesticity on supporters of suffrage. The arguments of activists in opposing camps clearly overlap, which is not surprising among middle-class activist women who, whatever their politics, labour under the same hegemonic gender constructions of their day. But the Fortnightly does take issue with two Nineteenth Century allegations about class and governance: that support of female suffrage is confined to a few women of the privileged classes, by implication New Women, and that Parliament has to date satisfactorily undertaken legislation to protect

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women. In respect to the first issue, the Fortnightly cites longstanding campaigns for female suffrage by working women, many of whom are signatories of its petition; addressing the second, while the Fortnightly admits improvements in Parliamentary legislation, it attacks complacency by citing major injustices. Lastly, three of the Fortnightly’s nine-page preamble are devoted to contesting the argument about the physical strength of women with respect to that required in politics. This allegedly scientific basis of women’s exclusion from politics, in which gender must necessarily be de-coupled from biological sex, is clearly fundamental at the time, and the amount of space occupied by this point suggests that readers of the Fortnightly might need convincing as much as their Nineteenth Century counterparts. In the Fortnightly, Fawcett and the editors did not simply list the celebrity and other names, letting personal recognition do its work. They devised an ideological form of petition, intent on educating its readers. The names are grouped in categories informed by the new ‘social’ science, and edited by selection from 2,000 signatories according to representations of ‘various sections of society and various departments of women’s work’ (Anon. 1889c: 131). Designed to outline extant civic roles of women, the categories indicate women’s achievements to date. They include a General List, Wives of Clergymen and of Church Dignitaries, Official: Poor Law Guardians, Members of School Boards, etc., Educational, Medical and Nursing, Social and Philanthropic, Literary, Professional: Artists and Musicians, Landowners, and Women Engaged in Business/Working Women. Simultaneously in July, the National Review joined the debate with ‘The Threatened Abdication of Man’. In keeping with its (conservative) politics, the National sensationally puts the case against, by engaging the celebrity, now New Journalist, Eliza Lynn Linton. Both of the other July articles, in the Fortnightly and Nineteenth Century, invoke the June Nineteenth Century by name, and reflexively position their respective journals as participants in a national and commercial debate about female suffrage. Linton too makes much of this, linking female suffrage as she does to Britain’s national character, an argument that she develops through a favourable comparison of masculine Britain with a feminized representation of France. This trope of England as ‘a masculine nation’ is mooted in the article only to be threatened, in the present by the allegedly huge number of ‘[h]en-pecked husbands’ (Linton 1889b: 580), and in future by a dystopic national culture dominated by women who place Women’s Rights, a rapacious individualism and the ‘right to boldly dabble in filth hitherto concealed from her knowledge’ (ibid.: 585) above Women’s Duties. The ‘nation’ will be ‘emasculated’ by female suffrage, with the numbers of hen-pecked men increasing, while women will (curiously) be ‘unsexed’ by their acquisition of manly political power. ‘Domestic shipwreck’ (ibid.: 583) is foretold. Linton’s internalization and reflection back of male fear of women to the male readers of the National Review is strikingly sensational,

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equal to anything seen in popular journalism then or now. Its mining of the association of sex with governance – from common speech usage of the phrase ‘the sex’ for ‘Women’ – involves a crude substitution of sex for gender, which unleashes a reiterated sexual vocabulary of emasculation, feminization, hen-pecked, etc. At its strongest, Linton’s language sinks to invective with respect to ‘the Women’s Rights women’, a ‘screecher’ (ibid.: 591) whose single-minded intent is to ‘swamp’ men by the ‘solidarity of sex . . . with its corresponding enmity to men’ (ibid.: 582); this goes well beyond rhetoric to a reflection and re-enforcement of male hysteria. Carolyn Spring (1997: 161) notes the ‘unspoken male complicity’ to exclude sexuality from suffrage debate in Parliament, thus never acknowledging their own sexuality, exposed in debates about prostitution, nor issues around marital relations and women’s sexuality. G.B. Shaw’s later observation that ‘the cry for the vote is often really a cry for the key of one’s bedroom’ (Shaw 1909: 119) illuminates both the glossing of sexuality as ‘home’ in male debate and the more open references to sexuality by women. That this article and others are signed by a woman is offered by the journal as a guarantor of ‘authenticity’ and authority. This phoney economy of suffrage coverage appears graciously to offer women space that is normally, in the National Review and the Nineteenth Century, gendered male, pretending that female suffrage does not rest with male electors, male legislators and male journalists. This allegedly ’separate’ issue of the woman’s vote is here left to ‘the sex’, which is precisely devoid of Parliamentary political power. It could be argued that, at one level, the primary function of this debate is to sell journals; Fawcett and Dilke versus Linton, and the Fortnightly versus the Nineteenth Century may be read as the ‘spice’ of a media industry that is gearing itself up for economic competition through New Journalism methods. If some women were politically mobilized by the debate, and some male legislators and electors were enlightened or even convinced, it is nevertheless probable that the burden of proof that rested on women activists and journalists was never going to convince Parliament on this occasion. As R.B. Haldane18 opined over a year later in the Contemporary Review, debate in the press was a side show; male MPs, who held all the cards, would only be convinced by longterm changes in the economy. In some respects, the debates and the campaign peaked in August when the second tranche of the Nineteenth Century petition appeared, prefaced by another anti-suffrage article positioned as a rejoinder to Fawcett’s and Dilke’s. The only signed anti-suffrage article to appear in the Nineteenth Century, Louise Creighton’s mildly aggrieved piece argues for the amateur, ordinary nature of its rank and file signatories as set against the big guns of the longstanding, hegemonic suffrage movement. Speaking as the wife of a clergyman, and a professor, she makes the Oxford19 case for the separation of higher education of women from the franchise, and addressing the arguments of both Fawcett and Dilke directly and in detail, Creighton

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concludes with a paean to ‘the power of woman’s influence’ (Creighton 1889: 354). But August also saw the beginning of the coda to this suffrage campaign, which the Westminster Review and the National Review were to conclude, in two pieces each. All of them pick up the reference to the rights of man in Linton’s title, ‘The Threatened Abdication of Man’. Two are by male journalists whose signatures leave readers then and now none the wiser. Nat Arling for the Westminster and W. Earl Hodgson (National Review) were not celebrities. The dearth of ‘names’ in these August–September issues may arise from the season, while the gender of the journalists reflects the male character of the profession and the preponderant (male) gender of the readership of these titles, as well as the shortage of women journalists. At the Westminster, Arling too pitches the argument in terms of the abstractions and history of political economy, a language redolent of past contributions to the Westminster by Philosophical Radicals such as James and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but he arrives at a significantly different conclusion on the franchise. Eerily mirroring the title of the simultaneous piece in the National in its specification of gender and rights, ‘Liberty of the Subject (Female)’ also sets the question in terms of constitutional freedom and the individual. Halfway, however, Arling turns to a Mill-like analysis of the state of women in the present. In its recognition of the inappropriate pathologizing of women’s situation, its defence of improved education, its harsh critique of marriage, and above all in its scepticism about religion – ‘the chains that so-called Christianity has riveted on them’ (1889: 163), this piece continues the robust tradition of the Westminster on women’s rights, but without supporting the recent Suffrage Act. Female suffrage, it is implied, is part of the slow process of the necessary and desirable ‘emancipation of women’, which is ‘a matter of time only’ (ibid.: 158), but however much ‘women wish to become the companions of men, . . . while ignorant, unappreciated, despised, they can never do so’ (ibid: 167). This is an unexpected conclusion to a Westminster piece, and readers in August may well have expected a follow-up. This is provided in September in ‘Women in Public Life’, a sequence which matches the symposia format this debate has taken in all of these monthlies; here, it consists of two signed pieces under one title. Again Chapman draws on non-celebrity journalists, a man and a woman. They are both strong advocates of female suffrage. The male contributor is Denis F. Hannigan, an Irish barrister and miscellaneous writer. His robust defence of women and the vote is the first of his many contributions to the Westminster between September 1889 and 1900. The female contributor is Elizabeth Martyn,20 whose shorter and feisty piece offers arguments that Hannigan doesn’t cover, including the four votes that women already possess – for Municipal elections, School boards, Poor Law Guardians and County Councils. It is, she notes wryly, the hardly taxing fifth vote that they lack, held normally at seven-year intervals. These spirited pro-

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Suffrage pieces re-establish the progressive reputation of the Westminster and act as a coda for that side of the debate more generally. Hodgson, who was to sub-edit the National for Austin in the early 1890s, takes a very different tack from Linton in his ‘A Conservative Plea for the Rights of Man’, while nevertheless echoing her eccentricity of tone and of ideology. In the cause of establishing ‘Ideal Democracy’, he recommends, in support of Goldwin Smith, the abolition of political parties and more generally ‘the disorganization of democracy’ (Hodgson 1889: 91). Although the Suffrage Bill is nowhere mentioned, this road to enhanced democracy is put forward as an alternative route to reform of the franchise. Moreover, throughout the piece, the language of the recommended reform is of ‘man’ and ‘manhood’: the gender of the electorate and the elected is unproblematized, except in the context of the piece – its location in a political serial; its timing with respect to the Bill, the petitions and the wider press debate; and its existence as part of a sequence that began with Linton’s piece in June – supplies the missing link with the Bill, and the oblique support of the status quo with respect to gender and suffrage. Apparently high-minded and abstract, it does not stoop to attack women, but deigns only to counter corruption in national politics across the board and to support (male) individualism. In conclusion, there are several points I would like to draw out of this particular moment of the suffrage campaign: first, that activist women appear on both sides of the question, and on both petitions; second, that the sequence of periodical intervention of 1889 suggests that the older, once quarterly Westminster Review had been overtaken – in its market niche of progressive monthly review – by its innovative successor, the Fortnightly; third, that the eclectic brandmark of the Nineteenth Century was not a guarantor of political neutrality, which was clearly breached here in this proactive instance; fourth, that the symposia format that the Nineteenth Century had introduced in 1883 had been adopted by 1889 by virtually all the political monthlies here, and that it was no longer unique to the Nineteenth Century nor ‘neutral’; fifth, that this debate in the journals was a function of commercial as well as political timing – the season of the year and the climate of the New Journalism with its appetite for the personal, the sensational and the fanning of competition through the construction of controversy and campaigns; and sixth, that both petitions offer writers of women’s history rich possibilities for further research. The maleness of the space of these higher journalism titles is also manifestly clear, in terms of the gender of contributors and editors, and the dominant discourses of the contents. Likewise, the shortage of women journalists is striking, where even in the well-disposed Westminster two out of three contributors are male, the rival Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly both publish signed pieces by Fawcett, and though the National musters two women out of three contributors, it only manages to publish a pro-suffrage piece, by a conservative woman, in November.21 But the links between women’s

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groups, both ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ suffrage, with journals at this time is unmistakeable, as is the power of women’s issues to attract readers. Lastly, unfamiliar names of both men and women writers emerge here in the history of suffrage and of nineteenth-century journalism: who were Elizabeth Martyn, Annie M. Payne and the eloquent D.F. Hannigan, and what were their links to the suffrage campaign beyond those we glimpse here?

Notes 1 I gratefully acknowledge the help of colleagues who deployed their expertise to comment on this manuscript: Dr John Davidson (Edinburgh), Professor Maria DiCenzo (Waterloo, Ontario) and Dr Cheryl Law (London). 2 For example, see the accounts by Brian Harrison (1978), Barbara Onslow (2000), Martin Pugh (2000), and Valerie Sanders (1996). 3 This was the period of the Women’s Petition for female suffrage and J.S. Mill’s amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867. 4 The Metaphysical Society. 5 Magnus acidly describes educated women as ‘this modern crowd of machinemade mediocrities’ (1889: 664). 6 For more on the Westminster Review and gender in the 1850s, see Brake 2001: 87–109. 7 For the origins of the Fortnightly Review in light of the Westminster, see Turner (2000: 273–4). Everett (1939: 13, 16, 21) underestimates the sway of the Westminster in 1865. 8 Evidence for this is found in the 1889 Annual Report of the NSWS: ‘It seemed desirable that a counter-declaration on the part of women who believed Women’s suffrage to be beneficial to women and to the State should be published. An arrangement was made with the Editor of the Fortnightly Review for the publication of this declaration’ (8–9). 9 At about this time, in May 1889, Harris helped fund the publisher Henry Vizetelly’s defence against a second prosecution by the National Vigilance Association for publishing cheap translations of ‘obscene’ books by Emile Zola. 10 On the Nineteenth Century and the Contemporary Review, see Brake (1994: 51–62); Brown (1947); and Srebrnik (1986). 11 Note that the author is Margaret Dilke, wife of Ashton Dilke, rather than Emilia Dilke, who did the articles in the Fortnightly (May, June 1889). 12 The house journal of the NSWS was the Women’s Suffrage Journal, edited by Lydia Becker, who was also an officer of the Central Committee of the NSWS as its Parliamentary Agent, and on its Executive. 13 Fawcett had already engaged with Smith in the National Review the previous year. To Smith’s ‘Conservatism and Female Suffrage’ (February 1888) she penned ‘Woman’s Suffrage’ in March. Along with Louise Creighton, Smith had signed a pro-suffrage petition in Oxford in the early 1870s, and had similarly changed his view by 1889. His 1874 Macmillan’s Magazine piece on ‘Female Suffrage’ had proved popular enough to subsequently circulate as a pamphlet. 14 The Preamble is unsigned, and Wellesley does not attribute it. John Sutherland implies in his biography of Mrs Humphry Ward that hers was the dominant voice (Sutherland 1990: 198), but Trevelyan (1923: 77): ‘a Protest . . . which Mrs Ward had drawn up [with some assistance from Mrs Creighton]’, and correspondence quoted by Harrison (1978: 115–16) imply that it was a thoroughly collaborative document, although the precise contributions of Harrison and Knowles seem to be undocumented.

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15 Missing Persons was the name of the supplemental volume of the DNB issued in 1993 to compensate for the exclusion of women and some categories of men from the DNB to date. 16 Compare W.T. Stead in the Review of Reviews in 1890. For more on Stead and women readers, see Brake (1994: 100–1). 17 Presumably, the juxtaposition of the articles by the suffrage supporters (86–103) and the republication of the anti-suffrage petition tear-out (104) is strategic, to ‘answer’ the first with the second. However, it is also a moment when the announced policy of political ‘neutrality’ is fissured, as material collision of what now emerges as the opposition with explicit partisan support is expressed through the layout of the edition. 18 Richard Burdon Haldane, a Liberal MP between 1885–1911, was the same person who introduced the Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill in Parliament in August 1889 and again in 1890 for the Women’s Franchise League. His sister, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane (1862–1937), was an activist in Edinburgh and London, where she worked with Octavia Hill, and a lifelong Liberal. She is misleadingly characterized in the DNB, where the emphasis is on her opposition ‘to militant methods when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height’ rather than on the fact that she ‘worked steadily for enlightened freedom for women in education and the professions’ (Christie 1949: 388–9). As her autobiography, From One Century to Another, shows, she was a defender of the women’s cause from childhood. With respect to the relation between her support for suffrage and that of her brother, she comments: ‘as I held strong views on it, I was glad that, in contradistinction from most of his party, Richard did the same’ (1917: 123). I am indebted to Dr John Davidson for this reference. 19 Creighton lived in Oxford in 1872–4 until her husband took a living in Northumberland. She was one of the women in North Oxford active in the formation of the local Association for the [Higher] Education of Women (AEW), which led eventually to the opening of LMH and Somerville in 1879. 20 Elizabeth Martyn went on to publish ‘The Case of the Helots’ in the Humanitarian in February 1894; this is a witty, spirited article in which women are reconfigured as helots. It includes a critique of women’s treatment and construction in the contemporary press. 21 In Annie M. Payne’s ‘The Woman’s Part in Politics’, she uses the argument that as capabilities and virtues are equally distributed between the sexes by Nature in evolution, ‘[w]omen, therefore, who are endowed with certain masculine virtues, tastes, capacities, which drive them to outwardness are not to be condemned’ (Payne 1889: 417). This permits her to argue in the conservative space of the National Review that as long as such women ‘affiliate. . .to their life work as many of the joys and duties of domesticity, rather than demanding outside rights, they will continue to create a sense of the justness of their position’ (ibid.: 417), and that as far as the vote is concerned, it ‘arouses less antagonism when coupled with that necessary, subtle, influence in the house’ (ibid.: 418). The spectrum of conservative opinion between Linton in July and Payne in November is indeed broad and bears out the claim of the National to be open to all conservatives, not simply those representing the Tory party position.

Bibliography Anon. (1889a) ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, Nineteenth Century, 25 ( June): 781–8 (includes signed petition) ⫹ petition form. —— (1889b) ‘The Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, Nineteenth Century, 26 ( July): 104 ⫹ petition form.

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—— (1889c) ‘Women’s Suffrage: a Reply’, Fortnightly Review, 45 ( July): 123–39 (includes signed petition). —— (1889d) ‘Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage’, Central Committee of the NSWS. ‘Appendix. A Women’s Protest Against Female Suffrage’ [a signed petition], Nineteenth Century, 26 (August): 355–84. Arling, N. (1889) ‘Liberty of the Subject (Female)’, Westminster Review, 132 (August): 157–67. Bostick, T. (1980) ‘The Press and the Launching of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1866–1867’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 13.4 (Winter): 125–31. Brake, L. (1994) ‘ “Silly Novels”? Gender and the Westminster Review at Midcentury’, Print in Transition, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 87–109. —— (2001) ‘Theories of Formation: The Nineteenth Century 1877’, Subjugated Knowledges, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 51–62. Brown, A.W. (1947) The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis. 1869–1880, New York: Columbia University Press. Christie, E.R. (1949) ‘Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane’, Dictionary of National Bibliography, 1931–40, L.G. Wickham Legg (ed.) London: OUP, pp. 388–9. Crawford, E. (2001) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928, London and New York: Routledge. Creighton, L. (1889) ‘The Appeal Against Female Suffrage: A Rejoinder’ [to Fawcett and Dilke in July], Nineteenth Century, 26 (August): 347–54. Dilke, M.M. (1889) ‘The Appeal Against Female Suffrage: A Reply. II’, Nineteenth Century, 26 ( July): 97–103. Editor [J. Knowles] (1877) [Rules] ‘A Modern “Symposium” ’, Nineteenth Century, 1 (April): 331n. —— (1889) ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, Nineteenth Century, 25 ( June): 788. Everett, E.M. (1939) The Party of Humanity: the Fortnightly Review and its Contributors, 1865–74, Chapel Hill: UNC Press. Fawcett, M. (1889a). ‘The Appeal Against Female Suffrage: A Reply. I’, Nineteenth Century, 26 ( July): 86–96. —— (1889b) ‘The Woman’s Suffrage Bill. I. The Enfranchisement of Women’, Fortnightly Review, 45 (April): 555–67. Glennie, J.S. Stuart (1889) ‘The Woman’s Suffrage Bill. II. The Proposed Subjection of Men’, Fortnightly Review, 45 ns (April): 568–78. Haldane, E. (1917) From One Century to Another: The Reminiscences of Elizabeth S. Haldane, London: Alexander Maclehose & Co. Haldane, R.B. (1890) ‘On Some Economic Aspects of Women’s Suffrage’, Contemporary Review, 58 (December): 830–8. Hannigan, D.F. (1889) ‘Women in Public Life [I]’, Westminster Review, 132 (September): 278–82. Harrison, B. (1978) Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, London: Croom Helm. H.C.B. [Henry Charles Beeching] (1921/2; reprint of 1901 Supplement) ‘Richard William Church’, Dictionary of National Bibliography, in Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds) supplement. London: OUP, pp. 431–4. Heilmann, A. (2000) New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Hodgson, W.E. (1889) ‘A Conservative Plea for the Rights of Man’, National Review, 14 (September): 84–91. Holton, S.S. (1998) ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: the Women’s Franchise League and its Place in the Contending Narratives of the Women’s Suffrage Movement’, in M. Joannou and J. Purvis (eds) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 15–36. John, A. and Eustance, C. (1997) ‘Shared Histories – Differing Identities’, in A. John and C. Eustance (eds) The Men’s Share, London: Routledge, pp. 1–37. Linton, E. Lynn (1889a) ‘The Characteristics of English Women’ I and II, Fortnightly Review, 45 (February and March): 245–60, 363–76. —— (1889b) ‘The Threatened Abdication of Man’, National Review, 13 ( July): 577–92. Magnus, Lady K. (1889) ‘The Higher Education of Women’, National Review, 12 ( January): 663–8. Martyn, E. (1889) ‘Women in Public Life [II]’, Westminster Review, 132 (September): 282–5. Onslow, B. (2000) Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Houndmills and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press. Payne, A.M. (1889) ‘The Woman’s Part in Politics’, National Review, 14 (November): 401–18. Pugh, M. (2000) The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rubinstein, D. (1986) Before the Suffragettes, Brighton: Harvester. Sanders, V. (1996) Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Shaw, G.B. (1909) ‘The Unmentionable Case for Women’s Suffrage’, The Englishwoman, I.1 (March): 112–21. Smith, G. (1888) ‘Conservatism and Female Suffrage’, National Review, 10 (February), 735–52. —— ([1913]) A Selection from Goldwin Smith’s Correspondence, A. Haultain (ed.), London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd. Spring, C. (1997) ‘The Political Platform and the Language of Support for Women’s Suffrage, 1890–1920’, in A. John and C. Eustance (eds) The Men’s Share, London: Routledge, pp. 158–81. Srebrnik, P. (1986) Alexander Strahan, Victorian Publisher, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sutherland, J. (1990) Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trevelyan, J. Penrose, (1923) The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, London: Constable. Turner, M. (2000) ‘Defining Discourses: The Westminster Review, Fortnightly Review, and Comte’s Positivism’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38.3 (Fall): 273–82. —— (2001) ‘Hybrid Journalism: Women and the Progressive Fortnightly’, in K. Campbell (ed.) Journalism, Literature and Modernity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 72–90. Vogeler, M.S. (1984) Frederic Harrison: The Vocations of a Positivist, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1967–89), 5 vols, ed. W. E. Houghton (I–IV), E. Rhoads Houghton (III–IV) and J. Harris Slingerland (IV–V), London: Routledge.

4

The American New Woman and her influence on the Daughters of the Empire of British Columbia in the daily press (1880–95) Françoise Le Jeune

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the small colony of Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia stood out from the rest of Canada and the rest of the British colonies for reasons of race, class and gender. First, it was a late creation among the series of colonies launched by the Colonial Office in the nineteenth century as it was open for settlement in 1849 only. Thus it was a well-devised creation which had learnt from the success and failure of other British settlements overseas. It was designed for white British settlers, and preferably reserved to middle-class families as it was said that British middle-class wives and mothers had an important part to play in the building of colonies. They would preserve the British spirit and identity on this small British island in the Pacific North West, secluded beyond the Rocky Mountains. The British middle class counted among them many penniless and disillusioned families in these mid-Victorian years. Hence many young couples found their way to the ‘last jewel of the Crown’ – as Victoria (the capital city) was advertized then – in the 1850s and 1860s. They came with their bourgeois dream, that of social and financial success in a British colony under the British flag. Most of the middle-class fathers secured a position in the colonial administration in Victoria as civil servants. The small colony prospered over the years and many of the oncestruggling middle-class colonists made it to the higher political sphere of the colonial administration and society, while their wives were actively participating in the maintenance of their colonial home, the education of the children, and networking for the promotion of their husbands. They were also ‘making do’ with no maids, on a small civil servant’s pension. But financial and social success eventually crowned their team effort in the late 1870s. As a consequence, most of these gentlewomen developed a strong sense of colonial duty and imperial sacrifice pairing their own dire years of hardship with the slow-growing prosperity of the budding colony and thanking themselves and their husbands for their effort when prosperous years transformed Victoria into a true ‘jewel of the Crown’. While their husbands held the highest positions in the small colonial world of British Columbia, middle-class housewives called themselves the Daugh-

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ters of the Empire in reference to a white Anglo-Saxon Canadian movement founded in Ontario at the end of the 1880s – the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. This very private club was reserved to British middle-class and upper-class women who, having emigrated to Canada in the early colonial years, believed in their imperial mission and sustained a strong attachment to the mother country. Chapters (or branches) were created in many urban centres all over Canada, including Victoria in 1887. The connection between British Columbia and the mother country was even stronger as the province did not join the Canadian Confederacy before 1871. Separated from the rest of Canada by the Rockies, the British families cherished their connection with Britain in which they found their political, social and moral inspiration in the letters from home or in the press via clippings from British magazines sent by friends or in British syndicated columns published in their local newspapers. Many middle-class colonists even received The Times, which was one month old by the time the newspapers arrived in Canada. To preserve this special relationship between their ‘home’ and their new home in Canada, the young generation of British Canadians – girls and boys born in Victoria in the 1860s and 1870s – often travelled to the mother country in their late teens in order to meet their British families and to be immersed in the mother culture and civilization. The trip to the ‘Old World’, as these young women tended to see it, was regarded as formative by the older generation and had to be accomplished prior to their getting married. The purpose of the research described in this chapter was to study British Columbian newspapers from 1880 to 1895 in order to understand what the British ‘matrons’, who came as pioneer gentlewomen, and their young Canadian-born daughters would read on the question of the New Woman. At a time when women in Britain were still petitioning Parliament for the right to vote, British Columbian women over 21 were granted the provincial franchise (in 1917, before anyone else in Canada). If the connection with the mother country was still as strong as one might be led to believe, how did they manage quietly to obtain the franchise before their British cousins? I thought the answer might have been in the dailies, as the isolation of the small colony was bridged by the reading of papers bringing news from the Old and New Worlds. What information on the progress of the woman’s cause were they given to read in Victoria which might explain the absence of defiance on the part of provincial MPs when the suffrage question was discussed in Parliament? In fact, I found that the largest circulating newspaper in the province, The Daily Colonist, had for several years exposed its women readers to an on-going debate about the virtues of the traditional Victorian woman and the New Woman. In fact, we will see that in this small colony whose isolation led its settlers to read papers avidly, middle-class female readers and their male companions had been influenced by the more advanced American views on the New Woman which came to their doorstep via syndicated columns from New York.

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In 1880, Victoria, the provincial capital of British Columbia where the most educated middle-class readership lived, counted two important daily newspapers, the Victoria Daily Times and the oldest one, the Victoria Daily Colonist, formerly called the British Colonist. The papers contained between six to ten pages, depending on the amount of information or advertisement they carried. In 1882, two pages were added for the purpose of advertisement and on Fridays a part of these two pages was dedicated to women’s issues. For this chapter, I chose to focus on one of the dailies only, the Victoria Daily (British) Colonist, with its large circulation, as it seemed the most representative of the first generation of white middle-class readers with its conservative approach to politics and its affection for the mother country, even though the term ‘British’ had been dropped from the title by 1871.1 A small section at the end of the newspaper had been devoted quite irregularly to women’s interests from 1878 onwards. However, besides some articles on French and English fashion and anecdotes on life in London circles published in the early years of the woman’s page, and three articles from the British press on the question of woman’s suffrage as early as 1869, it is difficult to describe the page as a regular feature. In the 1880s and 1890s the whole section began to be composed essentially of syndicated columns from the American Associated Press. It is in this space opened up for women that to my surprise I discovered that between 1890 and 1897 The Daily Colonist regularly published the syndicated contribution of a New York journalist, Eliza Archard Conner. From 1890 onwards, while in Britain the franchise for women was once again rejected and while, as Laurel Brake showed in the previous chapter, the British press was fighting over the ‘sex debate’, Eliza Conner, on a weekly basis, was introducing the world of the American New Woman to the British Columbian Daughters of the Empire. Writing in a separate journalistic sphere, the women’s page, normally reserved for woman-related topics, Conner used it as a forum in which she reported every week on the progress of the feminist cause in America. Besides, she wrote in a new, personal, high-flown style typical of New Journalism and female militants. However difficult it is to assess the influence on the Daughters of the Empire of a repeated exposure to this New Woman’s writing, I analyse a very special issue of The Daily Colonist, published by the female readers themselves on 28 May 1895. No less than eighteen women, from both the younger and older generation, contributed to this special edition called ‘Place aux Dames’ – ‘Make room for the ladies’ – which provides us with a sample of reactions to the question of the New Woman after the Colonist’s readers had been exposed to ‘her’ propaganda for five years.

The Daily Colonist and the woman’s page In the 1880s, like most North American newspapers, The Daily Colonist needed advertisements to support itself and to keep up the standard of its

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higher journalism pages. It is quite noticeable that the creation of woman’s pages corresponded with the rise of mass advertising. Indeed, papers appealed to their female readers by providing them with cheap syndicated columns to read, hoping that they would spend some time reading the advertisement pages too (see also Chapter 7). Illustrations became more abundant and therefore pages presenting fashion illustrations and do-it-yourself curios for women found their place at the end of the newspapers in the advertisement pages, or in the woman’s page or the ‘Woman’s World’ (as The Daily Colonist named it), which took up two or three columns. It must have seemed a convenient location for the editor as it came after the more serious local news and right beside the one or two pages of advertisements. Conveniently, in the lay-out of these pages, advertising was next to or in between these short paragraphs or columns devoted to women. It was designed to attract women shoppers offering at first sentimental or amusing readings, before taking advantage of the emotion created by their reading experience, with visual incentives calculated to prompt them to make spontaneous purchases. The woman’s page offered women journalists a narrow access to the world of journalism. North American editors first confined them to the end of the papers, to the ‘woman’s corner’, in which they could express their writing ambitions in reports on household-related news and other domestic interests. Confined to columns at the end of local newspapers, women gradually developed a distinctive style and often expressed their conventional or unconventional ideas before moving on to other sections of the paper. Two famous Canadian female journalists, Kit Coleman and Sarah Jeanette Duncan, graduated from this woman’s sphere of the written word to higher journalism in the 1910s. The latter wrote a column for the famous Toronto quality-paper, The Globe and Mail, under the alias Garth Grafton. For several years, next to the advertisement pages, Sarah Jeanette Duncan entertained Toronto’s upper middle-class women with her weekly chronicle, in which she often expressed her own feminist views on the world, regularly mocking in humorous tones the narrow-minded Victorian upper-class matrons she wrote for. She gradually rose to the position of editor of the woman’s page. The general editor trusted her with the selection of the syndicated columns which she often chose for their interesting content on the advance of the woman’s cause. Thus, as early as 1878, with the creation of an almost weekly ‘woman’s page’ The Daily Colonist’s readers were provided with information on the latest interests of the female reader. When it eventually became a regular weekly page two years later, the entire section was composed of a collection of syndicated articles from the American Associated Press. Articles connected only by a loosely defined female interest were simply juxtaposed to fill the page. Readers must have had the impression that the page or half-page was completed with bits and pieces assembled hastily by an editor who did not seem to care much about its content. This was quite

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a current practice among editors of provincial newspapers. In Ontario or Quebec, for instance, editors resorted to syndicated columns when they were lacking inspiration to fill up the page and did not want to hire a woman columnist or a woman editor for the woman’s page. However, we shall see that in the case of the editor of The Daily Colonist, his lack of interest for the woman’s page and for women’s reading led him to offer a seditious column that looked as though he dismissed it as ‘silly stuff’. Nevertheless, editorial control was quite tight, as is evident from the fact that the female editors of the ‘Place aux Dames’ special edition of 28 May 1895 had to justify their editorial proceedings in a separate paragraph. This by implication underlined the journalistic policy of the regular editor of The Daily Colonist: In ordinary editions of the paper the articles published are in harmony with one another and with the professed opinions of the editor. But as in this edition an effort has been made in quite an opposite direction, it was deemed expedient to request that the contributors sign their articles. The writers, therefore, are responsible only for the opinions above their own signature. (The Daily Colonist, 28 May 1895) If each article had to pass the editor’s muster, it is surprising that he would have endorsed subversive articles written by New Women, radical in tone and action, since this was not consistent with the rest of the paper. His policy must have only applied to the pages devoted to high journalism and not to syndicated material drawn from other papers. In short, in the 1880s, the American Associated Press seemed to have become a handy and cheap source of syndicated columns destined for a female readership into which editors could tap when looking for entertaining pieces which might suit the taste of their female readers – a second-hand readership for editors. Among the columnists working for the American Associated Press, some signatures recurred in the woman’s page of many provincial newspapers in Canada – Mrs Frank Leslie was one of them. In The Daily Colonist her regular contributions on the woman’s world of fashion, marriage and domestic happiness, along with some traditional illustrations, alternated with Eliza Archard Conner’s feminist column. At times both columns featured next to each other on the same half-page. However, from 1890 onwards, Conner contributed a weekly column called ‘Woman’s World in Paragraphs’ which demonstrated the New Woman’s progress in the world through facts and figures. The paragraphs were thought-provoking and seditious compared to Mrs Frank Leslie’s prim and proper column which was published once or twice a month only.

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The Woman’s World: the New Woman versus ‘silly stuff’ What we see in the pages of the woman’s corner, therefore, is an on-going debate between two extreme views, the radical feminist one defended by Conner and the anti-New Woman position held by other female contributors like Mrs Leslie. At no stage over those years, the period between 1890 and 1895, did British Columbian women express themselves on the woman’s cause in the paper. However, over this five-year period, women in British Columbia, at least those reading the paper, had had a weekly exposure to the writings of a committed New Woman and to her questioning of woman’s place in her community and in society at large. Conner wrote bitter commentaries on the Victorian American society that confined women to the private sphere and advocated the need for a woman to nurture her self and her body, while dedicating her time to paid work and civic activity, as well as to her intellectual accomplishments through higher education. The result of such subversive writing can be seen in the May 1895 women’s edition of The Daily Colonist. The influence of the New Woman’s position on the other contributors in this weekly debate on the question of woman’s rights and woman’s place in the world is quite noticeable, even if these columns were not answering each other directly in The Daily Colonist. Over these five years we can notice a gradual opening of the mind of the more ‘conservative’ or traditional women writers’ viewpoints (whose position was similar to the Daughters of the Empire in 1890). Mrs Frank Leslie, for instance, gradually abandoned the conservative stand of her early columns on the duties of women in the household, to discuss the phenomenon of the new mother, the new wife and the new daughter, whom she associated with the ‘modern girl’. The vocabulary used in American anti-feminist columns in the 1890s heralds the gradual acceptance or the coming of age of ‘the woman of today’, whom Mrs Leslie describes as a ‘woman of thought and actions’ in a column published on 30 May 1894, abandoning expressions such as the ‘fair sex’, the ‘weaker sex’ or the ‘softer sex’, or ‘wives and mothers’, which dotted her columns in the 1880s. However, she never abandoned her harsh criticism of the New Woman’s radical demands. While heralding some kind of New Girl’s age, she insisted that she was not ready to make other concessions to what she called the emancipation of the daughters, who might rapidly turn into New Women and ask for the franchise which, to her, was a ‘white elephant’: Do not suppose that I am advocating the complete emancipation of young girls from parental control. No, for I think nothing more disagreeable than the independent and almost insulting tone adopted in these days by a good many girls toward their fathers and mothers. Let girls, as they grow older, show their right to freedom by their moderation and wisdom in using it. (The Daily Colonist, 26 January 1894)

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As earlier studies have shown, the term ‘New Woman’ was coined by Sarah Grand and Ouida in 1894. In the conservative columns, the word is never actually used, but several metaphors in 1894 point to the New Woman: ‘fair feminine anarchists’ (30 May), ‘the woman emancipator’ (27 March), ‘the emancipated woman’ (ibid.), ‘these revoltees’ (12 October), ‘the self torturing feminine sophist’ (30 May), ‘the wild woman’ (22 September), and in one column the woman contributor quoted the British expression ‘the revolt of the daughters’ (30 May). The definition of the ‘enemy’ had evolved from the threatening old maid or blue-stocking to the feminist activist and the anarchist woman writer. Most of these expressions are taken from Mrs Frank Leslie’s exceptionally long column, ‘Mrs Frank Leslie on the case of her versus him’ published on 30 May 1894, in which she attacked the latest publications by New Women writers. The ‘fair feminine anarchists’ were Karen Blixen or Sarah Grand whom she accused of claiming their sexual freedom and ‘teaching, writing articles for newspapers, attending socialist meetings, and taking part in political discussion.’ (30 May 1894) She criticized their lack of literary art and the prejudiced mind of such ‘femmes incomprises’ (ibid.). She concluded that they were affected by hysteria, describing them as examples of the ‘literary shrew’ and ‘preposterously nervous creature’ (ibid.). The adoption of a more progressive approach on the part of the ‘traditional’ female contributors may have come from a larger influence found in the press, in New York, where Eliza Conner and Mrs Leslie were writing from. However, in their daily paper women readers in British Columbia witnessed the softening of Mrs Leslie’s ideas and positions on the place of women in society. Over the years she echoed the acceptance by the Victorian society in America of the concept of the ‘modern girl’, and she was possibly heard by some ‘matrons’ in Victoria. The Daily Colonist’s women readers benefited from the results of a confrontation of viewpoints via the press which happened in the American metropolis, a large cultural, intellectual and social centre where fashion and ideas developed and were promoted or rejected overnight. What is striking, however, is the fact that at the same time as the New Woman debate was raging in the press in New York, it also took place in the remotest corner of the British Empire, in Victoria, on the last page of a conservative daily under the very nose of The Daily Colonist’s editor and before the eyes of its second-hand readers, young British–Canadian women. Several questions remain unanswered. For instance, I did not discover who Eliza Archard Conner was and to which other papers she contributed in the USA. I did not find any of her articles in other Canadian newspapers. From her weekly column her readers may have gathered that she was a freelance writer living in New York where she was well connected with other female journalists and progressive newspaper editors. She seems to have been an independent woman – an ‘unattached woman’, to

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paraphrase Mrs Frank Leslie writing on 26 May 1894. From her freedom of tone it is clear that she was very independent-minded and that she did not seem to fear any editor or readers’ comments. She spoke her mind and never concealed her feminist feelings from her readers. Far from it, she repeatedly affirmed her New Woman viewpoint and way of life, attacking men and ‘matrons’ alike with terse comments. Conner took a particular strong stand on several aspects of the female cause, transforming her rather long column into seditious pamphlets or scolding pieces as she targeted men’s world and matrons’ domestic sphere at one and the same time. Under the main title ‘Woman’s World in Paragraphs’, she regularly attacked the traditional virtues of the confined woman’s world. Using the first person singular and a very personal tone – like many ‘New Journalists’ of the time who wanted to add some wit and life to their column – she commented on the progress of women in ‘Man’s World’ under the subtitle ‘Reports on the Progress for Women’. Then in a few short paragraphs she gave facts and figures illustrating the ‘progress of the cause’. At times, her column reads like a war bulletin announcing the progress of the allied forces beyond the enemy’s lines. For instance, reporting on women in the professions every week, she quotes the number of women involved in such and such trade – ‘There are about 200 women lawyers in this country . . .’ (28 February 1892) – praising them by name, like dutiful soldiers, when they joined an advanced position for women in the traditional male-controlled institutions or in typical male occupations. But she also vigorously attacked women who had joined the professions but did not want to fight for equal pay. She held them personally responsible for letting women lag behind men and for contributing to stereotypical assumptions about women taking up men’s positions, as is illustrated in this ‘Report on the Progress for Women’ of 21 February 1892: Just as long as women will put up with it [lower salaries for the same position] they are not worth a cut more. Woman or man who will endure injustice and ill treatment deserves all he or she gets and more too. They cheapen and degrade the services of their whole sex and strengthen that vile old superstition that a woman’s work is less valuable. (The Daily Colonist, 21 February 1892) She also encouraged women to enter universities by citing the example of successful and persevering female individuals in law schools or medical schools across America and sometimes Canada, which she found more progressive than the United States – at least on that chapter. She criticized big universities – giving their names – for being too narrow-minded or conservative on the subject of women’s higher education. She invariably insisted that every single female student’s victory and every step taken into

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man’s world was a victory for all the women in the world. Her activism also became blatant when she encouraged women to enrol massively in universities by stating that their admission could not be turned down unless universities introduced a special regulation against women which would have caused bad publicity for them. Similarly, she insisted on the importance of self-education for women who, if not engaged in higher education, should seek information by themselves about what went on in the world, by reading newspapers, or joining women’s clubs which held regular classes for their female members on politics and social reform. They should therefore prepare themselves for the day when they would receive the right to vote. Here again she quoted some figures on the American states in which women had already been granted the vote. What she called ‘woman’s duty’ in her column had nothing to do with the motherly commitment of matrons to social reform or temperance campaigns – applied to the franchise, this mind-set would have prompted them to vote along with their husbands or as they were told. She referred instead to a personal vote granted to active citizens enjoying a position of equality in the society in which they lived. Therefore it became necessary for women to acquire as much knowledge on political matters as possible in order to become enlightened citizens, superior to all those ‘useless men’, as she often described the other sex. Conner underlined the importance of becoming independent before getting married – if some women still wished to do so – insisting on the fact that a woman could easily stand on her own two feet. Hence several of her columns were devoted to the possible financial investments that a single woman could make in order to prosper rapidly – with a female partner if necessary – but above all without a male partner. She referred to the entrepreneurial spirit of women with some means, addressing women readers of her own social class. Indeed, she never gave any advice to women whose financial means would have been limited. On rare occasions she praised working-class women’s capacities to create unions and to fight for their rights better than isolated educated women, who should follow their example and learn from group activism. She tended towards exaggeration when preaching equality between men and women at all costs, even in harsh employments. For instance, on 29 March 1894 she attacked male reformers for limiting the hours of work of female factory workers to eight, whereas they left men’s hours untouched: ‘If a man may work in a factory as long as he and his employer choose, then so may a woman.’ The New Woman she represents – as she spoke for herself and her independent sisters in The Daily Colonist – gradually took shape before her readers’ eyes and became a regular companion. This New Woman came from the middle class, had joined a club, was educated and read the paper like most of her female readers in British Columbia. Women who decided not to marry learned to become self-reliant thanks to Conner’s short, often repeated maxims that women could

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remember in times when the courage to stand up for themselves might have failed them: ‘If you are a woman and have all the rights you want, for heaven’s sake be ashamed to tell it’ (29 March 1894). Or, quoting the French philosopher Descartes, she wrote: ‘I think, therefore I am’ (29 March 1894), and continued: ‘A woman remarked the other day “I admire men as a work of art, but I do not fall in love with them”.’ On 12 January 1895 Connor wrote: ‘The New Woman loves all mankind, but best of all, she loves her own sex.’ The female columnist also encouraged her younger female readers to join female clubs not for charity but for civil work or to look for partners among their own ‘sisters’. On 16 January 1894 she even devoted a column to the great experiment of an all-female colony, Miss Annette Daisy’s colony of women begun in the 1880s, in which women ruled themselves without men. Indeed, she was very disparaging towards men, whom she despised with the exception of one or two who gave a few women the opportunity to enter the professions. She commented with irony and even bitterness on men’s ‘advantages’ and the way they misused them (especially their right to vote). Last but not least, she underlined the changes in the physical appearance and outlook of the ‘woman of nowadays’, praising the novelties of regular exercise and the use of bloomers or ‘trouserettes’ by women. On many occasions, as in an article published on 19 April 1894 with the subtitle ‘A sign of the time – long skirts must go and the sooner the better’, Conner revelled in the shocking irreverence which New Women displayed in New York or Boston as they paraded in their new attire before ‘matrons’: Meg Merrilies, the brilliant reporter of the New York World lately made a trip from New York to Boston and back wearing the so-called Boston national dress: trouserettes, a short jacket vest, with regulation tie and a long coat [. . .] Men, women and boys stared at her, but women, poor fools, were the severest critics and they talked over her openly and mercilessly. Women do make me mad sometimes. (The Daily Colonist, 19 April 1894) Conner repeatedly attacked the ‘weaker sex’ or the ‘fair sex’, mocking, criticizing, ridiculing traditional women and their so-called domestic virtues. Like many New Women, she held her more conservative ‘sisters’ directly responsible for keeping women in subjection and for enjoining them to enter the narrow world of matrimony and financial dependence. As she states on 21 February 1892, ‘When a man has made money and bought himself a high official place, his wife, a stupid woman with no more brain than a turkey, sets herself upon a pedestal and sneers at woman suffragists, and professional women.’ She showed neither compassion nor support for ‘weaker women’, whom she condemned as uneducated, submissive, or too womanly or

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matronly. For instance, on two occasions she professed that a woman who was repeatedly beaten up by her husband and yet remained in the marriage ‘deserved to be beaten for her stupidity’ until she turned ‘black and blue’ (21 February 1892). Her tone on these occasions was very harsh, single-minded and entirely subjective. In fact, over the five years preceding the women’s edition of The Daily Colonist, her tone gradually became harsher and more militant. She was clearly using newspapers as a medium to reach women and to advance the woman’s cause, in violent tones at times, hoping to stir a revolutionary spirit among women. On 13 March 1892 she defined her journalistic mission as follows: The increasing prominence given to the work of her sex in the weekly newspaper and family journal makes it possible for the woman who lives at the crossroads to keep informed of her sister’s doings all over the world, and as she reads she thrills in unison with this reaching out of her kind. (The Daily Colonist, 13 March 1892) Opposing her high-quality contribution as a real journalist to the witty and light-minded pieces written by female contributors like Mrs Frank Leslie, she dismissed their writings repeatedly, mocking them as ‘so-called “woman’s columns” of the average newspaper . . . such a “silly stuff” ’ (27 March 1892). However, the brunt was borne by female readers interested in such ‘silly stuff’ instead of a more worldwide knowledge: ‘there must be a demand for such gush and nonsense or it would not be furnished . . . The prevalent ignorance of woman on wider and nobler topics is responsible for the present woman’s column of the newspaper’ (ibid.).

The Daughters of the Empire and the debate on the New Woman Where did British Columbian women stand on the question of the New Woman in 1895? Did they follow Mrs Frank Leslie’s more traditional views or were they inspired by Eliza Conner’s arguments favouring liberty and full emancipation for women? Did the new generation of British– Canadian women born in North America share Conner’s aspirations and her recommendations on ‘sisterhood’? Indeed, in order to fight for their own rights, ‘women could only rely on themselves’, wrote Eliza Conner in The Daily Colonist on 22 March 1895. Defending the importance of collective action and its support, she offered the description of a ‘model club’ in the state of New York in which women organized themselves and taught each other: ‘Best of all, article 8 of the constitution [of the club] declares that no topic, social, political or religious shall be excluded from discussion at the meetings’ (22 March 1895). Hoping to provoke some reaction among her young readers, she added: ‘If only more women had this much

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courage and liberality, what a happy world this would be’ (ibid.). The special 28 May 1895 issue of The Daily Colonist, published by the women of Victoria – members of clubs in the youngest, and charitable organizations in the older generation – is a good example of the impact Conner’s columns may have had on her readers. One of the contributors, Agnes Dean Cameron, played a prominent part in the edition of the issue and went on to become a journalist and feminist. As an introduction to the special edition, a letter was addressed to the regular editor of The Daily Colonist – ‘Place aux Dames’ – in which the female editors explained their journalistic intentions. As the contents of this letter confirm, women in Victoria were faithful readers of the daily paper, in which they had been regularly exposed to the progress of the woman’s question in the woman’s page: A few words are necessary to explain this edition of the Colonist and the aims of the women who are responsible for it. They do not put it forth as their ideal of what a paper should be. On the contrary, for daily food, they would much prefer the ordinary edition. (The Daily Colonist, 28 May 1895, emphasis in original) It was upon the occasion of the first national meeting of the Canadian Council of Women in Toronto on 27 May 1895 that The Daily Colonist agreed to devote some pages (eighteen columns) to the women of British Columbia. Local contributors included Mrs Gordon Grant from the Women Christian Temperance Union and Agnes Dean Cameron, and the special issue included a list of all the women’s associations and clubs in Victoria and a brief description of their activities. On the question of the possible influence that the five years of Eliza Conner’s journalism might have had on the women of Victoria, some answers might be found in one article bearing the interesting title, ‘A Plea for the New Woman’ (The Daily Colonist, 28 May 1895). Here a woman contributor acknowledged the fact that women, even housewives, now chose to devote more time to less tedious tasks inside or outside the home. Among their new interests, she underlined the importance of reading the daily press. This statement reinforces my assumption that the woman’s column must have been regularly read by British Columbia middle-class readers who might have followed the advice of Eliza Conner on the need to educate oneself in order to form one’s opinion: The most exemplary housewife nowadays does not sit down to count threads and neatly backstitch the necessary dozens of shirt fronts. Probably she takes up instead the daily newspaper and becomes interested in the government of her country, even perhaps to the extent of forming an opinion about it. (The Daily Colonist, 28 May 1895)

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In the eighteen columns devoted to the woman’s cause, there are two uses of the term ‘New Woman’, and it is in the definition given to this term that one understands how some British Columbian women envisaged the New Woman’s place in society. Among the one-day contributors to The Colonist, radical and progressive viewpoints are given a voice, whereas ‘silly stuff ’ contributors are left out. To illustrate the latter position, the edition includes a column written by Mrs Grant, the leader of the Temperance Union (WCTU) in Victoria. She explains that a large number of middleclass women now accept the fact that they have a public role to play as mothers and wives and that suffrage is needed in order to do so. On the other hand, the younger generation, represented by Agnes Dean Cameron and the anonymous author of ‘A Plea for the New Woman’, an unsigned piece, argued that women’s rights and demands were justly founded on the correlation between the coming of a ‘Woman’s Age’ and the ‘fin-de-siècle’. The grand-daughters of Victoria wanted to be recognized as New Women, but without the ‘revoltee’ side attached to the word. This testifies to the progressive perceptions of woman’s role in British Columbia on the part of the old Daughters of the Empire when compared with the situation in 1880. Even though the ‘matrons’ still believed, as they had done fifteen years earlier, that their fate was bound up with married life, they now recognized women’s right to be active outside their homes in ladies’ associations and reforming societies. Indeed, the local branch of the Council of Women in Victoria boasted 700 members in 1895, less than a year after its foundation in 1894 by Lady Aberdeen. This reflects the large support the franchise for women now enjoyed, compared to 1884, when only the members of the WCTU defended the issue before the Provincial Parliament in British Columbia. However, this was still a far cry from the militant activist demands of New Women such as Eliza Archard Conner. For instance, when one of the lady journalists discussed the franchise in municipal elections, in a moderately progressive column entitled ‘Woman’s Municipal Vote’ (28 May 1895), she argued that the world had changed for the better for women, who were no longer confined to their domestic duties and the separate sphere of the home. But at the same time she reminded her readers that the ‘highest fulfilment of her womanly nature is wifehood and motherhood’, concluding her article by denigrating the radical campaigns raging in the press in favour of women’s rights: ‘And so too, in this vexed “Woman’s question” that is being thus agitated today, we need to realize that no true woman seeks to become man’s rival or to usurp his rights or peculiar sphere’ (ibid.). The younger contributors attempted to demonstrate that women in British Columbia were also New Women. In her vibrant ‘Plea for the New Woman’, a budding female journalist tried to develop a new perception of women in society by looking at the origin of what seemed to be, in British Columbia, a now common exception, acknowledged and accepted by many readers:

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So entirely has the status of women been changed to the estimation of the public that the expression ‘New Woman’ has been coined to describe the latest development . . . it may be well to ascertain whether the term is reasonably applied. (The Daily Colonist, 28 May 1895) According to the article, the New Woman was in fact as old as Eve, like her seeking ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ (ibid.). And it is in this range of values that the column placed the New Woman of today, described as reading the papers, aspiring to a professional career, demanding equal educational and civil rights, and refusing to be politically classified along with lunatics, criminals and minors. By calling themselves New Women, the young generation of British colonists presented themselves as ‘modern women’, as hybrids between the ‘modern girl’ and the ‘New Woman’, adopting the progressive demands, yet rejecting what they regarded as revolutionary. The article is not aggressive or bitter, it is a mere statement of facts. In a calm tone the author affirms that women in British Columbia were now ‘new women’, but not quite New Women yet, and that they were accepted as such by society. One gathers that the term as well as the idea of the New Woman must have been discussed in clubs before and that the ‘plea’ is more a statement than a demand for recognition or acknowledgement. Here the term has lost the shocking connotation or aggressiveness felt by some matrons in New York. The tone of the article has nothing in common with that of the ‘revoltees’ embodied by Conner, to whom the author appears to refer when she apologizes for some women who had used and abused the press to boast about their progress: ‘Before everything, they [the New Women] have devoted themselves to their own improvement and perhaps an apology is necessary for the unblushing effrontery with which they have from time to time chronicled and emphasized their various triumphs’ (ibid.). Besides, according to this young female journalist, the British Columbian ‘new woman’ sought the goodwill and sympathy of men to advance her cause instead of antagonizing them. She conceded that ‘[t]he chivalrous instincts of men, to which women owe much in the past, are already ranging many on the side of the New Woman’ (ibid.). Here she seems to accept the heritage of her pioneering ‘parents’ who recognized the importance of team effort in their colonial society. The only true follower of Eliza Conner is to be found in Agnes Dean Cameron, an aspiring journalist born in Victoria in 1871, who adopted a very independent lifestyle and worked in general journalism in the twentieth century. Like Conner, in whom she seems to have found her inspiration, Cameron’s column in ‘Place aux Dames’ acknowledged women’s progress in the world by quoting facts and figures on the advancement of women in the professions. She also denounced the inferiority of women in society in spite of their intellectual performances, and she was the only

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contributor out of eighteen to take stock of the progress of woman as an individual claiming her civic rights, not as a group working to reform society collectively, but as an enlightened citizen in her own right. From 1890 to 1895, progress was slowly being made on the woman question in British Columbia. The press was an excellent catalyst for the women’s cause and a great medium of campaign for New Woman issues. Eliza Conner’s propagandist use of the term ‘New Woman’ seems to have been successful with her readers as the phrase, hardly coined by the American press in 1894, was soon adopted by the female editors of the special edition and other traditional women columnists writing in The Daily Colonist. However, the popular expression was soon turned into a hybrid concept by some provincial readers who adopted it to qualify their own demands or their own ‘predicament’. In 1895, in British Columbia, ‘New Woman’ became synonymous with ‘Modern Woman’, an active woman demanding the recognition of her rights as an individual. The expression referred to a more advanced concept than the ‘modern girl’, wellaccepted by matrons like Mrs Frank Leslie. In British Columbia, then, the New Woman had slowly emerged in the press, in a far corner of local newspapers used as a forum for a weekly debate between American women. It was through the press that the concept was taken up by a mass readership, who transformed its meaning from hateful to popular, from radical to non-militant. This reflected the way women thought about themselves in a semi-public space – the woman’s page of their daily – in which they had, for the first time, access to freedom of speech. The fact that the term New Woman was so readily adopted by the younger generation of British Columbian women, only a few months after having been coined in American newspapers, confirmed the importance of newspaper reading for the coming of ‘A Woman’s Age’ in the twentieth century. The journalist who wrote the ‘Plea for the New Woman’ stated in the special women’s issue: ‘Newspapers can be read in the seclusion of the home, and opinions do not necessarily result in actions’ (28 May 1895). If Eliza Conner and her radical views had not yet convinced every woman in British Columbia in 1895 that they should become pro-active in transforming their fate, she had obviously disturbed and ruffled some of the Colonist’s women readers with her impertinence, her ‘effrontery’. But in the meantime she challenged the old traditional ways of Victorian society in which her readers lived. She led women to think on their own and to seek in newspapers, beyond the woman’s page, the means and information to educate themselves for better days to come. Besides, her young readers in British Columbia identified with the New Women of North America, which enabled them to sever their connection with the Old World of their mothers and the obsolete ‘sex’ debate raging in Britain.

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Note 1 Unless otherwise specified, all references in the text relate to The Daily Colonist.

Bibliography Contemporary newspapers The Victoria Daily (British) Colonist The Globe and Mail The London Times

Criticism Banner, L.W. (1983) American Beauty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Banta, M. (1987) Imaging the American Woman: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History, New York: Columbia University Press. Burt, E.V. (2000) Women’s Press Organizations (1881–1999), Westport: Greenwood Press. Cott, N.F. (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Cramer, J. (1998) Woman as Citizen: Race, Class and the Discourse of Women’s Citizenship (1894–1909), Columbia: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Ewen, S. (1976) Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill. Marriner, G.L. (1987) ‘A Victorian in the Modern World: The “Liberated” Male’s Adjustment to the New Woman and the New Morality’, Southern Atlantic Quaterly, 2: 190–203. Nan, R. (1992) The Girls in the Balcony: Women and Men in the New York Times, New York: Random House. Okker, P. (1995) Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hole and the Tradition of NineteenthCentury American Women Editors, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Peiss, K. (1986) Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rosenberg, R. (1982) Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985) Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, New York: Oxford University Press. Varty, A. (2000) Eve’s Century, a Sourcebook of Writings on Women and Journalism (1895–1950), London: Routledge.

5

Locating the flapper in rural Irish society The Irish provincial press and the modern woman in the 1920s Louise Ryan The new woman, the working girl and the female shopper are all types of female presence associated with the city of modernity. They are significant as images of urban women within the city. (Parsons 2000: 43)

In the opening quotation above, Deborah Parsons underlines the association between certain female images, modernity and the city. But to limit the New Woman or flapper to the confines of the city walls is to underestimate the extent to which she transcended the urban to inhabit the environments of small towns, villages and rural landscapes. If the provincial press is to be believed, the flapper was as much a part of the discourse register in rural Ireland as she was in the urban centres. On 6 March 1926, the west of Ireland based weekly newspaper, the Connacht Tribune, carried an eye-catching headline, ‘Flappers and Shawls’ (p. 6). This referred to a court case against a Galway woman for non-payment of bills. During the proceedings the prosecuting barrister asked if the accused had recently bought her daughter a coat. She said no, to which he replied, ‘What does she put over her blouse, is it a shawl? Very few of the flappers now would be content with a shawl (laughter).’ The reference to a flapper in a Galway courtroom raises a number of questions not only about the prevalence of this modern symbol of womanhood but also about her place in Irish society – rural as well as urban – and her relationship to traditional womanhood. The juxtaposition of the modern fashion icon with the traditional garment of rural Ireland, the shawl, blurs the boundaries between both modernity versus tradition and urban versus rural. This chapter suggests that the flapper was more diverse and complex than such a simple dichotomy would allow (Ryan 1998a, 2002). Newspaper representations of the flapper reveal the many layers of contradictions and complexities embedded in this archetype of fashion, youth and consumerism. In the newly established Irish Free State of the 1920s, the flapper or ‘modern girl’ was a highly contested and deeply controversial symbol of womanhood (Ryan 1998a, 1998b, 2002). Within Irish cultural

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nationalism and Catholic discourses this figure embodied disobedience, vice and immorality. She was un-Irish, foreign and pagan. Her embodiment of foreign fashions and lifestyles threatened to destabilize Irish identity and thus undermine the new nation. In this chapter I consider not only the prevalence of the flapper archetype in rural Ireland but also the construction of this symbol of womanhood in the context of Irish cultural and national identity. Press representations are complex and contradictory; advertisements, women’s columns and feature articles indicate the range of perspectives and diverse opinions frequently celebrating women’s independence and modernity. Such divergent viewpoints may begin to challenge the assumed hegemony of a traditional gender ideology in Ireland at that time. Recent research suggests that Irish women were far from being passive dupes (Connolly 2002). The notion of a hegemonic gender ideology masks the tensions and contradictions that existed in Irish society (Clear 2000; Ryan 2002).

Embodying the nation Billie Melman has argued that the image of the flapper ‘haunted the popular imagination’ (1988: 1). This image embodied many diverse and, indeed, contradictory notions of femininity, womanhood and sexuality – beautiful/unwomanly, silly/sophisticated, desexed/highly sexualized, infantile/dangerous: ‘The equivocal figure became the centre of a polyphonic debate of many voices’ (ibid.). While debates about defiant young women had occurred in previous generations, what marked the distinctiveness of the flapper debates in the 1920s was the fact that they were so public, vocal and central, fuelled in no small part by the press. According to Melman, the flapper occupied the particular social, political and economic setting of the 1920s. The structural and demographic changes following the First World War heightened concerns about the behaviour and pastimes of independent young women. The spread of radio, cinema, mass-circulation newspapers and the growth in consumerism, especially amongst women, helped to circulate the stereotypical image of the fashionable, fun-loving flapper. Melman’s research on flappers focuses on the particular context of inter-war Britain. However, as Nava and O’Shea (1996) argue, the experiences of modernism varied in different countries. Modernity was not a simple universal process; it took on varying national characteristics and flavours. The flapper, as a symbol of modernism, embodied not only those different national characteristics but also helped to frame the specific debates and concerns of particular national contexts. In other words, the image of the flapper becomes a hybrid of diverse elements, a sort of cultural fusion, blending foreign and local, imported and home-made influences. Anti-colonial, nationalist movements represent one example of how the flapper came to be inscribed within particular definitions of culture,

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identity and traditional values. Thus the Irish Free State of the 1920s provides a very specific case in point. Nationalism is a gendered project within which women have been ascribed particular roles and responsibilities (McClintock 1993). While it is important not to ignore the active and often violent roles which women have played, and continue to play, in nationalist movements (Yuval-Davis 1997; Ryan 1999, 2000), women’s more usual roles have tended to emphasize passivity and dependency. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1993) have theorized, women are represented as symbols of the nation, as mothers of the nation, as transmitters of cultural traditions and as boundary markers between nations. I would add that women also might be represented as scapegoats of the nation: symbols of national weakness and corruptibility. Within nationalist iconography women stand for the good but also the potential evil within the nation. Women’s weakness and susceptibility to foreign influences make them conveniently flawed boundary guards in need of constant monitoring and policing by men. It is precisely in this nationalist context that the Irish flapper needs to be located and understood. While there are obvious similarities with concerns about the frivolous, jazzing flapper in Britain, it would be simplistic to assume that debates about the flapper were identical in all social contexts. The particular religious, social, cultural and political context of the Irish Free State informed the specific constructions and interpretations of the flapper. Following a protracted campaign for Irish independence from Britain, culminating in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21, the southern Irish Free State came into being on 6 December 1922.1 This newly established, newly partitioned, semi-independent nation had a lot of work to do to justify its existence and legitimate its demand for complete sovereignty. ‘As a new nation, the Free State sought to assert its legitimacy by defining a unique culture and identity which marked Irish people apart and distinct from British people’ (Gray and Ryan 1997: 520). Nevertheless, Irish culture in the 1920s was greatly influenced by British forms of entertainment and media, as well as by the growing enthusiasm for Hollywood films (Brown 1987). As Maryann Valiulis has argued, the reality of independence failed to live up to the expectations of Irish nationalists (1995a: 126). The government and the powerful Catholic hierarchy attempted to define their authority by restoring traditional order. This carefully constructed notion of ‘traditional’ Gaelic, Catholic Ireland was one in which women were to play a very specific role. Part of this nationalist project was an attempt to distance Ireland from the unflattering and degrading stereotypes that had formed such a core aspect of the colonial experience. Therefore there was strong emphasis on the cultural purity, virtue, integrity and honour of the nation. ‘Woman’ was to embody these virtues and so become ‘the badge of respectability’ of the new nation-state. Thus idealized Irish womanhood was ascribed the thank-

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less task of representing the purity and uniqueness of Irish national culture and identity (Innes 1993; Meaney 1993). However, women did not simply represent national goodness, innocence and virtue. As I have argued elsewhere (Gray and Ryan 1997), female images were also used to symbolize national weakness and susceptibility to foreign corruption. Irish male leaders asserted their own masculine authority through their attempts to police and contain women’s sinful and wayward bodies. Women embodied the decadence that threatened not only to undermine masculine authority but also to destabilize the fragile culture of the Irish nation-state.

Locating the flapper In an effort to understand the true extent of the flapper image in the Irish Free State, I have chosen to concentrate on the provincial press, drawing on a range of newspapers from the three southern provinces of Munster, Leinster and Connacht. There were scores of weekly provincial newspapers representing virtually every townland in the state. Therefore it is necessary to limit my research to some of the more widely read papers. I have selected the largest provincial paper, the Cork Examiner; unlike the other provincial papers, this was a daily newspaper. The Limerick Leader, published thrice weekly, was a vocal supporter of Irish cultural nationalism. In addition, I have selected four weekly papers: the Kerryman, based in Tralee but circulated throughout Kerry, Clare and North Cork, the Connacht Tribune and its sister paper the Connacht Sentinel, based in Galway but with a wide circulation throughout Mayo and the West of Ireland, and finally the Wicklow People, which had a good circulation on the east coast of the country. These papers were chosen partly at random but also because they circulated in large sections of the countryside. Though not claiming to be completely exhaustive, together these papers do cover most of the country outside of the metropolitan centre of Dublin and, of course, the North of Ireland. In a further attempt to keep the study manageable, while at the same time spanning a good range of sources, I focus on the period from the mid- to late 1920s. On 20 October 1928, the Wicklow People published a sermon given by Father Degen in which he declared that ‘[w]orship of the body takes the place of religion in women who are inordinately vain. The mortal soul is treated as non-existent, and nothing is recognised as sinful except dowdiness.’ (p. 4) The elevation of the body above the soul is an exact reverse of Catholic doctrine and so this image of women who worship their bodies but neglect their souls not only constructs them as vain but as antiCatholic and doomed to eternal damnation. As Mica Nava has argued, there was a growing suspicion that women derived a libidinous pleasure from ‘the phyical adornment and nurturing of the self ’ (1995: 11). For Father Degen, the only hope for salvation was a rejection of modern

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lifestyles and vanities. He pleaded with Catholic mothers: ‘What is your ideal of womanly perfection? Would you really prefer your daughters to imitate the daring sartorial suggestiveness of the modern flapper rather than the modesty, sweetness and gentleness of our Blessed Lady?’ (Wicklow People, 20 October 1928: 4). It was common for the flapper to be set up in direct opposition to the modesty of Mary the mother of God (Valiulis 1995b). Flappers were constructed as wild and uncontrolled daughters but also as poor prospects for marriage and motherhood. On 11 August 1928, the Wicklow People published an article on the ‘modern young woman’ which focused on her many faults and failings. While men would wish to marry ‘a modest, intelligent girl’, ‘a sensible, virtuous girl’ with ‘feminine charm’, who would wish to marry ‘a control defying, “good time”, “can anybody come?” flapper’ (11 August 1928: 4)? Here the flapper is seen as frivolous, wilful, superficial and lacking in the feminine virtues of modesty and good sense. But where did all these foreign fashions come from and who was responsible for them? In all the newspapers, modern fashions are presented as deeply alien, coming into Ireland from abroad. All the negative aspects of modern living, the jazz age, were associated with foreign influences, but the main sources of influence varied. Usually disreputable cinema influences came from Hollywood, salacious magazines and papers came from Britain, jazz was described as African, immodest fashions came from Paris. In ‘Catholic Notes’, a regular weekly feature, the Wicklow People frequently explored the problems and sources of modern fashions. For example, on 15 May 1926 ‘Catholic Notes’ pointed out that ‘vulgar fashions’ were dictated by the ‘underworld of Paris’ (p. 4). Modern 1920s fashions were constructed as being not only foreign but also corrupting to Irish Catholic society. Modern fashions were frequently described as tyrannical and oppressive, standing in opposition to freedom and independence (Wicklow People, 21 January 1928: 4). Both the independence of women and of the nation were undermined by the dictates of modern fashions. Women’s freedom, like Ireland’s freedom, was only possible through a return to religious values and traditional lifestyles. This argument presents a complete reversal of the usual way in which 1920s fashions were viewed, i.e. as liberating for women, representing women’s newly found political, educational and economic opportunities (Wilson 1985). If there was one aspect of modern lifestyles that worried traditionalists more than women’s clothes, it was the related issue of modern dancing. On St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1928, the Kerryman reported a recent lecture given at the Dublin Literary Society which pointed out that the ‘jazz life’ and the ‘craze for pleasure’ were having an adverse effect on the health and well-being of Irish youth (p. 7). ‘The jazz spirit – in everything as well as in dancing – is responsible for whatever decadence there is in the country’ (17 March 1928: 7). The condemnation of jazz and modern dancing was widely reported in the Irish provincial press in the mid-to-late

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1920s. Like modern fashions, jazz was seen as inherently alien and morally corrupting. On 9 January 1928, the editorial of the Limerick Leader, a paper very sympathetic to cultural nationalism, referred to ‘so-called modern dances’ as ‘imported monstrosities’, ‘apish and heathenish inventions’ (p. 3). The origins of such dances are made even clearer in a report of the Limerick branch of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA): ‘African dances that have come to this country of late.’ The GAA was adamant that such dances should not be held at any of its venues or social events. ‘Leave those savage dances to the uncivilized peoples and for God’s sake get away from the jazz bands’ (Limerick Leader, 4 February 1928: 3). The modern dance hall was a dangerous arena because it provided an opportunity for young people to mix unsupervised, to indulge in sensual dancing and to consume large quantities of alcohol. The growth of entertainments in the 1920s not only created an increasing number of public spaces for women but also led to fears about women’s uncontrolled and unchaperoned freedom (Nava 1995; Valiulis 1995b).

Conflicting images It may seem that my research leads to the same conclusions as Maryann Valiulis’s in Chapter 6. On first reading, the Irish provincial newspapers appear united in their condemnation of flappers and modern fashions, seeking instead to elevate traditional womanhood to her rightful place as pure embodiment of a pure nation. However, I want to suggest that this reading ignores some of the wider complexities around the image of the fashionable modern girl. Two of the provincial papers in this study had regular women’s columns – the Kerryman’s ‘Women’s Chat’ and the Cork Examiner’s ‘Woman’s World’. These concentrated mostly on fashion advice, reviewing the latest from Paris, London and Hollywood. There were also regular references to ‘the modern girl’, usually described in positive tones. However, what is particularly significant about both these women’s columns is that they were syndicated from Britain. All the reference points and examples were British: Ireland and Irish matters were never mentioned. The fashion, diet and hobbies features were completely untouched by Catholic or nationalist concerns for Irish traditional womanhood. Readers could gain information about the latest fashions, the newest hairstyles and the most up-to-date dance craze free from any religious or traditionalist biases. Hence these features are interesting because they provide a very different set of representations of the flapper than those usually propagated in the rest of the press. In this way, the women’s columns begin to suggest some of the complexities and contradictions that underpinned images of the modern woman in the Irish provincial newspapers. On 13 August 1927, the Kerryman carried a fashion report under the sensational heading ‘Trousers for women’ (p. 4). Designers were refusing

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to shorten women’s skirts any further despite the continuing pressure from women themselves. So in an attempt to solve the ‘skirt length controversy’, designers were proposing a compromise in the form of trousers which would look like ‘plus fours’ drawn into the leg well below the knee. Later that month, on 27 August 1927 ‘Women’s Chat’ (p. 11) again revisited the topic of women’s reluctance to return to more constricting dress. Designers were reported to be making ‘considerable efforts to bring back the waist-line to its normal place’. However, women would not be induced to adopt those ‘instruments of torture’ – ‘boned corsets’ (27 August 1927: 11). According to Mica Nava (1995) there were many conflicting views about the consumer in the 1920s. As consumerism became increasingly feminized, opinions were divided about the powers of the consumer versus the powers of commercial and fashion industries. It is clearly apparent in the two articles cited above that the female consumer is being constructed as powerful and determined to get her own way. In both of these reports the designers are not presented as evil or corrupters of women. Instead, women are presented as assertive customers demanding the right to shorter and looser clothing than the designers would prefer. Such images stand in stark contrast to those propounded by the Catholic hierarchy and the traditionalists. These alternative constructions are particularly apparent in an article published in the Kerryman on 3 September 1927. Written by a ‘London Physician’, the article discussed clothing and good health: ‘Most of you wear too many clothes; the girls have more sense than the men . . . Let the blessed air of Heaven get to the skin and keep it sweet and pure . . . The ill-ventilated skin is never healthy’ (p. 4). This is a rather unusual justification for the ‘half-naked’ fashions which so offended the Catholic bishops. The women’s columns were sensitive to the many criticisms made against the ‘modern girl’ and frequently attempted to cast these in a new light. In May 1925, the Cork Examiner’s ‘Woman’s World’ carried an interesting feature entitled ‘My Censored Sex’ (p. 6). Written by ‘A Woman’, this article explored the criticisms that had been made against women in every generation. In the 1890s the ‘new woman’ with her long skirts, mountainous coiffure and gargantuan hats was considered shocking. However, ‘shocked voices’ were now raised in condemnation of the ‘newest woman’. ‘Now she is shingled and shallow, and laughing up her sleeve (when she wears one) at all the earnest people who predict her downfall’ (ibid.). Fashion, according to the article, follows a cycle and in years to come female curves will once again become fashionable and then some ‘middle-aged man’ will ‘exercise his pen to deplore the absence of those slim boyish girls of other days’ (Cork Examiner, 21 May 1925: 6). While the other provincial newspapers in this study did not have women’s columns, that is not to imply that these papers represented a one-dimensional, monolithic, wholly negative view of the ‘modern girl’. It

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is useful to look beyond the women’s columns to analyse the more ambiguous references to flappers and ‘modern girls’ elsewhere in the newspapers. All the newspapers carried advertisements for fashion, films, dances and cigarettes that can be read as selling the modern lifestyle. It was not uncommon for modern girls to be condemned on one page and then celebrated in advertisements on another page in the same newspaper. Regardless of the concerns expressed by the Catholic hierarchy, the female body was used to sell a range of diverse products. Advertisements were aimed at the large cross-section of the local community who read provincial papers, and this is reflected not only in the range of products but also in the range of prices. In accordance with the increasing feminization of consumerism (Nava 1995), women were frequently targeted as consumers, not just for domestic essentials like washing powder but also for luxury goods. Undoubtedly the products most explicitly aimed at women were clothes. All the provincial newspapers in my study carried regular fashion advertisements. The accompanying drawings (and occasionally more expensive photographs) portrayed the typical flapper fashions so despised by the religious leaders. Dresses were usually knee-length, and in summer frequently sleeveless, evening wear in particular had necklines cut below the collarbone. The mannequins had bobbed hair, wore high-heeled shoes and displayed all the accessories of modern girls. For example, the Connacht Tribune regularly carried beautifully illustrated advertisements for the latest fashions at Moon’s department store in Galway (see 25 September 1926: 8, and 30 June 1928: 8). A photograph in the Connacht Tribune (25 September 1926: 6) suggests the pervasiveness of flapper fashion. The photograph shows four young women, students at St Louis Convent in County Galway, who had won awards in a music competition. All four were wearing knee-length dresses and had fashionably bobbed hair styles. The fact that these teenage girls were still at school and studying music suggests that they came from middle-class backgrounds.2 It is also likely that these girls and their mothers would have been the target consumers for shops like Moon’s department store. The Limerick Leader, despite supporting cultural nationalism, carried regular front-page advertisements for the fashionable Limerick store La Moderne. On 19 March 1928, just two days after a Lenten pastoral castigating the ‘pagan influences’ that corrupted Irish girls, the front page of the Leader announced that La Moderne now had ‘copies of the latest Paris models in most fashionable silks for Spring 1928’. To my mind, one of the most interesting and incongruous aspects of the Leader’s advertisements relate not so much to fashion but to that other great ‘pagan influence’, the cinema. Judging from newspaper advertisements it seems that three different films played in Limerick every week. Films were usually shown twice nightly at 7.00 pm and at 9.00 pm. The film posters, reproduced in the newspaper, were very dramatic and often

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rather suggestive. For example, on 7 November 1928 the film Fire was advertised, featuring a semi-naked, semi-conscious May McAvoy being rescued by a fireman (p. 1). The titles of the films often evoked contemporary images of fun and fashionable living, e.g. two films showing on 28 July 1928, Jazz Mad and Dance Magic. These films were advertised just one week after a fiery sermon by Fr Mangan appeared in the Leader in which he addressed the ‘agents of Satan’: ‘the pictures in the cinema that night after night are working havoc on the souls of Catholic boys and girls. . . . Pictures that are full of impure suggestions – that portray the lowest passions of men and women, that openly advocate immodesty and every manner of uncleaness’ (sic) (Limerick Leader, 23 July 1928: 4) The ‘impure’ suggestions and low passions are made fairly explicit in the advertisements for one of the many desert romances of the 1920s. On 29 October 1928 the Leader advertised Bebe Daniels starring in the film She’s a Sheik: ‘She loved a man who loved another, but she was used to having her way. She kidnaps him – takes him into the desert – and tames him.’ (p. 1) The provincial papers obviously did not enjoy the same circulation and sales as the national dailies. They were dependent on advertising and the products advertised tended to be local shops, stores, restaurants, cinemas and dancehalls. This meant that the newspapers were helping to publicize and sell local forms of amusements, while, at the same time, publishing the condemnatory outpourings of the Catholic church and traditionalists like the Gaelic League and Gaelic Athletic Association. These tensions within the provincial press are very illuminating and suggest the many contradictions that underpinned Irish society. The conflicting images of the flapper and modern girl that emerge from these newspapers suggest the ways in which this archetypal female image came to represent both the positive and negative aspects of life in the 1920s. The fact that this controversial female image was as common in the provincial papers as in the national dailies (see Ryan 2002) is interesting and indicates the ways in which concerns for tradition, authority and national stability were played out in rural Ireland just as much as in the capital city. In conclusion, this chapter has argued that while the flapper of the 1920s may appear to be a very general symbol, it is important to locate her within the cultural specificities of particular social contexts. Drawing on notions of gendered nationalist discourses, I attempted to locate and analyse the flapper within the specific setting of the rural Irish Free State. Although similar in many ways to the British flapper, I have argued that the Irish flapper served very particular functions within nationalist and Catholic ideology in terms of defining Irishness, Irish womanhood and relations with foreign nations. While the flapper was an ambiguous symbol in Britain (Melman 1988), in the Irish Free State she embodied the additional ambiguities of Ireland’s complex and contested relationship with Britishness. Hence the flapper helps to illustrate the tensions between former colonizer and colony, representing both the reality of

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British cultural influences in entertainment and lifestyles and the perceived threats which such influences posed to the uniqueness of Irish cultural identity. Judging by the Irish provincial press, the flapper archetype was very powerful and pervasive even in remote rural areas. It is simplistic to locate the flapper within a narrowly defined urban/rural dichotomy that constructs ‘urban’ as essentially degenerate and ‘rural’ as essentially pure. The flapper’s subversion of this dichotomy suggests the complexities and contradictions faced by rural Ireland in the early decades of independence. The flapper’s existence in local, rural communities demonstrated that the ‘denationalizing’ and ‘de-Christianizing’ threat of modern excesses in fashion, dancing and cinema – the jazz lifestyle – was to be found everywhere. In such counties as Kerry, Cork, Galway and Wicklow, it is apparent that the flapper image was used by priests, bishops and other commentators to symbolize the modern onslaught on traditional values. But a careful reading of the provincial newspapers suggests a complex appraisal of modern influences in rural Irish society. In particular sections of the papers, such as cinema posters, fashion features, advertisements and women’s columns, the modern girl and the modern life she symbolized were represented as desirable. Her youth, her flare for amusement, her loosely fitted clothing, her health and vitality all symbolized freedom and independence. In addition, as a young woman without dependants, frequently employed in paid work, she represented the ultimate consumer of luxury goods – clothes, cosmetics, accessories. She was a hybrid who fused conflicting elements by simultaneously rebelling against tradition but conforming to the trends of fashion and consumerism. Within the specific context of the Irish Free State, the flapper embodied the tensions between, on the one hand, cultural nationalists and the Catholic church working to minimize foreign tastes and fashions and, on the other hand, commercial interests and popular consumer demand which continued to promote and enjoy them. In both of these conflicting sets of images the modern girl is defined by a break with traditional femininity. Her clothes and lifestyle are very different from her mother’s generation. But her defiance of traditional mores can be interpreted either as liberating and freeing or corrupting and enslaving. The very qualities which made her so appealing to advertisers and film-makers made her an anathema to cultural nationalists and the Catholic church. Constructed in opposition to the goodness and purity of the traditional woman, the mother of future generations, the transmitter of Irish cultural and religious values, the modern girl symbolized threats to national culture, national identity and ultimately to national stability. In her Parisian short skirts and Eton bobbed hair, she visibly embodied all the dangers of foreign influences on the delicate and fragile essence of Irish womanhood and, hence, on the newly established Irish Free State.

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Notes 1 While twenty-six counties of Ireland formed the Irish Free State (later to become the Republic of Ireland), the six counties in the north-east of the country remained within the United Kingdom. 2 At this time in Ireland, post-primary education was not free and thus only middle-class parents could afford to send their teenage children to secondary schools.

Bibliography Newspapers Connacht Sentinel Connacht Tribune Cork Examiner Kerryman Limerick Leader Wicklow People Criticism Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1993) Racialised Boundaries, London: Routledge. Brown, T. (1987) Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, London: Fontana. Clear, C. (2000) The Women of the House, Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Connolly, L. (2002) The Irish Women’s Movement, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gray, B. and Ryan, L. (1997) ‘(Dis)locating “Woman” and Women in Representations of Irish Nationality’, in A. Byrne and M. Leonard (eds) Women and Irish Society, Belfast: Beyond the Pale, pp. 517–34. Innes, C.L. (1993) Woman and Nation, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. McClintock, A. (1993) ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’, Feminist Review, 44: 61–80. Meaney, G. (1993) ‘Sex and Nation’, in A. Smyth (ed.) Irish Women’s Studies Reader, Dublin: Attic, pp. 230–44. Melman, B. (1988) Women and the Popular Imagination in the 1920s, London: Macmillan Press. Nash, C. (1993) ‘Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland’, Feminist Review, 44: 39–57. Nava, M. (1995) ‘Modernity Tamed? Women Shoppers and the Rationalisation of Consumption in the Interwar Period’, Australian Journal of Communication, 22.2: 1–18. —— and O’Shea A. (eds) (1996) Modern Times: Reflections of a Century of English Modernity, London: Routledge. Parsons, D. (2000) Street Walking the Metropolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryan, L. (1998a) ‘Negotiating Modernity and Tradition: Newspaper Debates on the Modern Girl in the Irish Free State’, Journal of Gender Studies, 7.2: 181–98. —— (1998b) ‘Constructing Irishwoman: Modern Girls and Comely Maidens’, Irish Studies Review, 6.3: 263–72.

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—— (1999) ‘Furies and Die-Hards: Women and Irish Republicanism in the Early Twentieth Century’, Gender and History, 11.2: 256–75. —— (2000) ‘Drunken Tans: Representations of Sex and Violence in the AngloIrish War 1919–1921’, Feminist Review, 66: 73–94. —— (2002) Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 1922–37: Embodying the Nation, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Valiulis, M.G. (1995a) ‘Power, Gender and Identity in the Irish Free State’, in J. Hoff and M. Coulter (eds) Irish Women’s Voices, New York: Indiana University Press, pp. 117–36. —— (1995b) ‘Neither Feminist nor Flapper: the Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Women’, in M. O’Dowd and S. Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, pp. 168–78. Wilson, E. (1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage.

6

Subverting the flapper The unlikely alliance of Irish popular and ecclesiastical press in the 1920s Maryann Gialanella Valiulis

In 1922, following a war of independence and a civil war, the Irish Free State was in the first flush of independence. Political and ecclesiastical leaders now had the opportunity to mould a new state to reflect the ideals of what they deemed to be Catholic and Gaelic Ireland, to cast off the ‘alien standards of public morality’ imposed on them under British rule (see Devane 1924). In reality, this translated to creating a state which conferred on them a post-colonial sense of dignity and which reflected middle-class values of stability and respectability. But it was all done under the guise of creating Catholic, Gaelic Ireland. Issues of identity were a central facet of the debate about the nature of the new post-colonial state and within that debate, the role of women was of particular importance. As Louise Ryan points out in Chapter 5, women were seen as the embodiment of the virtue of the national character but with the potential for its corruption. She argues that ‘[w]omen’s weakness and susceptibility to foreign influences make them conveniently flawed boundary guards in need of constant monitoring and policing by men’ (p. 92). Therefore political and ecclesiastical leaders believed it was imperative that, in fashioning a Catholic and Gaelic state, women remain free from the temptations of the modern, foreign, 1920s world. The world of the ‘flapper’, of the second coming of the ‘New Woman’, was seen as a direct threat to the creation of a post-colonial Irish identity. While the flapper and all that she symbolized never had the same impact in Ireland as in the United States or Great Britain, Irish leaders felt vulnerable to its influence because of (among other factors) emigration, the lack of a language barrier and the general permeability of Irish culture to AngloAmerican influences. Politically, the Irish Free State had enacted a Constitution that guaranteed men and women equal rights and gave women over the age of 21 the right to vote. However, despite this very real political achievement, during the 1920s and 1930s successive governments tried to restrict the implications of suffrage and made it clear that women’s place was in the home, in the domestic sphere. The governments of Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail enacted a series of legislative measures that unambiguously

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declared that the public sphere was men’s sphere. Women need not apply. The gender legislation deprived women of political and economic rights: the Juries Acts of 1924 and 1927 restricted women’s right to serve on juries; the Civil Service Employment Act of 1925 restricted women’s access to the highest positions within the Civil Service; the Marriage Bar of 1931 prohibited women teachers from working once they married and was eventually extended to the entire civil service; the Conditions of Employment Bill of 1935 gave the Minister for Industry and Commerce the right to restrict women’s employment; and the Constitution of 1937 explicitly situated women in the home, noting that it was by their work in the home that women made their contribution to the State (Valiulis 1995a). If one were interested in the values of stability and respectability, perhaps then the 1920s were not the most auspicious of times to create an independent nation state. Indeed, the one fact on which everyone in the Free State – ecclesiastics, politicians, the press, women’s groups – seemed to agree was that life had changed for men and women in the Ireland of the 1920s. The sense of change was palpable. The Great War, the AngloIrish war of independence and the civil war all had left their mark on the Free State. Coupled with these political events were technological changes – the motor car, the cinema – and social change – jazz, dance halls, the cocktail hour, the advent of the flapper. The question was what impact these changes would have on the Irish Free State, especially on gender relations and gender roles. And, from the point of view of the ruling elites, how these changes could be contained, undermined and restricted. One arena in which the gender debate took place was in the advice columns of the popular and ecclesiastical press.1 Regularly, both the popular and ecclesiastical press ran articles in which they offered advice to women on issues that they felt were of current concern. In so doing, they offered a concrete gender ideology, that is, a clear set of beliefs about what was and was not appropriate for women in Ireland in the 1920s.2 This chapter argues that there were significant political implications to the discourse of modernity which swirled around the advice columns in the Irish press. In the advice columns in the popular and ecclesiastical press, under the guise of modernity, the intention was to construct an ideal which accorded with the designs of Catholic Ireland. The ‘advice’ of the advice columns complemented and reinforced the political agenda of the period and its restrictive gender legislation. If readers simply skimmed the advice columns, they very easily might come away with the idea that a radical change was underway in the rural, Catholic, conservative Free State. Both secular and ecclesiastical advice columns seemed obsessed with certain issues: men, sex, dating, beauty, fashion, and sex yet again. These were the dominant themes. Thus there were titles in the popular press such as: ‘Man’s Ideal Girl’; ‘The Interesting Stranger’; ‘Are We Unfortunate? by a Bachelor Girl’; ‘If Love Wanes’; ‘Character Counts Too – Comfort for the Plain Girls’; ‘Modern Kisses –

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The Truth About Them’; ‘Is Flirting Worth While?’; ‘The Ideal in Dress and Demeanor’. While the ecclesiastical columns would have less provocative titles – more along the lines of ‘The New Girl’; ‘Pretty Maid’; ‘The Irish Home and How To Save It’; and ‘The Saving of Girls’ – they dealt with the same kind of topics as did the popular press. The format remained fairly constant. The column would begin with a story about a particular young woman who had a problem or a particular issue – one that was widespread among other modern-day young women. This was followed by an analysis of the situation and then the resolution of the problem, with the young woman in question, after following the sage advice of the columnist, going on to be happy and content. Perhaps these columns were meant as modern-day secular morality stories or perhaps as ecclesiastical cautionary tales of the perils and pitfalls of modern living. The advice columns in the ecclesiastical press were rather straightforward. Often they were a series of on-going columns which stated specifically that they would advise young girls on how to cope with what were, in their view, the perils of modern life. They rejected the secular advice columns, describing them as ‘superficial journalism’ which offered ‘claptrap’ that was ‘unquestioningly accepted and so glibly repeated by the youthful or unthinking reader’ (Irish Monthly, January 1926: 718). In general, the ecclesiastical advice columns upheld the message in the Lenten pastorals of the Irish Bishops. Not surprisingly, the Lenten pastorals thundered against the modern world, condemning and forbidding, especially modern dance and modern dress. Foreign influences such as American jazz or sleek silk French fashions, it was argued, would be the ruin of the country – coinciding as it did with a time when it was in their grasp to create their own Catholic state. For the most part, the tone of the Lenten Pastorals was hostile and condemnatory. The bishops saw few, if any, redeeming qualities in the innovations associated with the 1920s. It was the tone, not the message, of the ecclesiastical advice columns that was different from that of the Lenten pastorals. Their language was more intimate, more inviting – along the lines of the worldly-wise aunt who can advise the naïve girl about right and wrong. But underneath the guise of intimacy and familiarity, there was the same worldview. In the sense that the ecclesiastical advice columns echoed the Lenten pastorals and were unambiguous in their message, they deplored what they saw as the effects of the social revolution: The net result is vulgarity, a distinct lowering of the nobility and dignity of woman, a want of refinement, a coarseness, such as we see in men, and which is the inevitable result of the equalization of the sexes. . . . The modern woman is ambitious of being the equal of man, and has almost succeeded in getting down to his level. (Irish Monthly, February 1926: 832)

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Specifically, the 1920s New Woman, the young flapper, was the problem: Now there in a nutshell is the whole solution of the modern boy and girl problem – the girls are unmaidenly, the boys are unmanly; but most often it is the unworthy girl that makes the unworthy boy. No! No girls, I am not blaming you. I’m just telling you a simple fact. What do I mean by ‘unmaidenliness?’ . . . Waving to boys in the Park, running after them in the streets, giving them the glad eye, dressing in the fashion! Kissing, jazzing, these and a dozen other things which young girls do nowadays are of the very essence of unmaidenliness. Some of them would merit the punishment of death in certain native pagan communities. Yet Christian maidens perpetrate them daily with impunity, and where the girls give such a lead, what can boys do but fall in and follow merrily? (Ibid., August 1925: 404) This passage illustrates the point that while the message echoed that coming from the pulpit, the tone was different. Again, it was more of a wise friend who would guide these confused, if not mistaken, young flappers through the morass of temptations to the beauty of the higher spiritual plane. But the point to be reiterated was that the core values were the same. In the eyes of the ecclesiastical advice columnists, the temptations of the modern world were many. Columns regularly exhorted young women to reject modern customs and fashions and remember that they were Irish girls whose virtues, especially purity, had been their long cherished characteristic, an indicator of Irish identity. Young girls were thus warned to be minders of their virtue. Parents, mothers in particular, were repeatedly chastised for being too lax, for not controlling their daughters. Ultimately, it was all up to women. The path to happiness, according to the ecclesiastical advice columns, was the path of virtue, the path of purity. The message was simple, clear and uncompromising. Keep yourself and your maidenly virtues intact and your reward will be the gift of ‘true love’. If, however, young women persisted in wearing low-cut fashion, engaging in flirting and ‘kissing’, then they would have ‘tarnished the whiteness of [their] spring blossoms’ and true happiness, i.e. marriage, would escape them (ibid.: 408). Young men were portrayed negatively, were characterized as ‘chancers’ who were ready to take advantage of the situation if young girls let down their guard. They would press for a sexual advantage, more often than not simply to boast of it to their friends. And, according to the ecclesiastical advice columns, these types of young men would leave the girls who had been ‘tarnished’ and go off and marry those who had not been ‘smudged’ – a favourite word in ecclesiastical discourse (ibid.). Young men were clearly less trustworthy but also less culpable and less responsible –

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enshrining yet again a variation of the sexual double standard. Women shouldered both the blame and the consequences for sexual matters. The secular advice columns took a less strident note and there was more ambiguity in their message. Their advice columns reflected the changes associated with the decade, addressing the ‘dear young flapper’ who was in paid employment, earning some money, buying, or at least yearning for, fashionable clothes, often smoking and drinking, going to the pictures and certainly going to dances. On the one hand, there was a new openness with which the advice columns in the women’s pages dealt with gender issues, especially those relating to sex. In one column, for example, the columnist argued that, according to the etiquette books of twenty years ago, men asked women to marry them and then they kissed. However, Nowadays things are different. Both men and girls test a few kisses before thinking of marriage. Kisses can reveal so much of a person’s character. That is why a man may say that he loves a girl as a preliminary to kissing her. If he likes her kisses he will take her out again; but of marriage he does not speak – yet. (Cork Examiner, 11 March 1927: 4) This new openness is, however, misleading. Despite the frankness, what is strikingly significant is that the overall message which these popular advice columns advocated was quite traditional, quite conventional. In fact, after stripping away the modern gloss, its overarching message to young women – even if they did address them as ‘young flapper’ and talked about kissing – was not very different from the message in the ecclesiastical advice columns. For example, according to the woman’s page, the most important quality for a young girl to have was purity. Never mind about flirting and kissing – these were, in truth, impediments to true love. As one column advised a concerned young woman: Believe me . . . [he] would have respected you more had you refused him those kisses . . . you are like an opening flower. Do not blossom for the many, allowing who will to kiss off your bloom. Save your sweetness until you have blossomed into full beauty. Then some man will appreciate you and you will be glad that you saved your kisses for him. (Ibid., 14 January 1927: 4) Certainly these words could have been written by any of the ecclesiastical advice columnists. In addition to purity, the advice columns of the women’s pages discussed the need for modesty. Revealing fashions, the tendency for young

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women to use slang and sit in what for many were ‘unlady-like positions’ all demanded that more attention be paid to modesty. Women were simply not supposed to call attention to themselves: Would you remember that the most fundamental law of good taste is quiet – in demeanor, in voice, in dress? . . . And would you govern your actions accordingly and dress as smartly as possible to be sure, but with the express purpose of avoiding attention rather than attracting it? . . . If you would bear . . . [this] in mind, . . . you will be the ideal woman. (Irish Independent, 11 March 1924: 4) This demand that women not call attention to themselves sometimes took on the tinge of passivity. Sometimes it meant unselfishness – ‘the secret of popularity is unselfishness’, one column proclaimed – a willingness to listen, to help, to do for others, especially if the others are men (Cork Examiner, 23 August 1929: 4). Passivity, unselfishness, a repudiation of the limelight all went into the virtue of modesty. Another regular theme in the women’s pages’ advice columns was beauty. While there were the requisite discussions about keeping your skin beautiful or dressing to advantage, there was another message coming through the columns – beauty was dangerous. Men would love you for your looks alone. Beauty was fleeting – what happens, the columns asked, to a woman when she ages and loses her beauty? Moreover, those who are beautiful are often self-centred and have neglected to develop their personality. Hence the article which extolled the virtues associated with plain-looking women: Kindness and modesty go far towards winning his heart . . . When a plain woman is loved, she is loved for her qualities, and since character remains when mere youthful beauty has fled, she is loved forever. (Ibid., 5 August 1932: 4) It is interesting to note that while plainness was extolled as a virtue, dowdiness was frowned upon as a sign that a woman no longer cared about her appearance and was not taking care of herself. This was particularly true after a woman had been married for a while. As one column entitled ‘Stepping Stones to Married Happiness’ warns: So many girls become careless of their appearance after several years of early rising. A husband may tease the first time he sees his wife with untidy hair and smut upon her nose; the second time he frowns impatiently, wondering ‘Why doesn’t she tidy up a bit?’ If she persists in her untidiness eventually he comes to think of her as just someone

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What is of particular interest in these columns is that the theme running through them was very traditional – the ultimate aim of these ‘young flappers’ remained marriage. Overall, the conduct of the young modern woman was viewed in the light of whether it would help or hinder her marriage prospects. There was clear agreement between the ecclesiastical advice columns and the secular columns about the primacy of marriage. Marriage remained the goal for young women – how to achieve it; and, having achieved it, how to keep it. The ecclesiastical literature was quite clear. Women’s natural role was of wife and mother – she was ‘queen of the home’. As one columnist observed: Her [woman’s] natural qualities fit her more for the activities and life of the home; and the commonsense of the human race has always regarded the home as the woman’s natural sphere. If she is a mother, her constant presence in the home is needed; and domestic duties which no one else can accomplish will absorb most of her energies. Her natural gifts of sympathy and love combined with her keener sensitiveness give her a special aptitude to promote the happiness of domestic life, which means so much both for man and woman. (Cahill 1924: 538–9) While the secular advice columns would not disagree and would themselves view marriage as the ultimate goal of women, there was a slight change, a recognition that women who did not marry could lead rewarding and fulfilling lives. It was a ‘dissenting discourse’ that was beginning to recognize that women had another viable option to marriage – a fulfilled single life. This was significant given the high numbers of Irish women who did not marry or ‘married late’. As one column noted: The modern woman is by no means so sure of marriage as was her grandmother or even her mother. The old theory of ‘a man somewhere for every woman’ died during the War; and if she cannot find her own particular man, then she refuses to consider a ‘second best’. (Cork Examiner, 11 March 1927: 4) While this clearly has a First World War reference to it, the message was quite applicable to Ireland. Irish feminists of the period pointed to the number of women who did not marry and had to either support themselves and/or their parents, or who were forced to emigrate. It was part of

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the post-Famine way of life. This issue surfaced during the debates on economic legislation – the Civil Service Bill of 1925, for example, or the Conditions of Employment Bill of 1935. The government’s position was premised on the view that all women married and had husbands who could support them. This view made it easier to argue against women’s entry into the public sphere. That this was not the case was pointed out to them by those who opposed these bills, particularly by leading feminists. For example, Professor Mary Hayden, an Irish feminist and historian, spoke movingly of the number of single woman who had to support parents or dependent siblings. In her view, these women made a noble choice (Hayden [c.1934]).3 Even the terminology changed. Women who did not marry were no longer ‘spinsters’ but ‘Bachelor Girls’. A column entitled ‘No More Old Maids’ argued that unmarried women were popular and fun-loving women who were typically in the business world and quite content with their lives (Cork Examiner, 29 January 1925: 5). As one ‘Bachelor Girl’ wrote: At present we are accountable to no man for our comings and goings, or for the spending of our money. We buy as many ‘pretties’ as we can afford, paying cash down, instead of having them ‘booked’ to a husband who turns grumpy over bills. To be a paid assistant in an office, shop or cage is surely a happier fate than to be an unpaid housekeeper to a man who looks hard and wistfully at every penny before handing it over. (Ibid., 30 May 1930: 4) This changing view regarding unmarried women – ‘Bachelor Girls’ – was reflected in a changing attitude towards marriage itself. It was no longer marriage to any male; rather, women now believed they had a choice. They had standards, criteria and if men did not measure up, they would not settle: With him [the right man] we should be more than content to share a cottage and a salary . . . but until we find him we are prepared to work contentedly each day acquiring a better understanding of mankind. Our marriage must be companionship in the highest sense of the word. (Ibid.) There was no rush. One column, for example, interviewed a woman who spoke of being happy and contented at age 30. Indeed she believed she was envied by those who had tied themselves down to the drudgery of domestic lives. Those who married young, she claimed, resented ‘all the Great Unmarried’ because they thought they had missed years of fun

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(ibid., 27 September 1935: 4). She went on to say that she would think of getting married at 35 if she found the right man: Marriage for the sake of marriage has never appealed to me, and unless I meet someone who means everything to me, I shall stay a bachelor all my days. I have my badminton, my amateur theatricals, and heaps of interests which were not mine at twenty, and altogether I have a much more amusing time. I have plenty of men friends, but I am simply not interested in marriage at the moment. (Ibid.) She valued her independence: It is worth something, you know, to be free. To feel that one can go anywhere one likes, and do anything one likes, without consulting anybody, to be independent, spending the money one earns oneself, instead of having one’s ambitions bounded by housekeeping purse. No Jimmy with measles or Bridget with toothache. Think of it! (Ibid.) A similar sentiment was echoed by Professor Mary Hayden who claimed that ‘marriage is not the only alternative for her [the office girl] to semistarvation or soul-killing dependence on charity, public or private’ (Hayden [c.1934]) Moreover, she pointed out that some women, like some men, may knowingly choose a career over marriage: There are artists, actresses, scientists, doctors and so forth whose pursuits are really interesting and absorbing. Such persons no doubt realize that, though their careers are not of necessity incompatible with marriage, yet the duties which marriage involves for a woman are likely to be serious obstacles to the concentration demanded for high class work. . . . That such persons should not marry at all is much better for themselves, for the children whom they might become the parents of and for society in general. (Hayden [c.1934]) This sentiment represents an important dissenting voice from the dominant view that, when all was said and done, marriage was the only and ideal state for women. Not only is there the idea that a future husband must meet certain standards, there is a questioning of motherhood – the joy of having and raising children which was supposedly the only option for all women. It is an important challenge to the orthodoxy of the day and represents an attempt to present diverse examples instead of one monolithic model. It certainly remains, however, a minority position in a society that forbade birth control and idealized the nuclear family complete with

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numerous children, and did not publicly consider alternatives to heterosexuality. There was also a slight change – more of a cynical awareness – about marriage itself. For example, for those who insisted upon worrying about whether or not they would marry, the advice was simply: men will marry when they will do nothing else. Which is encouraging to women who have not yet acquired husbands – and who want them. Therefore, you have no reason to hurry or to choose the wrong Adam because he proposed. The world is crowded with Adams at the present time, differing only in circumstances not in nature, from the one Eve had to take. You have only to keep up appearances and be patient. (Irish Independent, 15 June 1926: 4) For this columnist, husbands seemed like interchangeable commodities who have not evolved – at least in terms of social relationships – since the time of Eve. The ecclesiastical advice columns did not go as far as the secular ones in discussing alternatives to marriage and motherhood. However, they did recognize that not all women married and that women’s sphere was broader than any one particular hearth and home. They advised women that they could exercise their ‘natural’ nurturing talents and find fulfilment elsewhere: Wherever an infant has to be mothered, pain tended, pity and sympathy poured out, sorrow lightened, hungry hearts appeased, hope brought to the dejected, the pillow of death smoothed – there woman is ‘at home’, there is her sphere. (Irish Monthly, December 1925: 634) Woman as nurturer, as caregiver, was the model here. Again, Professor Mary Hayden supported this expanded definition of women’s role within Irish society: Even if she remains single, she is not necessarily left without human ties and outside interests. Probably she has brothers and sisters, perhaps nephews and nieces. At all events, there are the poor, whom, as our Divine Master has said, ‘are always with us’ and to whose service she can turn her thoughts. A large part of the charitable activities of lay organizations all over the world are carried on to a great extent by those ‘sad spinsters’ . . . Most of these women cannot give money, but they do better – they give themselves, their sympathy, their intelligence, to help their suffering fellow creatures. (Hayden [c.1934])

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While this alternative should not be overstated, it does represent a recognition of the reality of Irish life for many Irish women who remained single throughout their lives. The second discordant note concerned the qualities that went into a happy marriage. The dominant discourse believed quite firmly that a wellkept house and well-kept wife were the essential ingredients for a happy marriage – that is, you needed a clean house, well-cooked meals served on time and a tidy appearance. It all seemed to revolve around the physical, the rather superficial – what your house looked like, how the meals were cooked, whether your husband arrived home to find you with ‘smudge on your nose’! There was a classic short story entitled ‘A Friend in Need’ that was repeated numerous times in various forms and which contained this traditional message. The story was about a recently married woman who does not like to clean or cook. Her house is untidy. She burns the potatoes. Why? Because she was reading a novel! Because she spent too much time playing the piano! One morning, her husband’s breakfast is not ready. Tearfully, she goes to a friend’s house – a house that is neat and organized. She confesses to her friend that she has not the slightest taste or talent for housekeeping. Her friend takes her in hand. She shows her how to clean and cook – cooking everything to her husband’s taste. Dinner that night is a smashing success. The next day, the friend returns and gives her an old cookbook, assuring her that she has the makings of a ‘good housewife’ and will ‘grow to love’ her work. The story ends with the words: And as day after day went by, and she learnt to put her whole heart lovingly into the day’s task, and their careful, painstaking accomplishment, to the great gain of her own and her husband’s happiness and health, Maureen knew her kind friend’s words to be surely and abundantly true. (Irish Catholic, 22 January 1927: 7) Despite the repetition of this traditional message, there was also the beginnings of change in the dominant discourse. In many of the columns there was a hint that perhaps the character, the personality of the woman made some contribution to a successful marriage. Personal characteristics, such as a sense of humour, a sense of loyalty and trust were, for example, now deemed important. One column claimed that a man does not want to marry someone who is just a cook– housekeeper, or a mouse like creature who fails to attract other men. He wants a pal; and if she does burn the breakfast bacon at first and makes cakes which can only be cut with a hatchet, those are only beginner’s mistakes and in time she will know as much about cookery

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as she now knows about typing letters. Charm, tact and sympathy compensate for much. (Cork Examiner, 18 April 1930: 4) This same column ridiculed a woman who was ‘as dull as ditchwater’ but was a ‘paragon of domestic virtue’. She would ‘run a house beautifully but never make a home’ (ibid.). When asked whether good food and a spotless home are sufficient in themselves to keep a husband happy, at least one column responded, ‘To have a neat, well-ordered house and wellcooked food is, of course, very necessary, but it seems to me that a dainty, amiable wife is more important that a perfectly cooked breakfast’ (ibid., 31 January 1930: 4). Here quite obviously is a form of the companionate marriage. Of course, what is equally noticeable is that there is no mention of being smart or knowledgeable or intelligent. The addition is a woman’s personality, not her intellectual attributes. Wives should not seek to meet their husbands on an intellectual basis – marriage was all about charm and sympathy. Implicit in this discourse about changing social mores and morals in a rather central way were, of course, men. It was men that young girls were advised about – how to avoid them, how to marry them, or having married, how to stay married to them. The advice columns offered opinions on the type of man young girls should marry, the qualities she should look for and, ultimately, what men were really like. In the ecclesiastical advice columns, as we have seen, men were both condemned and exonerated for their moral behaviour or indeed lack of it. If a woman allowed a man to kiss her, he would, of course, take full advantage of her – as was his nature, according to the columnists. It was not right, but the burden of morality fell on women. However, that was not all. It was much more unflattering to men. Men were portrayed as cunning, as duplicitous, as untrustworthy – for example, a man would wink slyly at his friends when he believed a particular girl fancied him, sullying her reputation as a way of enhancing his own (Irish Monthly, August 1925: 408). And if young girls saw male attention and affection as gratifying, they were sternly warned that they would have little to boast of if they could read men’s real thoughts concerning them (ibid.). In order to emphasize the dangers to women from casual sexual encounters, the ‘dark side‘ of men had to be exaggerated and highlighted. This negative model of masculinity was the very opposite of the ‘solid’ husband type whom the young flapper was advised to marry. Indeed, in the ecclesiastical literature especially, the ‘young decadent boy’ was the destabilizing element which threatened and challenged the good husband, the head of the family. He was the ‘modern boy’ – the complementary opposite of the ‘modern girl’, the flapper, who in contemporary parlance would be described as ‘the lad’. The modern

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decadent boy was seen as a threat to the morality and stability of Irish society. He was a willing participant in the ‘social revolution’ of the 1920s, and was associated with excess, extravagance and sexual looseness. It was he who – at least in one version of the story in Catholic periodicals and Lenten pastorals – lured pure, innocent young Irish girls to dances, plied them with drink and then sullied their purity in the backseat of an automobile. It was the modern decadent boy who threatened to undermine the mores and morals of modern girls – modern girls who still remained responsible for the purity and virtue of the new State. The modern boy reeked of levity, of casual fun, of selfish self-indulgence. The modern girl would bear the brunt of responsibility – but the modern boy was the temptation. How then was the modern girl – no longer solely able to depend on arranged marriages or even in favour of them – to choose a husband? Here the advice columns, especially those in the popular press, had no difficulty. There were actual lists of the type of men to avoid. At the top of the list of men to avoid was the good-looking rake who excited a woman’s sympathy. The advice columns believed that he had no sense of responsibility and could never be reformed (Cork Examiner, 6 September 1929: 4). Next came the super-handsome or super-strong man whom young girls should avoid for (what seemed to the columnists) obvious reasons. Women knew well ‘that a handsome face attracts a lot of attention from other girls, and that the recipient of these attentions is in danger of becoming conceited’ (ibid., 25 February 1927: 4). Third, young girls were advised to steer clear of a ‘man who is vain of his appearance – a tailor’s dummy type’. Can you, the columnist asked, ‘imagine him as a husband? He would demand all the new dress suits!’ (ibid., 27 September 1929: 4) And, finally, the man who was definitely unlikely to make an ideal husband was a man who was chosen simply because his kisses were thrilling, and not because of any similarity of tastes (ibid., 25 February 1927: 4). As the advice columns went on to delineate the characteristics young women should look for in a husband, there were no surprises: kindness, thoughtfulness and unfailing politeness. He should be a generous, considerate man, straightforward and honest. Overall, as one column noted, ‘when a husband is required, . . . the plain, honest man, with his manifest anxiety to please and his greater capacity for loyalty to one woman, is chosen more often than not’ (ibid., 27 September 1929: 4). Thus, the gender ideology articulated in the advice columns, despite the beginnings of a dissenting discourse, was, overall, traditional and conventional. Its conventionality demonstrates its political significance. Moreover, it had political consequences that pushed beyond individual actions and morality of young women to the morals and mores of the community. In a political context, the virtues which both type of advice columns extolled for modern young women were part of a definite political agenda geared towards insuring respectability and stability and serving the polit-

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ical ends of the Irish Free State. First of all, there was purity. To preserve the purity of Irish women was essential because, according not only to the bishops but to politicians as well, purity was a characteristic integral to Irish self-definition. And purity was intimately tied up with women, and women’s behaviour. Thus, if the ‘sexual looseness of the 1920s’ became part of the lifestyle of the Irish Free State, it would undermine Irish identity. A repudiation of the new morality, of the new freedom, was essential if Ireland was to preserve her national identity. Hence the underlying emphasis on purity. Interestingly, I would argue that plainness had political consequences. In both the popular and ecclesiastical advice columns, plainness for men and women was extolled by the columnists. Within a political context, this had less to do with beauty on a certain level than with an acceptance of one’s lot, an acknowledgment of the virtues of the ordinary, the simple, the unsophisticated, the rural rather than the urban life. The beautiful was suspect – it was a symbol of an unrealistic quest for pleasure and excitement. It was ephemeral – not the foundation on which to build a nation and not what life, especially Irish life, was about in the 1920s. The advice columns echoed the political establishment as it urged contentment with a simple, modest lifestyle, stressing frugality, not excess, and simplicity, not sophistication. This emphasis on a plain and simple Irish lifestyle was part of constructing a national identity. Those changes associated with the 1920s were characterized as that which is not Irish – foreign frocks, foreign music, foreign ideas – and through this, an affirmation of what it was to be Irish. Certainly this delineation of ‘otherness’ is typical in post-colonial states and a common mechanism for defining national identity. Finally, there was modesty – a virtue that went far beyond simply waiting for a man to ask you out to the cinema, or being unselfish and giving. In a political context, modesty would also ensure that women did not challenge the new political order, that they would not claim for themselves the rights to which they were constitutionally entitled, but rather would unselfishly sacrifice their political selves to a domestic ideal. They would know their place. This was, of course, in marked contrast to the Irish feminists of the period, who challenged the government and refused to ‘know their place’. Even the dissenting voices had political implications. Ironically, I think that allowing this dissent, especially in reference to the idea that women could have fulfilling lives outside of marriage, strengthened the traditional message. Because many Irish women would not marry, it was important that their lifestyle be validated. This would help to smother discontent which might arise at the overemphasis which Church and State placed on marriage for women. Because the reality of women’s lives was, for a significant number, in direct contrast to the official ideology of domesticity, the popular advice columns played an important role in

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allowing those ‘Bachelor Women’ to feel that their lifestyles were legitimate and worthwhile. They were not spinsters who were stigmatized but bachelor women who contributed in their own way to society. It was a public form of approval. Moreover, the ecclesiastical discourse, with its emphasis on women’s nurturing role, gave those who did not marry a role and status within the traditional social order. It all worked to mute discontent and defuse any serious challenge to the dominant discourse. Thus, despite the gloss of modernism, and despite some of their more innovative ideas, overall the popular and ecclesiastical advice columns played a crucial role in upholding traditional norms, in reinforcing the values of the political and ecclesiastical leaders of the new State. However, in an important way, these columns did more than that. Because it appeared to be sympathetic to change – unlike the more formal ecclesiastical discourse of the Lenten pastorals or the political discourse of the period – because it used the language of modernity, this form of popular discourse was able to subvert these changes, to channel them in such a way that their potential for discord, for upsetting the status quo, would be defused and traditional doctrine would reign supreme. Significantly, the ‘advice’ of the advice columns contributed to the stability and respectability of the Irish Free State.

Notes 1 My ecclesiastical sources were primarily Lenten pastorals of the 1920s, and the more popular journal, the Irish Monthly and the weekly Irish Catholic for the 1920s. For popular discourse, I analysed the Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Cork Examiner plus the Irish Press for the first two years of its existence (1931–3). I specifically focused my attention on the mid-1920s. There is a problem with the Cork Examiner in that the women’s page was brought over from England. However, it was read throughout Munster and hence entered the popular discourse. Editorial control was such that if it were too radical for an Irish audience, it would have been eliminated. It is of particular interest that, despite a more flamboyant style, its message essentially conformed to that of the Irish Catholic Church. I am indebted to Louise Ryan for this information. 2 It would be wrong to see it as the dominant theme. For example, the women’s pages spent a great deal of their ink on what could be considered traditional domesticity. In all of the popular press, the majority of space on the women’s pages was taken up with recipes and household hints – how to stuff a goose, mend a hem, clean a curtain. 3 I have included this reply by Mary Hayden to give some indication that the views cited in the press resounded with Irish women.

Bibliography Newspapers, periodicals, and manuscript collections Cork Examiner Irish Catholic

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Irish Ecclesiastical Record Irish Independent Irish Monthly Irish Press Irish Times Mary Hayden Papers, National Library of Ireland

Criticism Brown, T. (1987) Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, London: Fontana. Byrne, A. and Leonard, M. (eds) (1997) Women and Irish Society, Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications. Cahill, Fr. (1924) ‘Notes on Christian Sociology’, The Irish Monthly, October, 52: 534–8. Devane, Rev. R.S. (1924) ‘The Unmarried Mother – Some Legal Aspects of the Problem’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, XXIII: 55–68. Hayden, M. [c.1934] Unpublished paper entitled ‘The New Woman – A Reply by Mary Hayden, Being a Criticism of the “New Woman” by Alice Autayne’, Mary Hayden Papers, Ms. 24,011, National Library of Ireland. Keogh, D. (1986) The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics 1919–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, J.J. (1989) Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meaney, G. (1993) ‘Sex and Nation’, in A. Smyth (ed.) Irish Women’s Studies Reader, Dublin: Attic Press, pp. 230–44. Richardson, A. and Willis, C. (2001) The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ryan, L. (1998) ‘Negotiating Modernity and Tradition: Newspaper Debates on the Modern Girl in the Irish Free State’, Journal of Gender Studies, 7.2: 181–98. Valiulis, M.G. (1994) ‘Free Women in a Free Nation: Nationalist Feminist Expectations for Independence’, in B. Farrell (ed.) The Creation of the First Dail, Dublin: Blackwater Press, pp. 74–90. —— (1995a) ‘Power, Gender and Identity in the Irish Free State’, in J. Hoff and M. Coulter (eds) Irish Women’s Voices, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 117–36. —— (1995b) ‘Neither Feminist nor Flapper: the Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman’, in M. O’Dowd and S. Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, pp. 168–78. Whyte, J.H. (1984) Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923–1979, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Yuval-Davis, N. (1977) Gender and Nation, London: Sage.

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Riding the tiger Ambivalent images of the New Woman in the popular press of the Weimar Republic Ingrid Sharp

Weimar society was characterized by political and social polarization, suffering as it did under the consequences of military defeat, especially the terms of Versailles with its humiliating war guilt clause and costly reparations. It was subject to economic and political instability, with twenty elections in fourteen years, political murders, galloping inflation, increasing urbanization and fear of crime and chaos. The revolutionary origins of the new Republic polarized attitudes. The conservative forces saw the revolution of 1918 as the triumph of the lowest elements of society and the liberal constitution as a symptom and cause of national decline, and they longed for a return to an imagined pre-war era in which gender certainties reflected an ordered universe. For socialists and those involved in the Movement for Sexual Reform, the republic seemed to offer a chance of founding a new, more humane moral order on the discredited ruins of the old. Under the new constitution, women received equality before the law as well as the right to vote and to stand for election to parliament. Censorship was also repealed, allowing the publication and distribution of politically and sexually outspoken material. The sex reformers were able to publish ‘enlightenment’ literature without fear of prosecution, while the conservatives deplored the ‘flood’ of pornographic images released onto the market. Among the many tensions underlying the troubled republic we can find the struggle for order over growing chaos, for tradition against modernity, for the old morality against the new. At the heart of this struggle was the relationship between the sexes, centred especially on women, who were seen to have changed more than men, certainly more visibly. With her short skirts and bobbed hair, her casual attitude to sex and cigarettes, not to mention her increased public presence, the New Woman came to be seen as the symbol of the age. While the New Woman is associated with the 1890s in America and England, in Germany, as in Ireland, she is very much a phenomenon of the 1920s (see also Chapters 5 and 6). Not surprisingly, the meanings attached to this symbol were multiple and contradictory and subject to change and revision over the fifteen years of the Weimar Republic’s exist-

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ence. Equally unsurprisingly, the New Woman did not spring fully formed out of the post-war period, but bore traces of her pre-war antecedents in the femme fatale of the fin-de-siècle, socialist visions of a New Man and the New Morality of Helene Stöcker’s pioneering Bund für Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Mothers), founded in 1905. The focus of this chapter is the media representation of the New Woman, and, while we must remain sceptical about the extent to which this construction reflected ‘reality’, or influenced women’s behaviour, there is little doubt that the New Woman ideal in the Weimar periodicals had a genuine resonance for many of the working women who read the magazines. The New Woman in her manifestation as ‘working woman’ existed abundantly in the Weimar Republic – Usborne (1992: 45) cites a 50 per cent increase in female employment since 1907, the biggest rise involving married women and those in the reproductive age groups 20–50 – and these women needed role models. This is borne out by figures for 1925 given by Meta Krauss-Fessel, showing that while only 25.4 per cent of women could be categorized as housewives, 39.4 per cent were employed. ‘According to these figures, there are around 155 per cent more working women than there are housewives, which demonstrates the increasing meaninglessness of marriage as an institution of economic security for the female population’ (1966: 175). There is also little doubt that the image of the New Woman as presented in the periodicals had an emancipatory intention, representing in some of its manifestations an attempt to offer a new model for gender relations and femininity freed of outdated norms and constraints. One dominant motif in the press was the so-called ‘masculinization’ of women, which was sometimes seen as a response to the emasculation of men, sometimes as its cause. Related to this was a concern with the blurring of distinctions. The masculinization of women blurred gender boundaries, while the fashion for short skirts – in part due to the textile shortage – and the increased presence of women on public streets meant that it was difficult to tell the difference between women of different classes, and even between prostitutes and respectable women. Between 1921 and 1923, hyperinflation blurred social distinctions and seemed to turn values upside down, as the traditional bourgeois values of order and thrift were ‘rewarded’ by poverty and social sinking, while pimps, prostitutes and profiteers flourished. Middle-class women, no longer confined to the home, adopted working-class attitudes towards sexuality and were no longer committed to chastity. As the economy stabilized after 1924, the rise of a mass fashion industry obscured class distinctions, as day-time fashions for working-class women were now much the same as those for the petit bourgeoisie. Only the evening gowns of the very affluent differed in material and style. Faced with the bewilderingly rapid shift in female behaviour, men found it hard to orientate themselves and behave appropriately, while

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women, too, needed to understand the new social norms. The popular press offered its readers both guidance and reassurance. A defining characteristic of the era was its mania for categorization, possibly as a way of negotiating the social minefield. According to Lynne Frame, ‘classification schemes of the Weimar period order every aspect of humanity, from physique to handwriting, to give contours to a society in disarray’ (1997: 13). Readers of the popular press were taught how to identify certain ‘types’, especially of women, based on visual clues such as physical appearance and body language (see also Maryann Valiulis’s discussion of male ‘types’ in the Irish press in Chapter 6). This was backed by pseudoscientific research, and had the effect of instructing readers in how to behave in socially approved ways, how to adopt the ‘correct’ posture and present an acceptable appearance.1 A major reason for trying to understand women was the rise of mass advertising. Women were at the centre of this new industry, as they were seen as primary consumers, easy to manipulate if you understood what motivated them to buy. Although it was rendered more acute by the trauma of war and defeat, gender anxiety was by no means new to Germany – it had existed there and had been reflected in the periodicals since the turn of the century. Indeed, the Great War was welcomed in some quarters as an expression of an essentially masculine vigour that would sweep away all that was moribund and effeminate in German society. Unfortunately, the anachronistic visions of a war based on individual heroism proved unrealistic, and instead of a vigorously masculine nation emerging from the ‘steel bath’ of war, trench warfare had emasculated the men. Warfare on an industrial scale had undermined the men’s sense of individuality; the trenches had reduced them to immobility and made them feel vulnerable, puny and insignificant against the weight of materiel unleashed to destroy them. Along with two million German war dead, 2.7 million men were disabled during the war. Many more suffered nervous disorders all the more shameful as they had previously only been associated with women. Even where men’s bodies remained intact – and the injuries inflicted by the new technology were appalling – male gender identity was in tatters (see Leed 1979 and Mosse 1996). The position of women became a visible symbol of the underlying state of the nation (see also Chapter 11); in an intensification of the traditional Madonna/Whore dichotomy, women appeared to hold the key to the salvation or destruction of Germany. The tension was between nurturing, motherly women who could heal, and nasty, sterile sexual beings who were both the cause and symptom of Germany’s destruction. Regeneration would only be possible through women returning to their traditional role as nurturing wives and mothers within a stable home. The altruistic love of women was seen as redemptive: a true woman could not only give returning soldiers a stake in society – something worth living and striving for – but by her classic femininity could give men back a sense of their

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gender identity as ‘other’ than woman. At the heart of the regenerative female identity was motherhood. Germany needed healthy children to replace the sick and the dead: a high birth rate was associated with a young and vigorous nation, a low one showed degeneration. And of course the emphasis on women’s domestic, reproductive role had the effect of naturalizing their position within the home at a time of increased job competition. Set against the nurturing qualities of ‘good’ women were the dangerous, destructive ‘bad’ women. The New Woman of conservative nightmares was selfish and predatory, a degenerate who preyed on men’s sexual weakness and threatened bourgeois marriage. The uncontained sexual woman was dangerous, a source of fascination and temptation but also of disease and destruction. Interestingly, the figure of the widow was imbued with similar overtones of dangerous sexuality: representing a woman who had been sexually awakened but was no longer safely contained within domesticity. The two figures elided as prostitutes adopted the widow’s veil to show availability. According to Erich Wulffen, a leading Weimar criminologist, even the ‘good’ woman had a kernel of evil, which would be released unless she was kept safely within the constraints of her domestic role. Seeking to explain the rise in female crime during the post-war years, Wulffen warns of the Dirnennatur (or ‘inner whore’) which lies dormant in each and every woman and which might burst out at any moment with the most terrible consequences. A sexualized woman could be perpetrator, instigator or victim: most crime could be laid at her feet. As basically amoral creatures dominated by instinct, emotion and the desire of the moment, women must be hemmed in by a sense of shame and a sense of duty, preferably restricted to the private sphere. Striving for women’s emancipation is, for Wulffen, doubly dangerous: it sets women free from the constraints and protection of their traditional domestic role whilst also socializing them out of the natural passivity which forms their last defence against their inborn criminality: Modern times, especially the Women’s Movement, wants to disturb this feminine passivity through sexual enlightenment and the preservation of sexual freedoms, completely ignorant of the dangers of such an undertaking, which are so well and tragically documented in the annals of female criminality.2 (Wulffen 1931: 13–14) The period 1918–23 saw an almost cathartic venom directed against the New Woman. Beth Irwin Lewis (1997) and Maria Tatar (1995) have studied this phenomenon as it relates to the visual arts, commenting on the popularity and commercial success of sexual murder as artistic subject in the early 1920s. During the same period, a number of publications

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focused on the criminality of women. Taken together, these texts and images reveal a fear and resentment of women who threatened the health, stability and ultimately the survival of the German race. In 1920 Thomas Wehrlin published the essay ‘Berlin is turning into a whore’ in Das Tagebuch (Diary), in which he expresses the deep anxiety associated with the new freedoms for women. Although Wehrlin writes specifically about the sexual freedoms that are threatening the birth rate, it is clear that social mobility, economic independence and political rights are equally serving to undermine women’s sense of duty. He contemplates the post-war city, with its conspicuous female consumption and the presence of hordes of women on the streets and argues that ‘whorishness has eaten its way deep into the bourgeois family’ (1920: 1381).3 Like Wulffen, Wehrlin believes that only maternity and the protection of a strong man can prevent women from succumbing to their base inner nature. The unbridled times had left women without this protection, while the increased use of contraception had uncoupled the link between sex and procreation and had robbed the sexual act of its meaning. Without the emotional connection, women simply enjoyed sex as they enjoyed other shallow pleasures. If the health of an epoch could be measured by how it regarded motherhood, then, according to Wehrlin, the Weimar age was sunk deep in the morass of degeneration. ‘Ask any one of these shortskirted, silk-stockinged creatures how they feel about carrying and bearing a child’, he writes, ‘and she’ll turn away from that possibility with amused horror’ (ibid.: 1383).4 This rejection of women who refused to put maternity at the centre of their existence continued throughout the existence of the Weimar Republic on the conservative side, while gender and race were twin pillars of National Socialist ideology. The Nazis saw themselves as restoring masculine values, based on the camaraderie of the Front, to a shamefully womanish society: If National Socialism has founded a state born out of the spirit of the front which demands all the masculine virtues from its citizens, embracing German idealism and heroic attitudes in its new, allencompassing world view, the severity of these standards has led some to call it a masculine state. . . . We celebrate and affirm the masculine state because we had to do penance for the weakness of the past with bitter suffering and humiliating shame; we celebrate and affirm it because we want a free, strong Germany.5 (Reber-Gruber 1934: 1)

Movement for sexual reform There were, of course, different, less negative views of the New Woman. The socialist vision of a new morality stressed the equality of the sexes within a fair and equitable society. One of the most influential socialist

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theorists, Alexandra Kollontai, claimed in 1918 that ‘the new woman is here – she exists’ (1918: 6).6 Her vision of the New Woman was of an independent, strong woman who was working her way through life without the protection of a man. The new morality for Kollontai was rooted in economic independence for women, and the principle of comradeship and equality replaced the traditional view of the wife as subordinate to and dependent on her husband. The movement for sexual reform stressed the rationality of the new morality and sought to set standards of healthy, socially responsible sexual and reproductive behaviour which would benefit society as well as the individuals affected. The movement appeared to reconcile the phenomenon of the New Woman with her greater independence and expectation of sexual freedom with society’s need for stable heterosexual family units able to produce healthy offspring. Atina Grossmann argues that the rationalized sexual model was both ‘emancipated and domesticated’, in that sexual satisfaction could be achieved within the institution of marriage (1983: 194). Sexuality properly managed would be a boon to society: the sexually adequate and satisfied worker is efficient, doesn’t threaten the social order through crime, drink and loose women. Through improved sexual technique, husbands could overcome the frigidity of their wives, who in turn should be prepared to meet all their manly needs. For sexual reformers, the independent New Woman was the woman of the future, although the leading role was still assigned to the man. Resolute and sensible, this modern type was compatible with maternity and domesticity and her straightforward approach was a far cry from the louche allure of the demi-mondaine predator who had stalked men’s nightmares – and fantasies – since the fin-de-siècle.

Representation in the popular press: Ullstein publications The Weimar press was a force to be reckoned with. Over 4,000 titles were regularly published in Germany in the mid-1920s and Berlin had over sixty daily newspapers of its own, in addition to weekly magazines and monthly journals (Kaes et al. 1994: 641). Although it took a while for the New Woman to be presented positively in the periodicals, from about 1923 onwards she is discussed extensively in the popular press and her image is used in advertisements. I shall be looking mainly at three widely read Ullstein publications, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), Die Dame (Lady), and UHU. Of the three, Die Dame was the most expensive, appearing monthly and directed at an exclusive readership of rich society women. The Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ) appeared weekly and was aimed at a lower middle-class audience, deliberately prioritizing pictures over text. With a circulation of over one million, this publication reached the largest audience. UHU also appeared weekly and addressed an educated, liberal readership.

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Weimar was a visually literate age, the photograph being seen as the best, most modern medium in which to capture the speed of urban life. All three publications made use of visual images, both BIZ and Die Dame offering its readers images of glamorous, rich, successful women – models, actresses and film-stars, both American and home grown, who were able to afford the opulent lifestyles which fed their dreams and aspirations. In its articles and advertisements, BIZ appears to play with elements of New Woman imagery within safe, normative boundaries. In inviting its readers to turn away from or ridicule extremes of fashion or behaviour, the magazine seeks to draw behavioural boundaries, while articles and images offer reassurance that, despite her different appearance, the ‘new’ woman’s concerns and priorities have changed very little from those of her mother’s generation. In these pages, the potentially disruptive, radical concept is robbed of its edge and the New Woman emerges as a modern consumer in a precarious world where security must be bolstered by judicious purchases and the right appearance. In Die Dame, the readership is supposed to be more knowing, aware that their modernity is a veneer, a matter of fashion and image, subject to rapid change as trends became outdated. The superficiality of the concept did not, however, mean that it was seen as trivial. Of the three publications under consideration, UHU took the issue most seriously, aiming not simply to reflect but to inform and shape contemporary debate about the changing role of women.

The masculinization of women Conservative thinking on gender meant that extreme differentiation of sex roles was seen as an indication of true culture, while gender blurring indicated an impure, degenerate society. Masculine fashions were therefore seen by some as a sign of women’s rejection of maternity, a refusal to undertake their cultural mission. The Ullstein periodicals, however, tended to present the phenomenon more or less positively as a fashion statement, contrasting the constricting pre-war fashions with the freer, more practical styles of the day. In the 1924 article for BIZ, ‘The Masculinization of Women’, the author claims women’s age-old right to flirt with fashion and sees the playful appropriation of male attire as a legitimate expression of feminine coquetry. It is also seen as a warning to the men: if they remain too neuter, too cool, they must expect their garb to be gently subverted. ‘In eras when men were very “manly”, very aware of their strength, very positive’, suggests the article, ‘in those eras when they displayed broad shoulders, broad chests, bold legs in tight trousers, feminine fashion was generally delicate and discrete’ (Anon. 1924a: 998).7 The implication here as elsewhere is that if the men are sufficiently manly, then women will become more womanly in response. Besides, the masculine style worn with coquettish femininity was far from masculine in its effect. The maga-

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Figure 7.1 ‘Eine Schreckensnachricht’ (‘A Grim Warning’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 41 (1924): 1216.

zine returns to the topic regularly throughout 1924 and 1925, often with humorous intention. An item from 1924 shows a woman with bobbed hair and modern dress, marred only by the growth of a luxuriant moustache. The picture carries the caption ‘A Grim Warning’ – if hair is not allowed to grow on the head, women are warned, it will force its way out elsewhere (Anon. 1924c: 1216, Figure 7.1). A cartoon carried in BIZ earlier in the same year shows a little girl rather bemused by her nanny’s instruction to ‘Kiss Mummy goodnight’. Looking at the two androgynous figures she asks ‘Which one is Mummy then?’ (Anon. 1924b: 1051, Figure 7.2). In 1925 BIZ carried the article: ‘Now That’s Enough! Against the Masculinization of Women’ in which it warned readers against the excessively short hair and masculine style of dress adopted by some American film stars. ‘What was once a capricious game of female fashion is gradually becoming an embarrassing aberration’,8 we are told (p. 398). If the masculinized fashion did not leave aspects of femininity, the result was disturbingly

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Figure 7.2 ‘Gib Mutti einen Gute-Nacht-Kuß’ (‘Kiss Mummy Goodnight’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 33 (1925): 1051.

decadent, replacing real charm with at best an unnatural appeal: ‘the appearance of a sickly sweet boy, which is repulsive to any real boy or man’ (Anon. 1925: 389).9 In Die Dame, with its affluent, fashion-conscious and highly sophisticated readership, the humour is more subtle, and the articles expect readers to be aware that masculinity/femininity is not fixed, but simply a masquerade to be donned or doffed at will. In the 1926 article ‘Variations on the Dinner Jacket’, it is argued that dress codes change from age to age without altering the underlying nature of the sexes. The reader is warned against confusing the accessories with the essence: One may rest assured that the woman of today doesn’t want to sacrifice any of her womanliness by adopting an appearance appropriate to a sporting age. She just wants to be slim and to show off her slim figure, she wants freedom of movement, not in a moral but in a literal sense. (Anon. 1926: 8)10

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Women’s fashions can be both practical and beautiful, and there is no reason for a new style of dressing to destroy female nature. The novelist and journalist Vicki Baum’s creation for her 1928 article in Die Dame, ‘People of Today’, Ypsi, equips her entire entourage with this season’s names and accessories – ‘husbands are usually called Peter now’ (Baum 1928b: 17).11 Her girlfriend is forced to crop her hair and carry a riding whip to hint at a fashionable depravity – ‘it is – you know, my dear – the latest thing to have a girlfriend who looks something like this’ (ibid.).12 The poor thing has to go through hell just to keep up to date: Adultery, cocaine, operations, uncomfortable chairs made of aluminium in her strictly au courant apartment, . . . shoes too small, hats too small, undergarments too thin in winter, tennis matches in ninetydegree heat in July, no children and stomach complaints, nicotine poisoning and slimming diets. (Ibid.: 32) Presumably if the fashion shifted to chastity belts or even full body armour, she would follow it. UHU ’s treatment, by contrast, has a discernibly emancipatory intention. The 1929 series of articles, ‘Controversy about Single Women’, runs over several issues and offers a range of viewpoints, some of them purporting to come from readers.13 The final word seems very close to UHU ’s own editorial standpoint and is similar to Vicki Baum’s message in her novel, stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (to be discussed below): What has always struck me in the course of my professional life is how many extraordinarily kind, spiritually and intellectually wonderful women are left on the shelf, not because they lack the ability to combine work and womanliness, but because most men lack the courage for a relationship with a thinking, independent companion. (Anon. 1929f: 100)14 In other words, it is not the New Woman who is the problem, but male failure to evolve sufficiently to cope with her.

Advertisements In 1926, Hans Kropff writes about ‘Women as Consumers’ in the trade journal of the advertising industry, Die Reklame (Advertising). Women make or inspire 75 per cent of purchases, so advertising must target women, using psychologically subtle campaigns based on an understanding of what motivates women to buy. Apparently women are more visual, so the image is more important than the text, they also respond emotionally, measuring every purchase in terms of advantage to themselves: ‘They

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Figure 7.3 ‘Weinbrand’ (Advertisement for Brandy), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 51 (1923): 1011.

relate everything directly to their appearance, their happiness, their sympathies’ (Kropff 1926, quoted in Kaes et al. 1995: 660). Advertisements therefore aim to offer a positive image, one which women can identify with, so it is interesting to see how they use elements of New Woman imagery. A series of adverts for brandy run in BIZ in 1923, for example, feature women many times larger than the men in the picture. In one, a robin in a top hat perches on a woman’s hand so that he can drink the brandy she is holding (Anon. 1923b: 1037, Figure 7.3), in another, a tiny man pleads with the woman to let him have some of the brandy she holds in a bottle behind her back (Anon. 1923a: 1011, Figure 7.4). These advertisements play with an image of male dependence, with the idea that women’s strength has eclipsed men’s, and yet the depiction of the vastly oversized women is

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Figure 7.4 ‘Weinbrand’ (Advertisement for Brandy), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 52: 1037.

somehow reassuring rather than threatening. The coquettish pose of the women, the pleading of the men suggest flirtatiousness rather than power relations, and the outcome is clear: the man will get what he desires. In order for the campaigns to be successful, women had to be educated to anxiety – needs and desires had to be awakened by advertising, problems identified which could then be solved by an appropriate purchase. Female readers of BIZ could develop any number of neuroses through the

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advertisements, which undermine their confidence with questions such as: ‘Are you too fat? Do your friends like you? Do people dismiss you as dull? Does your breath smell? Is your marriage happy?’ The beauty imperative is clearly expressed in any number of advertisements, which tell readers that ‘[w]omen should always please, in public and in the home. Good taste demands it!’ (Anon. 1927b: 852).15 Natural beauty is not enough, however, and the women learn that ‘life demands meticulous care of the advantages nature bestows.’ (Anon. 1927e: 2067).16 A woman’s appearance is in her own hands, and the penalties for failure to achieve the highest standards in personal hygiene are many: social inadequacy being one of the worst. A good joke can become a catastrophe if one’s teeth aren’t white enough (Anon. 1927c: 875, Figure 7.5);17 a lacklustre skin can bar entry to those select social circles, while ‘no one with a glowing complexion has ever been called dull’ (Anon. 1929c: 87).18 A mouthwash is the secret of a success clearly defined as the envy and admiration of other women and the love and protection of a good (i.e. solvent) man. Men were a scarce commodity after the war, and surplus women had to work hard to attract them in the first place, and to maintain a happy marriage once the man had been snared. It was not sufficient to shine, a woman had to out shine her rivals. A 1929 campaign for Elizabeth Arden in Die Dame plays on this sense of competition, asking: ‘do you want to be dismissed by other women as “harmless”?’19 (Anon. 1929d: 41). Women were expected to provide a cosy home as well as bolstering their own market

Figure 7.5 ‘Ein guter Witz kann zur Katastrophe werden’ (‘A Good Joke Can Turn into a Catastrophe’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 22 (1927): 875.

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value through vigilant maintenance of their youth and beauty, as this advertisement for coal tar soap argues so persuasively: In the olden days, mothers taught their daughters that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but nowadays we live on salads and count calories, and the modern wife keeps the love of her husband through youthful beauty. Any woman who sets store by a happy marriage will want to remain young and beautiful for as long as possible.20 (Anon. 1927a: 696) Despite their bobbed hair and modern dress, the women’s core values remain indistinguishable from those of the traditional German housewife, as epitomized by the advertisements for Rahma Margarine (Anon. 1924d: 1233, Figure 7.6). Both aim to please men and seek social approval in

Figure 7.6 ‘Rahma Margarine Buttergleich’ (‘Rahma Margarine – Just Like Butter’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 42 (1924): 1233.

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order to achieve or maintain a happy marriage (i.e. one where the man is happy), but ‘modern woman’ uses different methods. Carefully chosen purchases enable her to effortlessly and unobtrusively maintain her home as well as her charms. Gabriele Tergit, writing in BIZ, argued that the trappings of the New Woman – silk stockings, bobbed hair and make-up – were not frivolous but just the opposite: they were weapons in the struggle for survival in the catastrophic instability of the Weimar Republic: Everywhere the smart, pretty girls have an easier time of it. The pretty girl sells more, the boss prefers to dictate his letters to a pretty girl, people prefer to buy hats or take lessons from pretty girls. It’s cruel, but that’s the way it is. But nowadays, pretty isn’t something you are, it’s something you can become.21 (Tergit 1994: 45–6) Weimar girls, if they were to compete in the job market, had to sell themselves on their appearance. The new jobs in department stores demanded a code of dress and behaviour that recognized that the girl was attracting customers based on what men felt about her rather than on the quality of her wares, and an old-fashioned appearance made a girl look too respectable to arouse interest. She had to offer sufficient fuel for male fantasies without overstepping the mark.

Vicki Baum The appropriation of New Woman attributes to boost sales is apparent in the marketing of Vicki Baum and her books. Lynda King has made a detailed study of the marketing strategy adopted by Ullstein, and concludes that Vicki Baum, along with her novels and journalistic pieces, was packaged as a product that achieved brand-name recognition in the late 1920s (see King 1988). Already a successful author, Vicki Baum was relaunched as a New Woman, to coincide with the serialization of her novel, stud. chem. Helene Willfüer, one of the major successes of Weimar publishing. Although Ullstein received the completed manuscript in 1926, serialization was delayed until October 1928, leaving time for Baum’s image to be manipulated. As well as the adverts for her forthcoming novel, Baum contributed pieces to the three Ullstein publications that were designed to build up a persona which differed subtly from publication to publication. While her pieces for UHU and BIZ were accompanied by often quite large pictures of the author, her contributions to Die Dame were not. Instead of the attractive, but not stunning, Baum, her witty, cynical studies were illustrated by images of women as thin, rich and beautiful as the readership aspired to be. In UHU, advertisements for her works stress the

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serious and authentic research and the topicality of the issues raised. Through articles such as a report on rejuvenation experiments at a chemical laboratory, Baum is established as an ‘expert’, thus authenticating the ‘truth’ of her novels as a reflection of the age (UHU 1927, cited in King 1988: 87). Although the literary quality of the novel is implied, this is of lesser interest than the topicality and modernity of her subject matter (Anon. 1927d: 2014). After the serialization – presumably to boost the sales of the book – Baum published an article which reinforced the message of the narrative. In ‘The Mothers of Tomorrow, the Ingénues of Today’ (Baum 1929), she offers the view that the young women of the time are indeed a new type, but not one that need be feared: these girls will grow up to be mothers of future generations in marriages of greater equality. This viewpoint echoes the article ‘The Unprotected’, an imagined conversation between father and son about modern gender relations that appeared in UHU in 1929. While the older man yearns for the old basis of romantic love, female dependence on a male protector, the young man sees women as equals, not surrounded by any special mystery: They have freed themselves from the marks of slavery: long skirts and long hair, they’ve made a place for themselves where they wanted to and relieved us of the necessity of offering them one, whether in life or in the tramway. (Anon. 1929e: 57–8)22 The father fears that romantic love cannot survive the rationalization of gender relations, while the younger man, just as Baum’s sons appear to do, easily embraces relationships on the new footing. Baum writes as the mother of teenage sons, and their quoted comments establish her as a modern, open-minded parent who is the comrade and confidante of her children. She also writes as a daughter, a woman born into the pre-war era, and her description of her own mother’s life serves to challenge the traditional view of the women of this period as happier and more fulfilled than those of her own generation. Protected from external influences, denied sexual knowledge and fed the illusion of romantic love, Baum’s mother was disappointed and bitter, incapable of being an emotionally adequate mother to the teenage Baum. Just as Baum’s own rebellion against the stifling constraints of this generation shocked her mother, so her sons’ views appear shocking to a new generation of mothers. Baum argues that women of her own generation must be prepared for an evolutionary shift which allows a new model of motherhood to flourish. Baum’s older son’s reflections on his ideal partner show that a new generation of men is growing up, one free from the old expectation of female dependence and with an ideal of marriage based on equality, comradeship and mutual respect:

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In an article following the concluding instalment of Helene Willfüer, BIZ published a short profile of the author in which she is pictured, not at work, but sitting in the garden with her two sons. The relaxed pose, the intentness with which Baum appears to be listening to her boys and the intimacy of the moment offer a model of involved motherhood that informs and qualifies the readers’ response to the author. The text establishes her as a modern, even controversial, woman, a successful writer qualified to tackle difficult subjects, but at the same time the image is domesticated by the visual reminder that she is a mother (Anon. 1929a: 79, Figure 7.7). The work itself was marketed as uncompromisingly modern. Ullstein’s advertisements stress, even exaggerate, the controversy surrounding the serialization, taking it as positive evidence of the social significance and impact of the story. An advertisement for the book in the Vossische Zeitung claims that ‘a few voices of opposition that were raised in the beginning could not obstruct the progress of this open, courageous work’ (Vossische Zeitung 1929, cited in King 1988: 105). However, the heroine is reassuring rather than threatening: she may be strong and independent, but she is established from early in the book as truly womanly (i.e. maternal and nurturing). Early in the narrative, she is left holding someone else’s baby and responds as women are supposed to respond – as the baby’s tiny fist grasps her forefinger, ‘her heart registered this with a little inner sob as a special and beautiful experience’ (Baum 1928a: 6).24 Her response to her mentor and destined partner, Professor Ambrosius, is unambiguously sensual, even though he needs educating in order to see beyond her stained fingers and shabby clothes. Although she is passionately devoted to chemistry and achieves a commercially important breakthrough, love eclipses everything. It is not a complete surprise, then, that by the end of the novel she is willing to compromise her life’s work and financial independence for the ‘experiment’ of love and marriage: ‘You silly girl’, he said, his mouth close to hers, ‘I didn’t mean chemistry, I meant life. Will you live with me?’

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Figure 7.7 ‘Vicki Baum, die Verfasserin des Romans “stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer”, mit ihren Kindern’ (‘Vicki Baum, Author of the novel “Helene Willfüer, Student of Chemistry”, with her Children’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 2 (1929): 79.

Helene Willfüer laid her large, trembling hands on his breast and with an unending sigh she answered: ‘It is an experiment. I will try it.’ (Ibid.: 308)25 As Lynne Frame has noted, Baum uses the visual literacy of the Weimar age to establish characters with a minimum of description. Helene Willfüer’s New Woman attributes are compatible with maternity and morality because her physical appearance has already linked her to an older, classical age (Frame 1997: 28–31). In the course of the narrative she is linked to water, trees and nature as well as to Feuerbach’s Iphigenie. It takes Ambrosius several years and a great deal of suffering at the hands of the wrong women before he sees her in her element (motionless on the cliffs, overlooking the sea) and recognizes her true nature: ‘She sat motionless there, caught by the uncertain light, and her body looked as

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though it was rising out of the dark stone of the cliffs’ (Baum 1928a: 285).26 In fact, although Helene Willfüer was marketed specifically as a New Woman – and indeed, as a chemistry student, single mother and businesswoman, she scores highly on any New Woman checklist – her modernity is simply a response to circumstances. Although capable of independence, she yearns to be protected. Her first lover, an artistic, slightly effeminate boy typical of the post-war era, may activate her nurturing qualities, but she cannot lean on him. Because her nature is more robust, because she does not view life through a romantic haze based on ignorance, she needs a more manly type to bring out the woman in her. Professor Valentin Ambrosius is just such a man: his ability to lead and protect is conferred by his great size, his intellectual standing and his age: he is over twenty years older and her doctoral supervisor. The Professor’s superficially more womanly first wife, Yvonne Pastouri, who is groomed, powdered and dressed with feminine allure, in fact turns out to be the New Woman of post-war fantasy: sterile, artificial, incapable of true feeling. She denies herself to her husband, seeking instead the refinements of an unwholesome sexuality dependent on constant change and decadent props. She is unmasked in an adulterous scene which finds her ‘more than naked’ on a tiger skin, having her portrait painted for her lover. Before shooting, not his wife, but her painted image, Ambrosius bursts out: ‘Now I see your true nature. You don’t want love, you just want to play games, you want inconstancy, half measures, unhealthy passion’ (ibid.: 155).27 Fittingly, the former wife ends up an ageing, childless whore working in Paris, while Helene, the supposedly ‘scandalous’ single mother, lives a life of exemplary self-denial and moral rectitude to achieve the pinnacle of female achievement: a love match with a wealthy man. Of the reviewers, only Gabrielle Reuter baulks at the ending, wishing that the unconventional heroine hadn’t found happiness in such a conventional way (see King 1988: 103). However, despite the undeniably conventional elements to the love story, the proposed marriage is indeed ‘experimental’ in that the two partners enjoy greater equality than is usually the case. By delaying the marriage until Helene has succeeded on her own terms and the Professor has been humbled by suffering and ill-health, Baum reduces the inequalities between them and leaves open the possibility of an unusual partnership based on independence, love and mutual respect. To conclude, in the course of the Weimar Republic, the image of the New Woman carried a multiplicity of often contradictory meanings. After a brave start as social outcast and symbol of national decline, she became in the pages of the Ullstein press something far more mainstream and assimilated. The rationalized New Woman persona was appropriated and domesticated by fashion and advertising. Readers of Die Dame were not averse to adopting a fashionable loucheness, and the articles show that the games they played were conscious. A society lady might adopt a butch exterior (or persuade a friend to do so), complete with riding crop and

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monocle, as a titillating fashion statement rather than as an indication of any real sado-masochistic lesbian leanings. The fashion press played with the dangers of the New Woman image to hint at activities that would get you arrested if actually indulged. Despite the much-vaunted shift in moral values, there were laws in place which regulated the sexuality of women. The criminal code of 1871 and civil code of 1900 were still in place and homosexuality was illegal under paragraph 175 of the 1871 code, while paragraph 218 of that same code discouraged even sympathetic doctors from carrying out abortions. Film censorship was reintroduced in 1920, while the law against ‘Schmutz und Schund’ (filth and trash) was passed in 1926 (see Sharp 2000). Alongside the caprices of fashion, the periodicals used their version of the New Woman as a way of imagining new and better relations between the sexes. Just as Vicki Baum was ‘just New Woman enough’ while remaining within socially acceptable norms, so the New Woman of BIZ and UHU was simply an adaptation to a new age. Articles appearing later in the decade stress that the New Woman is not all that new – beneath her veneer of modernity, she is still the same old Eve. All she needs is a ‘real’ man to awaken – and contain – the woman in her.

Notes 1 See, for example, Anon. 1929b, an article in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper) which analyses the way a woman positions her legs to reveal her underlying nature and suitability for marriage. 2 ,Die neuere Zeit, zumal die Frauenbewegung selbst, möchte gern durch die sogenannte Aufklärung und Bewährung sexueller Freiheiten an jener weiblichen Passivität rütteln und übersieht dabei doch völlig die Gefährlichkeit eines solchen Unternehmens, die sich in den Annalen der weiblichen Kriminalität so traurig spiegelt.‘ 3 ,Die Verhurung hat sich tief in die bürgerliche Familie eingefressen.‘ 4 ,Fragt nur eins dieser kurzröckigen, seidenstrumpfigen Weiber, wie es zu dem Gedanken stehe, ein Kind zu tragen und zu gebären. Sie wendet sich von der Möglichkeit mit lachendem Grausen.‘ 5 ,Wenn der Nationalsozialismus einen Staat errichtet hat, der aus dem Frontgeist geboren ist und von seinen Bürgern alle männlichen Tugenden fordert, die deutscher Idealismus und heldischer Sinn, verbunden durch seine neue, alles durchdringende Weltanschauung umschließen, so hat diese strenge Forderung auch das Wort vom maskulinen Staat ausgelöst. . . . Wir bejahen den maskulinen Staat, weil wir die Schwäche der Vergangenheit mit bitterster Not und schmachvoller Schande zu büßen hatten, bejahen ihn, weil wir ein starkes, freies Deutschland wollen.‘ 6 ,Die neue Frau ist da – sie existiert.‘ 7 ,In Epochen, in denen der Mann sehr „männlich“, sehr kraftbewusst, sehr positiv ist, in den Epochen also, wo er in seiner Kleidung breite Schultern, breite Brust, kühne Beine (in engen Hosen) zur Schau trug, war die weibliche Mode gewöhnlich zart und verhüllend.‘ 8 ,Was zuerst ein launisches Spiel der Frauenmode war, wird allmählich zu einer peinlichen Verirrung.‘

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9 ,. . .wie ein süsslicher Knabe auszusehen, was ein Abscheu für jeden richtigen Knaben oder Mann ist.‘ 10 ,Man mag sich beruhigen: Die Frau von heute will nichts von ihrer Weiblichkeit opfern, weil sie ein Aeußeres annimmt, das dem Zeitalter des Sports entspricht. Sie will bloß schlank sein und ihre Schlankheit betonen, sie will sich frei bewegen können, nicht im moralischen sondern im wörtlichen Sinn.‘ 11 ,Ehemänner heißen jetzt meistens Peter.‘ 12 ,Es ist – Sie wissen das, gnädige Frau? – letzter Schick, eine Freundin zu haben, die so oder ähnlich aussieht.‘ 13 The articles began in March 1929 and ran until June of that year. 14 ,Aber was mich immer während meines Berufslebens seltsam berührt, ist die Tatsache, dass eine große Anzahl außerordentlich gütiger, seelisch und geistig famoser, tüchtiger Frauen kaltgestellt wird, nicht etwa weil ihnen die Fähigkeit mangelt, Arbeit und Frausein zu vereinigen, sondern weil den meisten Männern der Mut zu einer denkenden und selbständigen Gefährtin fehlt.‘ 15 ,Die Frau soll stets gefallen, in der Öffentlichkeit und im Heim. Dies gebietet der gute Geschmack.‘ 16 ,[D]as Leben verlangt sorgfältige Pflege der Vorzüge, die die Natur schenkt.‘ 17 ,Ein guter Witz kann zur Katastrophe werden! Ein herzliches Lachen ist reizvoll, wenn eine Reihe perlenweisser Zähne sichtbar wird. Wie abschreckend dagegen wirkt ein ungepflegter Mund.‘ 18 ,Und keine Frau ist jemals als belanglos oder uninteressant abgetan worden, wenn sie einen lieblichen Teint besitzt.‘ 19 ,Möchten Sie von anderen Frauen als, ungefährlich‘ betrachtet werden?‘ 20 ,Die Liebe des Mannes geht durch den Magen, belehrte früher jede erfahrene Mutter ihr heiratsfähiges Töchterchen, und das gute Kind stand geduldig von früh bis spät am Kochherd. Heute lebt man von Rohkost und nach Kalorien, und die moderne Frau bewahrt sich die Liebe ihres Mannes durch jugendliche Schönheit. Lange schön sein will jede Frau, der eine glückliche Ehe am Herzen liegt.‘ 21 ,Überall haben es die Hübschen und Gepflegten leichter. Die Hübsche verkauft mehr, der Hübschen diktiert der Chef lieber, von einer Hübschen wird lieber Unterricht genommen und lieber ein Hut bestellt. Das ist grausam, aber es ist so. Hübsch ist man aber heutzutage nicht, man kann’s werden.‘ 22 ,[S]ie haben sich befreit von den Sklavenzeichen des langen Rocks und der langen Haare, sie haben sich Platz gemacht und uns der Notwendigkeit enthoben, ihnen welchen anzubieten, im Leben wie auf der Strassenbahn.‘ 23 ,[G]enau so wachsen sie hinter uns her, wie die Jungens von heute sie wünschen: gesund und lustig, ohne Hysterie, ohne Blutarmut, ohne Nerven und Sentimentalitäten. Sie sind auf den Sportplätzen zu Hause und in den Laboratorien, sie arbeiten viel und machen kein großes Wesen aus jenen Gefühlen, die für uns damals so viel bedeuteten, weil sie halbversteckt, unterdrückt und verboten wucherten. Sie haben eine neue Art von Keuschheit, von Scham und von Stolz, diese kleinen sechzehnjährigen Amazonen in ihren kurzen Trikots. Weil ihre Körper frei sind, bleiben ihre Seelen sauber und gerade.‘ 24 ,[D]a verzeichnete ihr Herz dies mit einem kleinen innerlichen Schluchzen als ein besonderes und wunderhübsches Erlebnis.‘ 25 , „Du dummes Mädel,“ sagte er dicht an ihrem Mund.‘ ,Ich meine nicht die Chemie. Ich meine das Leben. Willst du leben mit mir?‘ Helene Willfüer legte ihre großen, bebenden Hände auf seine Brust, und mit einem unendlichen Atemzug antwortete sie: ,Es ist ein Experiment. Ich will es versuchen.‘ 26 ,Sie saß regungslos dort, von dem ungewissen Licht getroffen, und ihr Körper sah aus, als wüchse er aus dem dunkeln Klippgestein hervor.‘

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27 ,Ich kenne dich jetzt. Du willst gar keine Liebe, du willst nur die Spielerei, das Flackrige, das Halbe, das Ungesunde.‘

Bibliography Anon. (1923a) ,Weinbrand‘ (‘Brandy’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper advertisement for brandy), 51: 1011. —— (1923b) ,Weinbrand‘ (‘Brandy’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper advertisement for brandy), 52: 1037. —— (1924a) ,Die Vermännlichung der Frau‘ (‘The Masculinization of Women’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 35: 997–8. —— (1924b) ,Gib Mutti einen Gute-Nacht-Kuß‘ (‘Kiss Mummy Goodnight’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 33: 1051. —— (1924c) ,Eine Schreckensnachricht‘ (‘A Grim Warning’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 41: 1216. —— (1924d), ,Rahma Margarine Buttergleich‘ (‘Rahma Margarine – Just Like Butter’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 42: 1233. —— (1925) ,Nun aber genug! Gegen die Vermännlichung der Frau!‘ (‘Now That’s Enough! Against the Masculinization of Women’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 13: 389. —— (1926) ,Variationen über den Smoking‘ (‘Variations on the Dinner Jacket’), Die Dame (Lady), 13: 8. —— (1927a) ,Die Liebe des Mannes‘ (‘The Love of Man’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper, advertisement for coal tar soap), 17: 696. —— (1927b) ,Ein Wort, gnädige Frau . . .‘ (‘One Word, Madam . . .’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper, advert for depilatory cream), 21: 852. —— (1927c) ,Ein guter Witz kann zur Katastrophe werden‘ (‘A Good Joke Can Turn into a Catastrophe’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 22: 875. —— (1927d) ,Erfahrung mit der Verjüngung‘ (‘Experience with Rejuvenation’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper, advertisement for Baum’s UHU article on rejuvenation), 49: 2014. —— (1927e) ,Von solchen Frauen schreiben die Dichter‘ (‘Women Like This Inspire the Poets’, advert for Kölnisch Wasser), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 50: 2067. —— (1929a) ,Vicki Baum, die Verfasserin des Romans „stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer“, mit ihren Kindern.‘ (‘Vicki Baum, Author of the Novel “stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer”, with her Children’) Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 2: 79. —— (1929b) ,Neue Wege der Charakterforschung: Was die Beinhaltung enthüllt‘ (‘New Forms of Character Study: What Your Sitting Posture Reveals’), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), 13: 517. —— (1929c) ,Werden Sie nur in Ihrem engen Bekanntenkreis für entzückend gehalten?‘ (‘Is It Only In Your Close Circle of Friends That You Are Considered Charming?’), Die Dame (Lady; advertisement for Elizabeth Arden skin care products), 9: 87. —— (1929d) ,Möchten Sie von anderen Frauen als „ungefährlich“ betrachtet werden?‘ (‘Do You Want to be Dismissed as “Harmless” by Other Women?’, advertisement for Elizabeth Arden skin care products), Die Dame (Lady), 10: 41.

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—— (1929e) ,Die Schutzlose. Ein Gespräch zwischen Männern‘ (‘The Unprotected: A Conversation Between Men’), UHU, 3: 56–60. —— (1929f ) ,Schluß mit dem Streit um die ledige Frau‘ (‘An End to the Debate on Single Women’), UHU, 9: 98–100. Baum, V. (1928a) stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (‘Helene Willfüer, Student of Chemistry’), Berlin: Ullstein. —— (1928b) ,Leute von Heute‘ (‘People of Today’), Die Dame, 4: 17–19, 32. —— (1929) ,Die Mütter von morgen – die Backfische von Heute‘ (‘The Mothers of Tomorrow, the Ingénues of Today’), UHU, 5: 46–53. Frame, L. (1997) ‘Gretchen, Girl, Garçonne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal New Woman’, in K. von Ankum (ed.) Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, pp. 12–40. Grossmann, A. (1983) ‘The New Woman and the Rationalisation of Sexuality in Weimar Germany’, in A. Snitow, C. Stansell and S. Thompson (eds) Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, London: Virago, pp. 190–208. Kaes, A., Jay, M. and Dimendberg, E. (eds) (1994) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Berkeley and Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. King, L.J. (1988) Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Kollontai, A. (1918) Die Neue Moral und die Arbeiter Klasse (The New Morality and the Working Classes), in K. von Soden and M. Schmidt (eds) (1988) Neue Frauen: Die Zwanziger Jahre (New Women: The Twenties), Munich: Elefanten Press, pp. 6–7. Krauss-Fessel, M. (1966) ,Frauenarbeit und Frauenemanzipation in der Nachkriegszeit ab 1919‘ (‘Women’s Work and Women’s Emancipation in the Post-War Period, from 1919’), in M. Hirschfeld (ed.) Zwischen Zwei Katastrophen: Sittengeschichte 1918–1933 (Between Two Catastrophes: A History of Morality, 1918–1933), 2nd rev. edn., Hanu/Main: Karl Schustek, 165–96. Kropff, H. (1926) ,Frauen als Käuferinnen‘ (‘Women as Consumers’), Die Reklame: Zeitschrift des Verbandes deutscher Reklamefachleute (Advertisting: Journal of the Association of German Advertisers), July: 649–50, in Kaes et al. (1994): pp. 660–2. Leed, E.J. (1979) No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, B.I. (1997) ‘Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis’, in K. von Ankum (ed.) Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, pp. 202–32. Mosse, G.L. (1996) The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reber-Gruber, A. (1934) ,Erziehung der Frau im neuen Deutschland‘ (‘The Education of Women in the New Germany’), Deutsche Frauen-Kultur (German Women’s Culture), 9: 1–3. Sharp, I.E. (2000) ‘At a Moral Crossroads: Vom Leben getötet and the Regulation of Sexuality in the Weimar Republic’, in C. Schönfeld (ed.) Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature, Rochester and Woodbridge: Camden House (Boydell & Brewer), pp. 186–205. Tatar, M. (1995) Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tergit, G. (1994) ,Anspruchsvolle Mädchen‘ (‘Choosy Girls’), repr. in J. Brüning (ed.) Gabrielle Tergit: Atem einer Anderen Welt. Berliner Reportagen (Gabrielle Tergit:

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The Breath of a New World. Berlin Reports), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 45–6. Usborne, C. (1992) The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wehrlin, T. (1920) ,Die Verhurung Berlins‘ (‘Berlin is Turning into a Whore’), Das Tagebuch (Diary), 43: 1381–3. Wulffen, E. and Abraham, F. (1931) Fritz Ulbrichs Lebender Marmor: Eine sexualpsychologische Untersuchung des den Mordprozeß Lieschen Neumann charakterisierenden Milieus und seiner psychopathologischen Typen (Fritz Ulbrich’s Living Marble: A Sexopsychological Study of the Milieu Surrounding Lieschen Neumann’s Murder Trial and its Psycho-pathological Types), Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig: Verlag für Kulturforschung.

Part 3

Communities of women

8

Romance, glamour and the exotic Femininity and fashion in Britain in the 1900s Hilary Fawcett

Glamour, romance and exoticism are prevalent themes in women’s fashion, magazines and other areas of popular culture which were engaged in and directed at women in Britain in the period from 1890 to 1914. These themes represent new experiences and pleasures which were to open up to women at the beginning of the new century. Newly expanding fashion markets were a key element in the development of a commodified femininity, which was to play such a significant part in the female experience of twentieth-century capitalism and modernity. In high fashion and the developing fashion media, an increasingly overt engagement with eroticism was part of a much wider discourse on femininity and sexuality (see Bland 1987). The images that come out of this period in relation to fashion are often highly stylized and fetishized, antithetical to the concept of functionality, but nevertheless redolent of a new sensibility in relation to female sexuality and identity. The category of the New Woman in this period is generally attached to the radical and politicized. The feminist, the suffragette, the student and professional woman were part of that body alluded to in the press and literature as the New Woman. These were women who, in varying degrees, challenged the traditional status of women in society. The uniform of the New Woman was the ‘tailor made’ and shirt waister, a look which referred to masculinity in its plainness and tailored cut, yet retained the lines of conventionally fashionable female dress. There were those feminists who engaged with dress reform and wore less structured and more alternative forms of dress, but they were a minority. Even prominent militant suffragists such as the Pankhursts dressed in clothes which were conventionally feminine, although not in the height of fashion. As Angelique Richardson states in Chapter 14, the New Woman was essentially middle class and attached to conservative notions of taste. By 1918 and up to the mid-1920s, the term New Woman was identified with the modern woman: the independent, cigarette-smoking, fashionable flapper discussed by Louise Ryan (Chapter 5) and Maryann Valiulis (Chapter 6). This later identity was tied to the consumption of luxury items and stylishness in ways that the early category was not. The complex imageries and identities that I

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examine in this chapter are located to varying extents outside the first category but in many ways anticipate the second. The fashion system as we know it had begun to evolve in the midnineteenth century when Charles Worth set up his couture house in Paris, where he was gradually followed by other designers in an expanding couture culture. Department stores in major European cities soon provided the middle class with copies of Parisian gowns. High fashion by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was still a middle and upper-class pursuit. Those engaged in it were moneyed and often part of Society and therefore of the Establishment, a group less likely to be directly associated with sexual politics. Nevertheless these women represent in their appearance and attitudes aspects of the new order in relation to female sexuality and status. I will examine the role of these women as consumers of fashion, women’s magazines and other areas of popular culture, and explore the ways in which, through this material, we can trace the development of new femininities. This will include investigating the increasing participation of women in the production of popular cultural material. Themes from high fashion cut across class, and the democratizing of the fashion system allowed for a wider range of women to engage in the construction of identities which challenged conventional attitudes towards sexuality and femininity. The role of female fashion in this period was crucially tied to changes in social and cultural attitudes to gender and sexuality. Anxieties concerning the rise of a ‘monstrous regiment of women’ (Hogarth 1897) and shifting gender roles were articulated widely in printed and visual material. These anxieties are demonstrated in dominant representations of women within European culture. We can observe this in the work of painters such as Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele or Gustav Klimt, as well as in the self-parodying stylization that we find in fashion, an exaggerated femininity functioning as a retort to social change.1 The fin-de-siècle was marked in some social groups in Britain by a more relaxed and open attitude to sexuality than was the case in the earlier nineteenth century, despite a strong moral backlash by certain parts of the establishment to what was seen as a threat to decency (see Bland 1995: 95–123). The circle of Edward Prince of Wales was one in which extramarital affairs were tolerated. Lily Langtry, mistress of Edward VII in the 1880s, continued to be a prominent society figure and leader of fashion through the 1890s, her status as royal courtesan only adding, it seems, to her glamour. Such a situation may have been common in France and other European countries during the nineteenth century, but Britain under Victoria and muscular Protestantism had remained overtly puritanical until late in the century. The fact that women like Langtry and Daisy Warwick, another of the king’s mistresses, were so prominent in Society and popular icons in magazines and newspapers speaks of a real shift in moral attitudes in some sections of society.

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Leonore Davidoff has said, in relation to the late nineteenth century: ‘As political life is segregated from social activity, Society functions came to be regarded simply as a way of life, pleasure as an end in itself’ (1973: 37). The Season, which was elaborately conducted around formal and recreational events, required women to have ever-more lavish and stylish wardrobes. Fashion became increasingly important as a marker of status as increasing numbers of the nouveaux riche, who had come here from America and Europe, joined the aristocracy and upper middle class in social engagement. Women’s magazines such as The Lady’s Realm covered the Season, including photographs of debutantes and Society beauties as well as clothing suitable for various aspects of the social round. Leisure and pleasure were central to the lives of the rich and flirtation and seduction were key elements in social activities. Fashionable women wearing either Parisian gowns or gowns bought in London, the burgeoning British fashion industry, dressed to please. Sexual licence was not universal in Society but occurred in particular groups. In radical circles, women such as Eleanor Marx and Olive Schreiner promoted free love as part of a utopian socialist ideal. Whilst in the middle and working classes conventional attitudes to marriage and courtship were still dominant, in popular reading materials and entertainment we can see a relaxation of attitudes. In the music hall, for example, performers such as Marie Lloyd, who famously sang ‘A Little Bit of What You Fancy Does You Good’ (a familiar music hall song of the early 1900s) represented a sexualized and assertive femininity. From the 1880s onwards the medicalization of sexuality and the developing area of sexology had opened up the issue of female sexuality and the question of female sexual desire. This was a positive advance in a society in which sexual desire in women had been thought by many medical experts and others to be indicative of low breeding or mental instability. However, female sexuality as identified by writers such as Havelock Ellis, J. Arthur Thompson and Richard von Krafft-Ebing existed in response to masculine initiation. A woman’s greatest sexual fulfilment, it was thought, was to be found in marriage, in the arms of a loving husband. Even within feminism and suffragism there was massive support for marriage and the importance of woman’s role as wife and mother, the ‘womanly woman’. The concept of romantic marriage, in which a responsibility of the wife was the erotic seduction of her husband, is one which becomes prevalent as we move into the twentieth century. Other factors significant in shifting attitudes to female sexuality and the representation of femininity were changes in the divorce laws2 and developments in contraception.3 Both of these elements were particularly beneficial to middle and upper-class women. Working-class women could not afford to engage in divorce proceedings, and information concerning the contraceptive diaphragm was disseminated principally in magazines and printed matter directed at a middle-class audience. There remained

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serious social anxieties about making contraception available to the poor as it was thought that the institution of marriage would be threatened and moral disintegration would ensue. The significance for middle and upperclass women of having access to sophisticated contraception cannot be overestimated. We can analogize this period with the 1960s, when the advent of the contraceptive pill played a significant part in the complex constitutive shift in femininity, which was vividly represented in the area of fashion. London became increasingly important as an arena for the consumption of fashion at the turn of the century. New British designers operated from Conduit Street and Bond Street alongside the establishments attached to Parisian fashion houses such as Worth and Paquin. Department stores proliferated as the marketing of fashion and style gained in cultural significance. In 1905 Mrs Eric Pritchard wrote in The Lady’s Realm (May to October 1905, XVIII: 16): ‘I firmly believe that the hour has come when we Englishwomen may be termed a well dressed nation, and it is extraordinary to notice the change that has taken place in this direction over the last few years.’ In her article she referred to the way in which women across different classes were more connected to the fashion process and better coached in the rules of good taste. Women’s magazines, advertisements and sophisticated shop displays were all part of a broadening base from which information on the rules of fashion was disseminated. On the cusp of the twentieth century the city played an increasingly important role in the changing lives of women. In the 1900s, ‘City streets and urban spaces were the stage for the performances and contestations over subjectivities and sexualities’ (Beckett and Cherry 1998: 41). Unchaperoned women of all classes, working women and, most dramatically, suffragist demonstrations were all elements in an expanding female public presence in city streets and in London in particular. As Lynne Walker (1995) describes, new facilities for women, such as restaurants and sites of recreation, developed in London in this period. Erika Rappaport (2000) has written of the romanticization of the West End of London at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of commercial display. The theme of romance resonates across a broad range of cultural sites in the period. Plays such as Our Miss Gibbs and The Prince of Pilsen linked glamour and romance in trite, predictable storylines with romantic closure which appealed to a female audience. The West End theatre was filled with plays and entertainments which relied on spectacular and highly glamorous representations of fashionable women, prefiguring the Busby Berkeley Hollywood musicals of the 1920s and 1930s. Advertisements for fashion and associated areas were often placed in theatre programmes and indeed leading designers such as Worth, Paquin and Lucile designed costumes for major productions (Kaplan and Stowell 1994: 8). In magazines such as The Lady and The Lady’s Realm there was regular coverage of the theatre

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with a particular emphasis on stylish and fashionable productions. It is also the case that the developing theatrical profession, which was rapidly gaining respectability, provided careers for middle-class young women. Female theatre-goers in the West End passed by elaborately designed window displays in department stores containing spectacular tableaux of fashion (Rappaport 2000: 207). New spaces for women in the public domain and developing consumer cultures gave women entrée into a feminine world shaped by fantasy and spectacle in which they saw themselves represented as glamorous and exotic. As Rita Felski has stated, ‘latenineteenth century retailers and marketers eagerly sought to stimulate [such] desire through erotically saturated strategies of display and enticement’ (1995: 65). This was particularly true of the developing area of fashion journalism, where rapturous accounts of Paris and London collections as well as department store modes were fed to a public through an expanding newspaper and magazine coverage. In the writing of Mrs Eric Pritchard, fashion editor of The Lady’s Realm, we find a voice highly attuned to the increasingly theatrical and engaging world of early twentiethcentury fashion. Periodicals such as The Lady’s Realm covered a wide range of cultural material in the 1900s. A magazine with a predominantly middle and upper-middle-class readership, The Lady’s Realm had regular columns on fashion, the theatre, art as well as publishing popular writing. In it we find a broad discourse on femininity which informed middle-class taste and in which the themes of romance and glamour play a significant part. What is also interesting about this discourse is that it cuts across high and popular culture and that it is possible to identify common themes developing in these areas. As the fashion editor of The Lady’s Realm in the 1900s, Mrs Pritchard, with her column ‘London and Paris Fashions’, was a key element in the magazine. She wrote about fashion in a highly descriptive way, elaborating on every subtlety and detail. The ‘frou frou’ nature of contemporary dress was one in which she luxuriated, and there is a highly sensual quality to her accounts of the selected outfits. She stimulated the desire of her readers in the rapidly and often fantastic arena of fashion in the period, engaging with fashion in a way which also contributed to debates about female behaviour and morality. As a prominent arbiter of fashion she strongly promoted the function of clothing and lingerie as part of the process of seduction. Her book The Cult of Chiffon, published in 1902, identified fashion as a key part of the armoury of the married woman, which operated as a defence against the threat of sexual betrayal. Although Paris was still very much the centre of the international fashion industry and massively influential, it is possible to see nuance and difference in British fashion markets and in the feminine ideal of the period. The monumentality of fashionable beauties such as Jennie Jerome, Daisy, Lady Warwick, Consuelo Vanderbilt, and actresses such as Gaby de Lys, had a dramatic and powerful quality. Pre-Raphaelite imagery,

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specifically those late luxuriant images of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, impacted on popular taste and the feminine ideal in the Britain of the later nineteenth century, contributing to the favoured strong profile and dark colouring (Buckley and Fawcett 2001: 20). Contemporary French professional beauties and actresses such as Emile-Marie Polaire, Lianne de Pougy or Cleo de Merode had a more girlish, gamine look (Marwick 1988: 283). There are, however, in the sensuality and excessive voluptuosity of the ideal female body allusions to the Odalisques of Ingres and other Classical painters whose subject matter was much concerned with the East and ‘the exotic’. Due to advances in photography in the 1890s, images of fashionable women were disseminated through magazines, newspapers and postcards. Actresses and aristocrats, as well as actresses who became aristocrats by marriage, were presented in glamorous poses in imagery that prefigured Hollywood. Fashionable clothes from the mid-1890s to 1906 were made up in delicate fabrics, silks, chiffons, lawns and in pale colours, principally pinks, creams, greys and light blues. Very flattering to the older woman who was central to the fashion process, these colours stressed status in their fineness and extravagance. The use of the spoils of the Empire in feathers, jewels and delicate embroideries added a further dimension of glamour. This notion of glamour, of made-upness (Kuhn 1985: 12) is very much a late-nineteenth-century construct – the combination of erotic beauty and artifice. We can find intimations of this in Rossetti’s later paintings and increasingly in the art of academicians such as Lord Leighton, Alma Tadema and Albert Moore. Glamour was the mainstay in the commodification of femininity within modernity. Developing areas such as cosmetics and hairdressing4 and the massive expansion in the advertising of female merchandise in magazines all played a part in the process by which women might be transformed from their humdrum selves into the figures of fantasy that gazed from posters, illustrations and magazines. The cultural interest in the East, which we find across a range of sites in this period, is also part of the growing engagement with fantasy and sensual pleasure which characterized areas of consumption for women. Writers such as Richard Burton had identified the East as a place redolent with sexuality and uncharted delights. There had been a preoccupation with the Orient in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Represented by European painters such as Ingres and Courbet from the 1860s, popular paintings in Britain by male artists had, from the 1880s, often centred on images of the seraglio and harem. It has been argued that images of women in Eastern settings by male artists represented a displacement of sexual desire from a Western context to a site where it was made acceptable by reference to the other. Increasingly at the turn of the century and into the 1900s, however, women were themselves engaged both in the production and the consumption of such exotica in the areas of fashion, popular fiction, art and design.

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There are sites in which we can clearly see themes and identities, which connect to a notion of the exotic. For the layers of chiffon and silk from which female lingerie and fashion were constructed in the period, we find in their seductive function echoes of the process of veiling and unveiling, which in the 1890s Oscar Wilde had brought to the London stage in his play Salomé (Showalter 1991: 149). Marie Corelli’s popular novels were set in Egypt, India and biblical lands, and the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn created exotic settings for her heroines’ adventures. References in fashion to Japan were also a constant in the period (see The Lady’s Realm, May to October 1904: 407). Images of the harem had saturated municipal art galleries and popular illustrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and theatrical productions also often alluded to the charms of the East (Figure 8.1). In a copy of the Lady’s Realm of 1906 (May to October: 571) there is an article on the Ameer of Afghanistan and his wives alongside a poem by Omar Khayyam, which is illustrated by highly romantic images of seductively dressed Eastern women in a harem-like setting. Female spectatorship in this context is complex; these images would seem to provide a female audience with access to the languorous world of the harem with its secrets of female sexual technique and power.5 Reina Lewis, when positioning the work of women writers in relation to Orientalism in the nineteenth century, states that ‘women’s differential gendered access to the possibilities of imperial discourse produced a gaze on the Orient and the Orientalized Other that registered difference less

Figure 8.1 Miss Marie Studholme, actress, veiled and exotic. Early 1900s. Postcard.

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pejoratively and less absolutely than was implied by Said’s original formulation’ (1996: 4). The Oriental arena could be seen to represent the mysteries of sensuality for a Western culture in which female sexuality had so long been hidden and sexual technique been uncharted. The East offered a site in cultural production where the passionate wife might acquire skills in seduction, a place of shared identity with other femininities in the developing terrain of female sexuality and sexual knowledge. Female mystery is something which women were encouraged to cultivate in order to make themselves appear more seductive. The techniques of femininity tied now to the new industries of cosmetics and fashion provided a modern equivalent to the rites of the harem (see Figure 8.1). Favourite perfumes of the day used the Eastern scents of patchouli, tuberose and jasmine. Elinor Glyn wrote of a visit to Seville in the 1900s: a riot of orange trees in full bloom, of roses, of jasmine and every voluptuous sweet scented thing, offset by little fountain sprays cunningly placed on the tiled walks and the cool of the bath of the ladies of the Harem. If the whole of Seville was passionately romantic the Royal Garden was the concentrated note of it. (Glyn, cited in Hardwick 1994: 219) This association between the harem, a site of sexual oppression, and contemporary notions of romance seems invidious in a period of apparent change and advance in relation to female sexuality and identity, but is indicative of the complexity which marks negotiations of gender and eroticism. The exotic appeared to offer types of knowledge for women in relation to sexuality, but it also represented an escape from the fraught realities of women’s changing status in the period. As Rita Felski notes, the ‘exotic sublime promises women a temporary escape from the mundanity of the everyday; yet this very nostalgia for redemption from the limits of modernity reinscribes the hegemonic centrality of the European perspective that it seeks to escape’ (1995: 140–1). The romance of the exotic still ties women to a sexuality defined by male pleasure, whilst at the same time allowing for fantasy and fun, in contrast to the dutiful sexuality which had been prescribed to women in the middle of the nineteenth century. The arena of fashion with its emphasis on the fantastic and glamorous was one in which a number of middle-class and aristocratic women forged lucrative careers. In a series titled ‘Careers for Women’ in The Lady’s Realm in 1905, millinery is proposed as a suitable calling for a young lady. We are shown the salon of Lady Rachel Bing, which resembles an aristocratic parlour in which clients sit in elegant chairs waiting for a fitting. Millinery is an arduous career, the author suggests, but nevertheless a pleasant one (November 1904 to April 1905: 67). Lucile (Mrs Duff Cooper), a British

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designer who worked in London in the 1900s, is an interesting case to consider in the context of the construction of new female identities. She herself was very much an independent, self-made woman. Growing up on the island of Jersey, she had greatly admired her fellow islander Lily Langtry, who had created a successful and glamorous life from humble beginnings. Lucile opened her first salon in Conduit Street in 1904, where she designed clothes for an increasingly prominent clientele. Although the line of her dresses might have followed the Parisian directive, the extravagant and erotic nature of both her designs and the fashion shows which she organized were uniquely spectacular. Lucile’s sister was Elinor Glyn, who was later to create the Hollywood ‘It Girl’ personified by Clara Bow, and helped to orchestrate Lucile’s collections and fashion shows. The themes of romance and seduction were writ large in her work. The text that Glyn provided for these fashion shows connected fashion to popular cultural themes in a way that fashion photography and magazine coverage were to do as the century progressed. The shows were attended by the most prestigious and glamorous figures in Society, including Daisy, Lady Warwick and Lily Langtry. Husbands attended to buy clothes and underwear for their wives. The clothes themselves were enormously elaborate with an emphasis on evening wear. Lace, chiffon and beading combined with daring décolletage in gowns, which were often provocative and always immensely flattering. Older women comprised the main part of Lucile’s clientele. This period is unique in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in privileging the older woman in fashionable iconography. Although there were economic reasons for this, it is also indicative of the emphasis placed on the role of sexuality within marriage; thus there is an emphasis here on the sophisticated allure of the ‘matron’ as opposed to the less vampish attractions of the ‘ingénue’. The fashionable female body in this period was voluptuous. The girlish slightness which had been cultivated in the mid-nineteenth century had gradually given way to a mature monumentality as the century progressed. Lucile describes her ideal fashion model as being ‘six foot of perfect symmetry . . . Not one of them weighed under eleven stone and several of them weighed considerably more. They were big girls with fine figures’ (cited in Gordon 1932: 18). Women were advised to be properly corseted in order to enhance their figures, but there is no sense in which dietary regulation was promoted in women’s magazines. In a 1905 article on careers for women in physical culture, Gracie Ellison wrote: Woman we are told by some writers has deteriorated. She may have done so in certain respects but in some things she has certainly improved. One of her most sensible crazes in this twentieth century is her desire for occupation and good health . . . (The Lady’s Realm, May to October 1905: 83)

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This concern with health went with the increasing interest in sport for women; there was little talk of slimness, and strength and good posture were the priorities. Food played a very significant and pleasurable role in the lives of middle and upper-class women. The development of restaurants in department stores, where women might eat together unchaperoned, made food a central part of the new pleasures of consumption. Gordon Selfridge’s cultivation of a feminist image in the marketing of his restaurants gave his stores a progressive appearance: When Selfridge advertised his restaurants and other ‘resting places’, he maintained for example that such amenities served both individual and social needs. He marketed the main restaurant, which could seat up to three thousand patrons a day, as the largest and best in London. (Rappaport 2000: 167) An uninhibited engagement with food ties in with the accent on sensuality and pleasure, which characterized the period in terms of fashion and popular taste. The ideal female body in its voluptuousness and the ways in which fashion accentuated its fecundity combined the sexual and the reproductive. In exaggerating curves, the corset gave the female body its extraordinary hour-glass silhouette. Anxieties about gender and sexuality, which dominated the period, could be said to result in the exaggerated performative femininity which we find here (Buckley and Fawcett 2001: 33). The integration of the maternal and the sexual, which we find in the ideal body image, is interestingly represented in fashionable paintings and photographs of Society matrons which punctuate popular magazines. Women of the moment, stylishly dressed, are pictured holding their children in images which in many cases have a modern informality. A good example is the photograph of ‘The Lady Arabella Romilly and her baby’ pictured in The Lady’s Realm in the summer of 1904 (May to October, XVI: 224). Postcards which were sold as part of the newly developing star system also promoted images of glamorous actresses holding their children in similar fashion, as in the image of ‘Ellalaine Terris and daughter’ (Figure 8.2). The connection between the seductive and glamorous stylishness of the period and the notion of maternity is an interesting one, coming as it does at the moment just before the separation of sexuality and fertility in the tropes of fashionable modernity for women. Mid-Victorian family images had tended to be stiff and formal, dominated by the presence of the pater familias. These images of the early twentieth century represent a maternal ideal at once caring and alluring, and seemingly autonomous in this particular frame. Even the maternal is infected with a stylish glamour, remaking motherhood as part of the new order of cosmeticized femininity attached to expanding markets in consumption which positioned women centre stage.

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Figure 8.2 Ellalaine Terris and daughter. Early 1900s. Postcard.

The urban woman that I have discussed is one for whom the pleasures of consumption opened up new freedoms and forms of self-expression. There were possibilities in the world of fashion for escapist fantasies and sensuality, despite fashion itself being highly fetishized and often restrictive. As noted by William R. Leach: In those early nearly euphoric days of consumer capitalism, textured so much by the department store, many women thought that they had discovered a more exciting, more appealing life, freedom made within a consumer matrix . . . Mass consumer culture presented to women a new definition of gender that carved out a space for individual expression similar to men’s and that stood in tension with the older definition passed on to them . . . (Leach, cited in Felski 1995: 89) In women’s magazines we find an arena in which women engaged with the popular both as writers and consumers, creating a cultural terrain of

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their own. The Lady’s Realm in the first years of the twentieth century, although much concerned with fashion, beauty and romance, promoted careers for women in areas such as music, art, embroidery, business and millinery. There were many women successfully and independently creating careers in new areas of popular consumption such as fashion and entertainment. In terms of gendered identity and representation, women had to face many conflicts, but they were also offered opportunities and new horizons far beyond those of half a century earlier. The emphasis on glamour, romance and the exotic which we find in this period was to feed into the cinema of the 1920s with films like The Sheik and the heavily seductive personae of film stars such as Theda Bara and Mae West. This may be problematically escapist, but it is also exciting and speaks of sexual desire in new and dramatic ways. A transitional phase in relation to women and modernity, and fraught with tensions, this was nevertheless a period full of new possibilities and adventure. It was also the last moment before the sexual and reproductive were pulled apart in female representation and the female body became regulated into so-called functionality, a point at which that ultimate consuming passion – food – became a site of fear and anxiety for women. Excess and viscerality were elements in a feminine world expressive of exotic sensibilities and new horizons of bodily pleasure as reflected in fashionable clothing. In order to enter the new world of apparent freedom and emancipation in the later 1900s, women had to forgo these pleasures, which we see clearly represented in the female imageries of the early twentieth century.

Notes 1 Concerns about homosexuality represented in the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 and the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 were a part of the general anxieties around gender and sexuality at this time. Joan Riviere (1929) has discussed the possibility of ‘womanliness as a masquerade’ to deflect from male homosexuality, and this could be contributive to the highly stylized images that we find here. 2 The Married Women’s Property Acts 1870 and 1882 allowed women to retain their own wages and capital. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1886 enabled women who were beaten or deserted by their husband to claim maintenance and custody of children under the age of 10. See Holcombe 1983. 3 See the increasing use in the later nineteenth century of the sponge, the douche and vaginal diaphram. Of these, the diaphram was the most effective and by the 1880s widely advertised in middle-class magazines. Patricia Branca (1975: 139) states that these advances accounted for lower birthrates amongst the middle class at the end of the nineteenth century. 4 Cyclax were the first major cosmetic house to establish a showroom in London’s Bond Street. 5 This is also true in sites such as the music hall, which had a predominantly working-class audience and in which actresses and performers such as Marie Studholme, Jessie Preston and Lillie Elsie were frequently represented in Oriental attire.

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Bibliography Beckett, J. and Cherry, D. (1998) ‘Modern Women, Modern Spaces: Women, Metropolitan Culture and Vorticism’, in K. Deepwell (ed.) Women Artists and Modernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 36–56. Bland, L. (1987) ‘Sex and Morality’, in J. Beckett and D. Cherry (eds) The Edwardian Era, Oxford: Phaidon, pp. 88–100. —— (1995) Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885 to 1914, London: Penguin. Branca, P. (1975) Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home, London: Croom Helm. Buckley, C. and Fawcett, H. (2001) Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women’s Fashion from the Fin-de-siècle to the Present, London: I.B. Tauris. Davidoff, L. (1973) The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, London: Cresset Library. Felski, R. (1995) The Gender of Modernity, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Lady L. Duff (1932) Discretions and Indiscretions, London: Jarrolds. Hardwick, J. (1994) Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn, London: Andre Deutsch. Hogarth, J.E. (1897) ‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women’, Fortnightly Review, 68: 926–36. Holcombe, L. (1983) Wives & Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kaplan, J.H. and Stowell, S. (1994) Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, A. (1985) The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lewis, R. (1996) Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, London: Routledge. Marwick, A. (1988) Beauty in History: Society, Politics and Personal Appearance, London: Thames and Hudson. Pritchard, Mrs E. (1902) The Cult of Chiffon, London: Grant Richards. Rappaport, E.D. (2000) Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, Chichester: Princeton University. Riviere, J. (1929) ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, reprinted in S. Saguaro (ed.) (2000) Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 70–8. Showalter, E. (1991) Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-siècle, London: Bloomsbury. Walker, L. (1995) ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London 1850–1900’, in C. Cambell Orr (ed.) Women in the Victorian Art World, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 70–85.

9

Charged with ambiguity The image of the New Woman in American cartoons Angelika Köhler

Changing patterns of female role models constituted one of the most widely – and controversially – discussed topics in modern popular magazines which, particularly between 1890 and 1910, established themselves as an institutionalized expression of the diversifying tendencies of American social, economic and cultural life. Some periodicals favourably appreciated the fact that American women gradually conquered the public arena; others emphasized their consistent American style of dressing by rejecting any fashionable French influence. But whether they encouraged selfconfident young females or reminded them of a woman’s domestic responsibilities for her family and her home – the multivalent participation of the magazines played an important role in the discursive construction and reconstruction of the image of the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century. In this chapter, I want to discuss some visual representations of the image of the New Woman which were published in the satirical weekly Life between 1890 and 1915. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was unusual for male American artists to create a female persona for purposes of satire and humour. For decades, women were adored as ‘Angels in the House’. One of those who questioned this traditional assumption was Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944). Although his pen-and-ink drawings still present women as objects of male appreciation, they have left the pedestal and are increasingly granted a voice to speak ‘in their own right’. The Gibson Girl has probably become the most popular image of the New Woman who ‘at once pleased the crowd and satisfied the critical’ (Downey 1936: 3). Dressed in a plain but well-tailoured business suit, the Gibson Girl welcomes ‘the rest of the world’ (Figure 9.1). What her outfit already suggests is enhanced by her rather male gesture of lifting her hat in order to greet her friends. The Gibson Girl is about to conquer all spheres of life. She has crossed the narrow borders of domesticity; while directing her open gaze inquiringly at the infinite realm of life, she seems to ask: ‘What’s going on in the world?’ Yet, as her golf club indicates, she does not want to remain an outside observer but intends to become an active participant

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Figure 9.1 ‘The Gibson Girl’, Life, 7 June 1907: 1.

in worldly affairs. Carrying the club in her left hand and waving her hat with the right one, the young woman displays an independent, self-reliant and powerful personality. Her movements are controlled by herself and her facial expression shows that she herself determines her place in the world. However, the way she presents herself also reveals her readiness for compromise. The Gibson Girl is aware of her attractiveness; she demonstrates this awareness quite frankly. A pug nose and carefully shaped lips underline her desire to be looked at and admired. The male-produced Gibson Girl became the model for a whole generation of young American women. Irrespective of their social status, they

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read the elegant and sporty appearance of this female image as the materialization of their hidden desires. The American girl made the figure ‘a flesh-and-blood reality in every boulevard, avenue, and Main Street in the country’ (Gelman 1969: v). The Gibson Girl soon even became ‘Miss America’: ‘she was a national sensation by 1894, when the first folio edition of Gibson’s book was published’ (Banner 1983: 154).1 Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1867, young Gibson had only been able to afford a brief training as pencil-and-ink-painter at the Art Students’ League in New York. When some of his early drawings were accepted by Life and Tid-Bits, he travelled to Europe to study European art. In London he met George Du Maurier,2 a caricaturist who became rather well known in the United States after the publication of his novel Trilby3 in 1894. The female fictional protagonist of this book lived an unconventional life in the Quartier Latin in Paris and thus introduced the American audience to a hitherto unfamiliar image of a non-domestic femininity. Having published his sketches in the magazine Punch, Du Maurier became one of the most famous caricaturists of his time. In his early career he felt inspired by the Aesthetic Movement,4 a heterogeneous group of artists that questioned traditional values and thus challenged the Victorian order. One important feature of the aestheticism of the female members of the group was their way of dressing. They still emphasized their waist, but not wearing corsets any longer, they underlined their natural beauty and grace (see Ormond 1969: 247–8 and 267–8). This corresponded with Du Maurier’s basic idea; in effect it was only later that he became aware of the social implications of this concept: a criticism of constricting and impractical clothing was tantamount to a criticism of the way of life women were forced to follow due to dress codes. Their restricted physical mobility at the same time created and reflected their exclusion from a large part of social activity. As the result of his co-operation with the English caricaturist, Charles Dana Gibson designed his own image of female beauty; it still bore some resemblance to the Du Maurier type, yet lacked the latter’s artistic distance. The drawings showed instead Gibson’s charming intimacy with his figure. The artist was very familiar with his subject; for him, a handsome young American, whose ambition and diligence had launched a successful career, modern American women were part of his social experience. After his return to the United States, his cartoons were reproduced not only in many of the most widely read magazines of the country, but were also used as illustrations for the novels of best-selling authors of the time like Richard Harding Davis5 and Constance Cary Harrison. Thus they became even more widely known. Starting around 1895, each edition of Life published at least one drawing of the Gibson Girl. The magazine obviously wanted to meet the expectations of its younger female and male readers. It supported a

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natural, unconventional presentation of young American women in daily life. Furthermore, it promoted a male–female relationship characterized by a new spirit of companionship in which men and women dealt with each other in a more open, more equal way. As Linda Harris Mehr points out: ‘The fact that the Gibson Girl was considered the ideal woman by men as well as women indicates a certain willingness on the part of men to accept the new type of woman’ (Mehr 1973: 235). The Gibson Girl seemed to express the changes in the traditional image of American women that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, saw her as a representative of the process of female liberation from conventional social values which supported the formation of the image of the New Woman. In Women and Economics the feminist activist emphasized the new external characteristics of modern American females: ‘[they were] growing honester, braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and able and free, more human in all ways’ (Gilman 1966: 148). The first June 1900 issue of Life presented a drawing of the Gibson Girl called by the artist ‘Advice to Caddies’ (Figure 9.2). The cartoon displays a young female golf player in the foreground, contrasted with eight male figures in the back. They are more or less intensely preoccupied with the search for the ball and have degraded themselves to the level of caddies. Gibson underlines the superiority of the woman technically by presenting her as extremely tall and upright compared to the men who are bent over

Figure 9.2 C.D. Gibson, ‘Advice to Caddies’, Life, 7 June 1900: 486–7.

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or even kneel on the ground. Moreover, her self-controlled and cool appearance contrasts to the only ‘straight’ man in the drawing who – confused or resigned – dries his forehead covered in sweat. Since most male eyes are directed to the woman, the men need to put their heads in a position that counteracts their supposed intention to find the golf ball. The protagonist does not appear to be affected by her surroundings. Although the caption reads ‘You Will Save Time by Keeping Your Eye on the Ball, Not on the Player’, a statement that at least implies her awareness of the admiring looks of her caddies, she does not seem to notice them. The positions of her head and of her hand, raised to her head in order to rearrange her hair, indicate instead that she is busy with herself, untouched by the events going on around her. She is the superior master of the situation, her male fellows act like immature adolescents. Does this figure really represent the image of the New Woman? It does within the contexts of popular understanding; a careful analysis, however, reveals that the Gibson Girl can hardly stand the claim of emancipated femininity. It is this very specific ambiguity that makes the New Woman a powerful phenomenon at the turn of the century. She represents modernity as far as her creators are willing to grant it to their model. But at the same time the Gibson Girl also carries the potential to embody those aspirations to self-reliance and independence that American middle-class women see in her.6 The power and the limitations of the image of the New Woman are rooted within this network of male liberalism and female ambition. To call this Gibson Girl a ‘golf player’ is definitely an exaggeration since having thrown the ball into the rough, she now holds her club like a parasol just with the tips of her fingers. Her fashionable, sporty outfit consisting of a plain skirt and a shirtwaist corresponds to the typical American leisure ensemble and follows at face value the demand of the so-called dress reformers of the time. On a deeper level, however, her garment indicates her readiness for compromise since her very tiny waist considerably constrains any free physical movement and suggests her desire to be looked at. In Chapter 10, Trina Robbins adds further evidence for the Gibson Girls’ fake activities by pointing out that their bathing suits never get wet – they just pose on the beach but never actually go into the water. In the cartoon reproduced in Figure 9.2, the young woman’s coquetry is so obviously an expression of a conventional female role that not even the artist himself is safe against some ironic comment. Gibson depicts her in the classically statuesque, artificial position that focuses favourably on her breast – a pose still typical of models. Robbins underlines this rather lifeless impression by referring to the Gibson Girls’ enigmatical smile which makes her compare them to ‘Edwardian Mona Lisas’. And this can only be understood as a very one-sided (male) construct of a modern female self-image. Certainly, the Gibson Girl offers a new, non-traditional quality. Her superiority is not entirely rooted in female attractiveness. She challenges

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her surroundings with witty, sometimes even sharp remarks. In comparison with the traditional restraint of the True Woman, she is smart, but nevertheless her self-reliance remains a pose directed at men. She tries to satisfy her need for boosting her ego by catching male admiration. However, this is fundamentally different from the idea of women’s autonomy and self-determination as represented by the female advocates of a new gender role pattern.7 Another aspect that distinguishes the Gibson Girl from the feminist concept of the New Woman is the environment she acts in. The Gibson Girl dominates in society, in sports and outdoor activities as well as in the theatre. Only rarely is she depicted in a domestic environment; even less does she act in the professional realm of business and power – and if so, she cannot find happiness and fulfilment in her job, as a drawing published in 1896 suggests (Figure 9.3). The Gibson Girl has graduated from college, entering the professional world as a minister. But the church is empty, nobody attends her service; she does not seem to be recognized as a female minister by the public and thus cannot really carry out her job. At a basic level, the situation allows this to be interpreted as an expression of a still wide-spread social conservatism. And indeed, Gibson adds the caption ‘In Days to Come the Churches May be Fuller’ (Life, 23 July 1896: 588–9).8 This could have been the words of the prayer she utters in loneliness (waiting for ‘believers’ who come to admire her). Yet the artist still offers another option. During her service, the woman minister is accompanied on the organ by Cupid. Is the Gibson Girl praying for relief

Figure 9.3 C.D. Gibson, ‘In Days to Come the Churches May Be Fuller’, Life, 23 July 1896: 588–9.

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from her professional isolation, for love and a family? Since this interpretation is strongly supported by other Gibson drawings published in Life, the cartoon implies ambiguous readings. Although the artist ‘depicted his women in activities and showed them expressing attitudes that were not ordinarily considered appropriate, [. . .] he could not visualize women assuming roles then filled by men’ (Mehr 1973: 22–3). His female figure is presented only in a semi-real, stylized environment ranging from college life to leisure time. The Gibson Girl, as the name indicates, wants to be the young American middle and upperclass woman who, being free of any social responsibility (which she necessarily would have to assume as wife and mother), can enjoy the newly discovered realms of education, sports and entertainment.9 The only reference to her future development is suggested by Cupid being present when the Gibson Girl is about to finish school and start considering a professional career. The little guy not only wants to show the young American woman her place in life by throwing his love arrows, but he also becomes the artist’s voice. In 1905, in an interview with The New York Times, Charles Dana Gibson seemed to echo these sentiments when he called his Gibson Girl ‘dead. – I mean married’ (Griffith 1905: 4). Indeed, to ‘marry’ and to ‘die’ describe synonymously the future prospects of this image of halfstereotyped femininity. As a married woman, she cannot act as the Gibson Girl any longer; a liberated American wife would have been beyond the artist’s imagination. Gibson definitely breaks with the nineteenth-century concept of the fragile and delicate image of the True Woman when he takes his female figure off the pedestal and presents her instead as a strong, self-centred and independent young woman. For several reasons this female image suggests modern twentieth-century aspirations. Gibson’s drawings anticipate the vast potential that the United States will contribute to the new century when he creates a national alternative to the European model of femininity, and in that he celebrates the American girl, he pays special attention to the quality of being young, thus preparing the ground for a dominant cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. The image of the frequently ageless True Woman represents a condition of maturity, balance and harmony, whereas the youth of the Gibson Girl embodies dynamism and flexibility, the rebellious spirit to change conditions and the mobility to adjust to new situations. Gibson’s cartoons have much in common with the idea of the New Woman as long as she is not married;10 she suggests new possibilities for women and for male– female relationships. The figure’s participation in selected (even if frequently elite) fields of the public arena sketches out options to modern young women who do not want to leave their fathers’ homes to enter straight into their husbands’ homes. Around the turn of the century women were putting off marriage because only as singles could they participate in public life. Their average age for marriage was, according to

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statistics, twenty-two.11 The interval between school and marriage became their ‘Gibson-Girl years’, a publicly sanctioned time of experimenting with new female roles in life. However, once the Gibson figure is married, she ceases to exist as a selfreliant young woman and is supposed to give up her rebellious spirit. Nevertheless, some of the artist’s drawings indicate that his protagonist at least tries to maintain a sense of equality within marriage. ‘[E]ven though she appeared to revert to the traditional’ (Mehr 1973: 235), the popularity of the Gibson Girl implies that her creator developed a female image appropriate for turn-of-the-century America. Although he ‘himself may not really have wanted the Girl to pursue a career or follow other masculine pursuits, he made her so intelligent and independent that many women in the audience may have been encouraged to do so’ (ibid.: 54). Popular understanding of the message of the Gibson Girl must have gone farther than the artist had originally intended: when the figure disappeared, female admirers in particular changed her into a myth signifying modern femininity to give their belief in female independence and self-reliance permanent shape – a transformation which ironically prepared the ground for critics of women’s challenging aspirations to push the image into a reaffirmation of the traditional concept of female moral superiority. The Gibson Girl’s willingness to get married was interpreted by both parties as the result of the fact that ‘her lover recognized and paid tribute to that superiority’ (Hofstadter 1961: 114) – that he, for very different reasons, put women nevertheless back on the pedestal. Gibson’s effort to reform the image of femininity within the existing gender concept could not work; his image of the modern unmarried woman provided an outside frame that needed to be filled with meaning by the people who looked at her. She was what her audience wanted her to be – conservative and revolutionary at the same time. Nonetheless, charged with ambiguity, the Gibson Girl possesses the potential to come close to the image of the New Woman. In a 1901 essay for The Atlantic Monthly, Caroline Ticknor imagines a fictional encounter of a Steel-Engraving Lady who blushes when she expects her husband to return home, and an ‘up to date and up to snuff and [. . .] self-supporting’ (Ticknor 1901: 107) Gibson Girl. The latter is supposed ‘to write a paper on Extinct Types’ (ibid.: 106). Following the conversation between both women, the reader easily identifies the Steel-Engraving Lady as representing the image of the True Woman. She ‘was taught grace of motion, drilled in a school of manners, made to enter a room properly, and told how to sit gracefully, to modulate [her] voice, to preside at the table with fitting dignity’ (ibid.: 107). The Gibson Girl represents the image of the New Woman. However, there is a fundamental difference between Charles Dana Gibson’s and Caroline Ticknor’s concept of a new femininity. The cartoonist created an image that incorporated the aspirations of modern young women without challenging the overall American concept

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of home and family. If his Gibson Girl had been asked by the SteelEngraving Lady whether contemporary men liked the unconventional manner in which modern women approached them, she could have answered most honestly: Whether he likes it or not makes little difference; he is no longer the one whose pleasure is to be consulted. The question now is not, ‘What does man like?’ but ‘What does woman prefer?’ That is the keynote of modern thought. You see, I’ve had a liberal education. I can do everything my brothers do; and do it rather better, I fancy. I am an athlete and a college graduate, with a wide, universal outlook. My point of view is free from narrow influences, and quite outside of the home boundaries. (Ibid.: 106, emphasis in original) But never would the artist have made his Gibson Girl say that ‘[e]ach woman owe[d] a duty to herself, to make the most of her Heaven-given talents’ (ibid.: 107). This statement was not compatible with the existing American gender role pattern based on the notion that a woman’s duty was service to others, to people who needed her. Definitely, Ticknor’s understanding of the Gibson Girl is more advanced than the figure’s male creator intended her to be; yet, this once again affirms the capability of the image to become a symbol of the New Woman fighting for social and sexual freedom. As long as the Gibson Girl dominated the public discussion about changing female identities, American women felt encouraged to develop a more self-reliant behaviour and to strive for a higher degree of independence. They increasingly crossed the threshold from their homes into the public arena successfully, even though their efforts were guided (and, of course, largely controlled) by a socially approved model of modern femininity. This rather promising New Woman discourse of the 1890s does not continue in the first decade of the twentieth century. The willingness to compromise – as a potential initial step toward change – began to vanish from public debate; critical voices – also female ones – arose. In the September 1904 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, Winfield Scott Moody imagines a fictional encounter between the once publicly celebrated Gibson Girl and Daisy Miller who – according to the author – would definitely be deeply shocked by the behaviour of ‘Theodosia Van Armiger, the “modern” American girl whose portrait Mr. Charles Dana Gibson draws so vividly’. As Moody explains: Daisy was unsophisticated, innocent, and thus vulgar only because she lacked culture. Theodosia is most sophisticated, highly educated in all that the schools teach, and elaborately informed about things in general and the habits of a polite society. She deliberately chooses vul-

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garity as something ‘smart’ or as an expression of ‘individuality’ or ‘pose’. (Moody 1904: 17) The writer frankly criticizes the young American woman because she does not live up any longer to the male ideal of a high moral standard and cites a famous New York lawyer in his toast: ‘Women: once our superiors, now our equals’ (ibid.). Even though women had not achieved equality with men in 1904, the basic message of the article is to stop further change, or in Moody’s words, ‘female decline’: If Theodosia marries and finds a master in her husband she may blossom out into all that is admirable as wife and mother, unless she, in turn, disregards the obligations of her own motherhood. But so long as she remains an unmarried Gibson Girl her mother, who has neglected to govern her, must carry the blame for her wilful, bad manners. (Ibid.) However easily Charles Dana Gibson could make his rebellious Gibson Girl disappear by changing her into a married True Woman, American society appeared to lack control of women’s experiments with new female role models. Facing the double burden of professionalism and family life, an increasing number of women who wanted to pursue a career postponed or even forsook marriage. At the turn of the century, about 10 per cent of women chose not to marry; moreover, the divorce rate rose to more than 8 per cent, with the tendency towards divorce still growing (see Antler 1987: 136–96; Riley 1995: 190–1). The traditional gender role pattern, one of the basic pillars of American society, appeared to be seriously threatened. Around 1905, the discourses focusing on women’s role in American society resembled a historical anachronism. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women, encouraged by the enormous social and economic changes brought about by an industrialized society, had increasingly tried to unite their traditional domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers with their new options as female professionals in order to define their place in the complexity and diversity of American life. They had demanded their right to choose between attending college and entering the modern professional world or, rather, following a more traditional pattern of life that favoured home and family with or without a college degree. The public discussion had centred around the term ‘female professionalism’: was a profession necessarily connected with the public realm so far identified as the male sphere, or could it also be applied to the domestic sphere? Housekeeping in a modern industrialized society required more than only skills passed down from generation to generation;

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modern women had to acquire knowledge to operate modern household devices and to understand new scientifically based concepts of healthy nutrition, to mention just two challenges of modern life. However narrowminded this pattern of controlling female strategies might have been, it had responded to changes in life. In this context, men and women had been subjected to social developments – for this reason, their frames of reference had altered and their socially constructed images of male and female identity had required specification. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a shifting emphasis from women’s ‘profession of housewifery’ to their ‘profession of womanhood’, a movement away from a concept originating in social change to one rooted in biological fact. To be female did not allow for any choice; the way into motherhood was predetermined. This backlash in relation to the female image was also the result of a growing uncertainty about the male image. Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, ‘began to pound home connections between manliness and Americanness’ (Banta 1995: 5) based on ‘his belief in the gender functions universally exacted of males and females in all “civilized” countries’ (ibid. 1998: 24). According to Roosevelt, the nation’s future greatness depended upon upholding two related ideals: the strenuous assertion of American masculinity demonstrated as will, work, and readiness for moral (and mortal) combat; the patriotic support given by the American female who dedicates herself to mothering strong sons. (Ibid.: 20). In his firm Republican orientation towards a successful American nation, Roosevelt considered male patriotism as the crucial element in his political concept: ‘the man who can do most in this country is and must be the man whose Americanism is most sincere and intense’ (Roosevelt 1925: 15). What the ‘country’ meant to man, the ‘home’ meant to the American woman. If a woman loved her country, she – first and foremost – had to love her home. Duty to her family and in a wider sense to her nation was a basic female virtue that could be realized best by her exclusive concentration on the domestic realm. This was the place where ‘True Americanism’ grew; it therefore needed to be protected against any outside influence or change. Here Roosevelt’s nationalistic concept rather developed into an expression of anxiety than of self-confidence. The traditional Victorian gender pattern was not only challenged by young American women’s exploration of new female role models but also by around twenty million immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who settled in America between 1880 and 1920.12 The majority of them were peasants, representing a social structure that was organized along patriarchal lines. However, their ways of thinking and behaving had hardly

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changed over the generations. Being exposed to the unfamiliar American conditions of life and the English language, they tried to compensate for their feeling of alienation by clinging to their (foreign) traditional values and customs as a way to protect themselves, to create continuity and feelings of community. The majority of these immigrants were unable to subscribe to such values as the Victorian ideas of family size and sexuality.13 The younger generation assimilated American culture more readily; however, they created another threat to the American pattern of gender continuity. Since immigrant workers performed mostly low-paid jobs in American cities, nearly all family members had to earn their living outside the home. The young females soon appreciated the greater freedom granted to unmarried American women and, believing that in the United States a woman could ‘make herself a person’ (Yezierska 1920: 15), they endangered the conventional female image. Women had traditionally been responsible for the home; now, under the conditions of social change, they were expected even more to concentrate exclusively on their domestic duties as an expression of continuity in the American way. Women who wanted to fulfil their ‘patriotic duty’ to the utmost could not have any aspirations outside their homes: There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the homemaker, the bread-winner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmeet, the housewife and mother. (Roosevelt 1905: 4) According to Roosevelt, gender separation into a male public and a female domestic sphere is an unquestionable natural law. He puts women back on the pedestal, excludes them from any active participation in public life14 – and this after nearly half-a-century of powerful struggles to overcome this artificial confinement of women in their fathers’ (and later their husbands’) homes. The cartoons published in Life speak a clear, uncompromising language: there is no place in the world outside the home for a woman to be happy. ‘Out in the Cold’ (Life, 17 March 1904: 268)15 shows a sad Cupid standing on the stairs, waiting in vain to be invited into a young female graduate’s study. Late at night, she reads her books in loneliness. The light of the lamp creates an artificial brightness in her room that seems to substitute for natural vitality and adds to the physical coldness outside. Love and companionship – in the popular concept the essentials of female life – are excluded from her realm. Another young woman who is supposed to have graduated in natural sciences is experimenting with different ‘life ingredients’, such as fear, hope, coquetry, experience, in order

Figure 9.4 ‘The Search For the Great Cause’, Life, 6 July 1905: 15.

Figure 9.5 The rather unconventional shape of Cupid acts as a reminder of the new roles women aspired to play in public life. Eventually, of course, things turned out the same as before, with Cupid being in charge of their future lives; for even if, as in this illustration, Cupid boasted a mortarboard, he remained the God of love. Life, 9 June 1906: 689.

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‘to find the essence of life’ (Figure 9.4). She mixes all the substances together and discovers a vivid Cupid to be the result of her search. As already observed at the beginning of this chapter, whenever a female graduate is depicted in the magazine, she is surrounded by her books, very often by a globe, sometimes by her golf equipment – but always by Cupid (Figure 9.5). In the earlier issues the more unobtrusive presence of this little fellow seems to say that as long as he is at hand, there will be hope for the young woman to find love in order to marry the proper partner and find a fulfilled life as a wife and mother. In the sketches published towards the end of the 1910s, Cupid draws attention to himself; he claims to organize the drawings and to construct their messages. In ‘A Lesson in Ancient History’ (Figure 9.6),16 ‘Judge Cupid’ teaches a female college student the ‘eternal truth’ of human history. For the young woman ‘[i]t is useless to argue’ with him since he represents the ‘law of the heart’. The god Eros describes people’s life as the story of man and woman falling in love, struggling for their love and sometimes even dying for their love. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the message of female duty was articulated in an increasingly sharp manner as women demanded the vote more forcefully, as well as claiming the right to participate in public matters. A compromise between professionalism and motherhood was unthinkable. In its November 1912 issue, Life published a drawing (Figure 9.7) that depicts a young mother looking into the smiling face of her baby and a professional woman dressed in a business suit exclaiming: ‘I feel two natures struggling within me.’ A woman needs to make up her

Figure 9.6 ‘A Lesson in Ancient History’, Life, 11 February 1915: 285.

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Figure 9.7 ‘I Feel Two Natures Struggling Within Me’, Life, 7 November 1912: 1658.

mind; once she has decided on career and fame, she will never be given a chance to return from her barren, cold world of disappointment, anxiety and loneliness into the flowering and happy world of love, marriage and home. The college years can be tolerated as a period of ambition and social achievement, as another drawing tells the reader (Figure 9.8); they can be considered a period of experimentation that keeps choices open, but striving for professional success necessarily ends up in female frustration. This ‘truth’ is illustrated in ‘Two Sisters of the Future’ (Figure 9.9). The picture shows two women: the one who has become a housewife and

Figure 9.8 ‘Looking Backward’, Life, 22 August 1912: 1638.

Figure 9.9 ‘Two Sisters of the Future’, Life, 3 June 1915: 1012.

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mother, now enjoying the play with her baby, is ironically called ‘The Failure’; the other one sitting in more professional surroundings, a book on her lap, smoking, staring in the air, and probably reflecting on her dissatisfaction with life, is called ‘The Success’. The latter corresponds strongly to the image of the New Woman. Dressed in a business suit, she has replaced domesticity with professionalism and public commitment. On the walls of her room there are feminist posters showing a woman candidate for congress and a woman boxer. Her environment does not radiate happiness and satisfaction. The message is unambiguous: what this young American woman is striving for will never fulfil her expectations of life. The solution proposed by Life is another backlash against nearly seventy years of women’s struggle for emancipation: ‘Make Reasonable Woman Comfortable’ (Life, 1 January 1914: 13). Any other way will end in chaos, as Life says in a 1915 cartoon, showing both husband and wife as professionals (Figure 9.10). She is sitting at her desk, surrounded by books, reflecting on some phenomenon; he is a painter, presumably not a very successful one since he cannot concentrate

Figure 9.10 ‘When the Husband and Wife are Both Professionals There Comes the Question as to Whose Time is the More Precious’, Life, 17 June 1915: 1021.

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on his job. The young man is in charge of their baby that lies crying in a cradle mechanically moved by the father. Nobody really cares for the baby, he or she has become an object like the desk or the easel. The ‘new’ definition of gender roles is interpreted by the artist as a simple reversal of the traditional pattern. This suggests that, in order to enable women to achieve the desired professional success, men are made to lower their expectations. The issue of gender role change could hardly be ridiculed more ironically. What in the 1890s began as a humorous interpretation of young American women’s striving for self-reliance and the right to choose had turned into a sarcastic condemnation of professional women who try to find fulfilment outside of domestic duties. Gender roles, in the interpretation of Life, are permanent, unchangeable. Only with the man as the breadwinner and the woman as wife and mother can the future of the nation be secured. American society, rooted in the tradition of male dominance, missed the chance to make modern gender developments an integrated part of its cultural concept. The New Woman, as Margaret Deland said in a 1910 article for The Atlantic Monthly, was ‘almost ceasing to be “new,” and that is why she [was] ceasing to be entirely a joke; for there [was] something more than a joke in all this curious turning upside-down of traditions and theories in regard to women’ (Deland 1910: 289). Being confronted with a condition of male powerlessness, the cartoons published in Life tried to restore men’s dominance by ridiculing the New Woman as a threat to the future of the American nation. In the 1910s, their image of the New Woman was no longer supposed to channel experiments with new female role models; it had developed into ‘both a target for attack and a way to release anxiety about changes in the Victorian social order’ (Ardis 1990: 11).

Notes This chapter is a slightly changed version of a chapter from my Habilitation (German post-doctorate qualification for professorial status) entitled ‘Ambivalent Desires: The New Woman Between Social Modernization and Modern Writing in Turn-of-the-Century American Writing’, Technische Universität Dresden, 2000. 1 The book referred to in the quotation is the first edition of eighty-four of Gibson’s best drawings published in New York in the autumn of 1894 (see Russel 1902: 8). 2 The British artist and writer George Du Maurier (1834–96) was well known for his illustrations and cartoons which were published in the magazine Punch and other periodicals (see Ormond 1969; Kelly 1996). 3 For a critical discussion of the novel, see among others, Stevenson 1960; McCail 1977; Purcell 1977; Fletcher and Bradbury 1980; Titus 1994; Grossman 1996; Pick 1998. 4 For an investigation of the British Aesthetic Movement, see among others, Freeman 1990; Psomiades 1997; Schaffer and Psomiades 1999.

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5 The co-operation between R.H. Davis and C.D. Gibson resulted in the creation of the so-called Gibson–Davis man, the New Man, who became the ideal partner of the Gibson Girl. 6 It is hardly possible to specify women’s reaction to the projections of this figure; yet the general acceptance of the Gibson Girl among middle-class women who earned their living outside the home in particular, and the positive integration, for example, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s concept of female independence or Caroline Ticknor’s essay on changing female images provide a certain justification for this statement. 7 See again Robbins’s chapter (Chapter 10), which focuses on the new – more lively – quality of Brinkley’s drawn female images. However, Brinkley started her career at about the time when the Gibson Girl had already begun to vanish from the public arena. Both images should be seen as successive elements in an historical development rather than as subjects of synchronic comparisons. 8 The ambiguity of the cartoon’s caption also allows for the interpretation that female attractiveness could affect people’s more regular church attendance. 9 See also Anthony Hope’s essay on Charles Dana Gibson in which he particularly focuses on ‘the artist’s preference for the attractive sides of life’ (Hope 1897: 870). 10 The potential of the Gibson Girl to act as a New Woman is discussed by Andrea Fredericksen (1991). 11 See U.S. Bureau of the Commerce. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract: Supplements. Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1957, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960: 15, cited in Wilson 1979: 162 ff. 12 For detailed figures of immigrants’ national descent and places of settlement in the United States, see Burchell and Homberger (1998: 130–3) and Higham (1984: 20–8). 13 Catholicism and Judaism, the dominant religions among the immigrants, supported the ideal of large families and therefore rejected the idea of abstinence as a way to control pregnancy. For a detailed discussion of the processes of immigrant assimilation to American culture, see among others Dinnerstein and Reimers 1975; Altschuler 1982; Sollors 1986; Burchell and Homberger 1998: 133–48; Higham 1984. 14 This is also the basic idea of some other articles, for example ‘The Normal American Woman’ by the President of Harvard University, C.W. Eliot LL.D. 15 This drawing is very darkly coloured because the time of the depicted scene is late at night; a reproduction was therefore impossible. 16 See also ‘To the Woman College Graduate’, cartoon, Life, 11 June 1908: 635.

Bibliography Altschuler, G.C. (1982) Race, Ethnicity and Class in American Social Thought, 1865–1919, Arlington Heights: Harlan Davidson. Antler, J. (1987) The Educated Woman and Professionalism: The Struggle for a New Feminine Identity, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Ardis, A. (1990) New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Banner, L.W. (1983) American Beauty, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Banta, M. (1995) ‘Welcoming Henry Home: Or, What Took so Long to Grant James His American Credentials’, paper presented at the Modern Language Association, Chicago, December.

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—— (1998) ‘Men, Women, and the American Way’, in J. Freedman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–32. Burchell, R.A. and Homberger, E. (1998) ‘The Immigrant Experience’, in M. Bradbury and H. Temperley (eds) Introduction to American Studies, 3rd edn, London and New York: Longman, pp. 130–48. Deland, M. (1910) ‘The Change in the Female Ideal’, The Atlantic Monthly, March: 289–302. Dinnerstein, L. and Reimers, D.M. (1975) Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation, New York: Harper Row. Downey, F. (1936) Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C.D. Gibson, New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons. Du Maurier, G. (1998) Trilby, E. Showalter (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliot, C.W. (1908) ‘The Normal American Woman’, The Ladies’ Home Journal, January: 15. Fletcher, I. and Bradbury, M. (eds) (1980) Decadence and the 1890s, London: E. Arnold. Fredericksen, A. (1991) ‘“Not Worrying About Her Rights”: The Gibson Girl’s Role as New Woman in Turn-of-the-Century United States’, unpublished M.A. thesis, UCLA. Freeman, J. (1990) Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gelman, W. (1969) The Best of Charles Dana Gibson, New York: Bounty Books. Gilman, C.P. (1966) Women and Economics, C.N. Degler (ed.), New York: Harper and Row. Griffith, W. (1905) ‘Gibson Girl’s Creator and American Girls Types’, The New York Times, 30 April: 4. Grossman, J.H. (1996) ‘The Mythic Svengali: Anti-Aestheticism in Trilby’, Studies in the Novel, 28.4: 525–42. Higham, J. (1984) Send These To Me: Immigrants in Urban America, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hofstadter, B. (1961) ‘Popular Culture and the Romantic Heroine’, The American Scholar, 30: 98–116. Hope, A. (1897) ‘Mr. C.D. Gibson on Love and Life’, McClure’s Magazine, July: 869–75. Kelly, R. (1996) The Art of George Du Maurier, Hampshire: Scolar. McCail, R.C. (1977) ‘The Genesis of Du Maurier’s Trilby’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 13: 12–15. Mehr, L.H. (1973) ‘Down Off the Pedestal: Some Modern Heroines in Popular Culture 1890–1917’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA. Moody, W.S. (1904) ‘Daisy Miller and the Gibson Girl’, The Ladies Home Journal, September: 17. Ormond, L. (1969) George Du Maurier, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Pick, D. (1998) ‘Powers of Suggestion: Svengali and the Fin-de-Siècle’, in B. Cheyette and L. Marcus (eds) Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Psomiades, K.A. (1997) Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Purcell, E.L. (1977) ‘Trilby and Trilby-Mania: The Beginning of the Bestseller System’, Journal of Popular Culture, 11: 62–76.

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Riley, G. (1995) Inventing the American Woman: An Inclusive History, Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, Inc. Roosevelt, T. (1905) ‘The American Woman as a Mother’, The Ladies’ Home Journal, July: 3–4. —— (1925) ‘True Americanism’, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. XV, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 15–31. Russel, R.H. (1902) ‘How Charles Dana Gibson Started’, The Ladies’ Home Journal, September: 8. Schaffer, T. and Psomiades, K.A. (eds) (1999) Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Sollors, W. (1986) Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, L. (1960), George Du Maurier and the Romantic Novel, London: Chapman & Hall. Ticknor, C. (1901) ‘The Steel-Engraving Lady and the Gibson Girl’, The Atlantic Monthly, July: 105–8. Titus, M. (1994) ‘Cather’s Creative Women and Du Maurier’s Cozy Men: The Song of the Lark and Trilby’, Modern Language Studies, 24.2: 27–37. Wilson, M.G. (1979) The American Woman in Transition: The Urban Influence, 1870–1920, Westport: Greenwood Press. Yezierska, A. (1920) ‘Wings’, in Hungry Hearts, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, pp. 3–27.

10 The day of the girl Nell Brinkley and the New Woman Trina Robbins

Nell Brinkley’s (1886–1944) syndicated art and commentary once ran in newspapers across America, as well as in such national magazines as Harper’s, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping. She was also reprinted in England, and was a superstar of her time. During the height of her popularity in the 1910s to the 1920s, ‘The Brinkley Girl’ appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and inspired poems and at least three popular songs.1 Women who aspired to the clouds of curls she depicted on her elegant art nouveau beauties could even buy Nell Brinkley hair curlers, one of many products inspired by Brinkley. Her delicate pen work influenced later pioneer women cartoonists like Brenda Starr creator Dale Messick. For thirty years (1907–37), Nell Brinkley chronicled in her daily columns the new American woman of the twentieth century, a woman who went to work, played an important part in the First World War, got the vote, removed her corsets, and became a flapper, smoking and drinking with the boys. It is easy for the reader to be seduced by the innocent sexuality of the Brinkley Girl, and to see the artist as nothing more than ‘past master as a cheesecake artist’, as she was called in her obituary in the American Artist (1945). However, a second and third look at her work reveals the feminism in Brinkley’s art – an often sugarcoated, post-Victorian feminism, but feminism nonetheless. Brinkley was compared to Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the ‘Gibson Girl’, her contemporary during the early part of her career. (‘The late Nell Brinkley attracted more copyists than did Charles Dana Gibson’, reads her obituary in the American Artist in 1945.) Coincidentally, her first major assignment for the Hearst papers in 1907 was as a trial artist for the Harry K. Thaw murder trial. In this first ‘crime of the century’, Thaw stood accused of killing famed architect Stanford White over the affections of beautiful model and ex-Floradora Girl, Evelyn Nesbitt, Thaw’s wife and White’s ex-lover. Nesbitt had been a model for Charles Dana Gibson and was considered the quintessential Gibson Girl. But the ‘Gibson Girl’, despite her pretensions to independence, was a static creature (see Figure 10.1). She was never shown doing anything more strenuous than posing on a golf course in a stylish suit, while her ardent suitors

Figure 10.1 Art by Charles Dana Gibson (top) and Nell Brinkley (bottom): a comparison. Charles Dana Gibson’s art is from 1910. Nell Brinkley’s art from Hearst newspapers, 25 September 1914.

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feverishly search for her lost ball,2 or sitting on the beach in a bathing suit – yet she never went into the water, nor was she drawn actually playing golf! Later in her career, Brinkley was contemporary with John Held Jr., whose art has become synonymous with the flapper of the ‘roaring twenties’. Held’s flappers are more active, as befits jazz age characters. But their activity mostly consists of dancing the Charleston. Brinkley’s women, on the other hand, are in constant motion. They are depicted playing tennis and swimming (their bathing suits actually get wet), they bicycle, ride horses and hunt. Gibson’s women smile enigmatically, Edwardian Mona Lisas. Brinkley’s women laugh with their mouths wide open, their loose hair blowing in the wind – and most important, they work. The Gibson Girl and the Held flapper have rich daddies. Gibson’s women are debutantes and Held’s flappers are coeds at the most expensive colleges. As Angelica Köhler points out in Chapter 9, the Gibson Girl is also educated – and in those days that meant a costly women’s college. Held’s flappers and Gibson’s girls will never work a day in their lives. But as early as 1913, Brinkley, who herself left high school at the age of 17 to pursue her career, drew working women, from factory and farm workers to ‘career girls’, and wrote about them in the florid, overblown style which was fashionable at the time: ‘The valiant army of girls who do battle shoulder to shoulder with men’ (Brinkley 1913); ‘Her pretty fingers are dabbled in everything that a man can do – and the fingers are agile and skilled too, my friend’ (Brinkley 1914); ‘She has the same aspirations . . . the same weariness, the same rewards [as working men]. And just as you do, she gets money for the talent she markets’ (Brinkley 1916a); ‘Farther away was another figure, a feminine one, in kerchief and rough skirt, raking rhythmically . . . there are women in the world, Mimi, who help in the field. Did you know that?’ (Brinkley 1932b). One of Brinkley’s favourite subjects was the comparison of rich women of leisure with working girls, and her art shows, rather than tells us, where her sympathies lie. In her 1915 panel, ‘The Tug of War’ (Figure 10.2), rich girls, identified by their ruffles, frills and fancy hats, engage in a tug of war with the more simply dressed working women. The rich girls laugh – this is a game to them – but the working girls concentrate, grim and serious. The ‘tug of war’ symbolizes their struggle in the America of 1915, where they must fight against prejudice and disapproval. In Chapter 9, Angelica Köhler shows us image upon image of women whose choice of career over marriage ends in unhappiness, even tragedy. Brinkley’s depictions of career women are a complete opposite from those images. Compare ‘The Success’, in the panel ‘Two Sisters of the Future’ (Figure 9.9), with Brinkley’s ‘Miss 1914’, in ‘Too Busy’ (Figures 10.3 and 10.4). Both women sit alone at their desks in their offices. The Success, depicted in mannish attire, complete with tie, broods over her cigar, lonely and dissatisfied. The woman in the poster behind her head, running for

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Figure 10.2 ‘Tug of War’, from an undated Hearst newspaper clipping, 1915.

Congress, presents a clichéd image of the feminist with her frowning face and pince-nez. On the other hand, the beautiful, fashionably dressed Miss 1914 is herself a politician! It says so on her door, in the list of her accomplishments: ‘Real Estate, Dr. of Medicine, Lawyer, Architect, Chemist, Broker, Politician, Scientist, Consulting Engineer, Editor, Voter.’ Outside her door waits the ubiquitous Cupid, and it is he who smokes the cigar. Brinkley, who would never have dreamed of suggesting that women might not marry, simply shows us that Miss 1914, quite happy in her accomplishments, will find romance and marry when she is good and ready. Although, with the exception of Gibson, I do not know the gender of the artists whose work Angelica Köhler displays in Chapter 9, there is a strong probability that they were male, and that a major reason for Brinkley’s differing views on working women was her sex. Brinkley, herself a career woman, supported her mother and possibly her father by producing a daily panel for thirty years. She knew what hard work was, and she tells us quite a bit about herself in her art. A 1927 selfportrait (Figure 10.5) depicts Brinkley herself slaving over a drawing board late at night,3 with the full moon outside her window, and gives advice to aspiring artists: ‘WORK! . . . Just PLAIN OLD WORK. And even

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Figure 10.3 ‘Too Busy’, from an undated Hearst newspaper clipping, 1914 (1).

after Fame is your partner, it isn’t all indorsing (sic) checks and going to teas with other famous people. It’s still just PLAIN OLD WORK!’ (Brinkley 1927, emphasis in original). Brinkley was a practical woman who knew exactly which side her bread was buttered on. Her public and her boss, publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, demanded romance, so she supplied them with beautiful ‘Brinkley Girls’, handsome men and enough roly-poly cherubs to fill the Vatican.4 She also provided enthusiastic reviews and beautiful portraits of Hearst’s mistress, actress Marion Davies. But for every twenty romantic panels she supplied, she would do one on the subject of suffrage or working women, or – one of her favourite subjects – women active in sports or the outdoors. One of the series Nell produced between 1910 and

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Trina Robbins Figure 10.4 Too Busy (2).

1930 was called ‘The Day of the Girl’. This was her 1915 commentary which ran beneath the illustration: ‘She tramps the pine woods and the hill in knickerbockers, her waist free of corseting and her limbs of skirts; her pack on her shoulder; and never missing man!’ (Brinkley 1915). In a 1920 drawing (Figure 10.6), Brinkley debunks the stereotype of the ‘ugly feminist’ by showing two women sitting side by side in a streetcar. One, in a mannish suit and hat and pince-nez, reads ‘Young Love, a Novel’, while the other, smothered in lace, furs and fluff, called by Nell a ‘Fluffy, trailing female’, studies Essays in Political Economy, ‘a thin volume of high-brow dope’ (Brinkley 1920). The fluffy girl with the serious book can be considered a statement about the artist herself. In 1916, America would not enter the war for another year, but Brinkley was already drawing patriotic cartoons, to which she added a feminist element. One of these drawings depicted three of the typically beautiful

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Figure 10.5 ‘Fame’, 25 May 1927.

women for which Brinkley was famous, one dressed as the goddess Liberty, one in uniform and the third wrapped in a banner that said ‘Suffrage’. The copy running beneath this picture read: ‘Any man who loves and reveres his mother and his country should idolize, if he worships at all, the three graces, Suffrage, Preparedness and Americanism’ (Brinkley 1916b). When America entered the First World War, women flocked to Washington, DC, to take over the desk jobs abandoned by young men who enlisted. Brinkley produced a series called ‘Girls Who Work For Uncle Sam.’ Using wheedling purple prose that would horrify today’s feminists, she called for decent pay and pensions for thousands of young women working for the war effort. She also finally dared voice the possibility that

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Figure 10.6 ‘Clothes Don’t Always Make the Woman’, 6 August 1920.

some of these women might never marry, although never suggesting that this might be a good thing: Don’t you think, as I think, that they deserve good pay . . . and a pension, after Uncle Sam is through with them . . . so that if the dream they all dream of – a home and a man and a child . . . does not come true – his schoolgirls will be taken care of? (Brinkley 1918a) In 1918, Washington, DC landlords would not rent to single young women, and could get away with it, too. Brinkley proposed the idea of a military-style barracks for the young female war workers: What you goin’ to do about it, Uncle Sam . . . ? You goin’ to let them curl up on park benches . . . their first night in your great white town? You goin’ to let them run into the barbed wire entanglement of a glaring apartment house sign that says . . . ‘No dogs, no children, and NO YOUNG LADIES?’ When you goin’ to put up . . . a barracks, as you do for your other soldiers? (Brinkley 1918b, emphasis in original)

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Brinkley’s feminism and patriotic fervour culminated in a full-colour serialized newspaper adventure, ‘Golden-Eyes and Her Hero, Bill, Over There’. In a tale worthy of the old Pearl White films, the heroine, GoldenEyes, follows her soldier sweetheart, Bill, to France ‘over there’. In France she steals military secrets from a German spy, opens an abandoned chateau to war orphans and finally rescues her wounded ‘hero’ from the battlefield. Here, Nell describes the heroine and her faithful collie hidden in No-Man’s Land, overhearing the enemy plans for a raid. The writing is classic vintage Nell: Hearing voices in a rough, lowered tongue with the hated guttural hissing, dog and girl dropped and crawled . . . nearer and nearer, their two hearts thumping on the rough ground they hugged. . . . Out of sight, dug in from wind and enemy, Germans were talking low of a coming big raid on the trench their own Bill held! Later the ghost-moon saw two wild figures . . . running – running – reckless of barbed wire and holes . . . ‘We got to be on time, DollDog!’ panted Golden-Eyes, gone ungrammatical and caressing with excitement. (Brinkley 1919, emphasis in original) By the 1930s Brinkley was drawing and writing about her heroines: Amelia Earhardt and, Eleanor Roosevelt. She produced the series ‘Heroines of Today’, depicting, among others, a woman detective, forest warden and a fighter in the Spanish Civil War. In 1932 she described Amelia Earhardt while writing of the New Woman: THIS is better than what [the Victorian woman] had – her body freedom, with the world her playground, even as the men . . . a girl, flying down a track, bare legged, bare armed . . . she has brown legs like a Greek boy . . . a jockey, winning a race . . . And THIS. A girl in a man’s overall and leather coat, big shoes, a helmet in her hand. The air is free for her, too. She flew the Atlantic, alone in a ship in the air! (Brinkley 1932a, emphasis in original) While the less positive female images of ‘The Gibson Girl’ and the Held flapper live on, ‘The Brinkley Girl’ is today forgotten except by a small cult following. America has long suffered from a collective amnesia with regard to women artists. Not so long ago, it was a widely accepted belief that they simply had never existed. Then great artists like Frida Kahlo, Tamara De Lempicka and Artemesia Gentileschi were rediscovered, primarily by other women. Nell Brinkley is long overdue for rediscovery.

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Notes Trina Robbins’s biography, Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century, was published in 2001 by McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina, USA. Her article about the most famous aspect of Nell Brinkley’s work, her beautiful women, ‘Nell Brinkley and the Brinkley Girls’, can be found in issue 8 of Illustrator Magazine. 1 ‘The Nell Brinkley Girl’ (1908), ‘The Brinkley Bathing Girl’ (1909) and the unfortunately racist ‘The Brinkley Coon’ (1909) are three that I know of. There may have been more. 2 See ‘Advice to Caddies’, Chapter 9, Figure 9.2 in this volume. 3 In an interview (7 May 1932) in the New Rochelle Standard Star, Brinkley stated that she worked from nine in the morning until sometimes after six at night. 4 Brinkley was not alone in her overabundance of Cupids. As Angelica Köhler points out in Chapter 9, women depicted in the satirical weekly Life, between 1890 and 1915, seemed always to be accompanied by Cupid.

Bibliography American Illustrators Research Group (1980) American Illustrators Research Group 1980 Annual, Huntington Beach: American Illustrators Research Group. Armitage, S. (1987) John Held, Jr., Illustrator of the Jazz Age, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Brinkley, N. (1913) ‘A Business Girl’, Hearst Newspapers, 23 September. —— (1914) ‘Too Busy’, Hearst Newspapers. (The exact date is missing from this newspaper clipping.) —— (1915) ‘The Day of the Girl’, Hearst Newspapers. (The exact date is missing from this newspaper clipping.) —— (1916a) ‘Careers’, Hearst Newspapers. (The exact date is missing from this newspaper clipping.) —— (1916b) ‘The Three Graces’, Hearst Newspapers. (The exact date is missing from this clipped-out illustration.) —— (1918a) ‘Uncle Sam’s Little Schoolgirls’, Hearst Newspapers. (The exact date is missing from this clipped-out illustration.) —— (1918b) ‘Uncle Sam’s Girl-Shower’, Hearst Newspapers. (The exact date is missing from this clipped-out illustration.) —— (1919) ‘Golden-Eyes and Her Hero “Bill” Over There’, Hearst Newspapers, America Weekly Sunday Section, 19 January, p. 1. —— (1920) ‘Clothes Don’t Always Make the Woman’, Hearst Newspapers, 6 August. —— (1927) ‘Fame, the Dream and Reality’, Hearst Newspapers, 23 May. —— (1932a) ‘Can Such Things Be?’, Hearst Newspapers, 6 August. —— (1932b) ‘I Know a Discontented Lady’, Hearst Newspapers, 29 October. Carter, A. (2000) The Red Rose Girls, New York: Harry N. Abrams. Horn, M. (1980) World Encyclopedia of Comics, New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Kessler-Harris, A. (1982) Out to Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millstein, B. and Bodin, J. (1977) We, the American Women, Chicago: Science Research Associates. Reed, W. and Reed, R. (1984) The Illustrator in America, 1880–1980, New York: The Society of Illustrators. Robbins, T. (1993) A Century of Women Cartoonists, Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press.

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—— (2001) Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century, Jefferson: McFarland & Company. —— and Yronwode, C. (1985) Women and the Comics, Guerneville: Eclipse Books. Ross, I. (1936) Ladies of the Press, New York: Harper and Brothers. Rowbotham, S. (1997) A Century of Women, New York: Viking. Scott, A.F. (1971) The American Woman, Who Was She? Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall. Society of Illustrators (1985) America’s Great Women Illustrators 1850–1950, New York: The Society of Illustrators. Thaw, H.K. (1926) The Traitor, Philadelphia: Dorrance and Company.

11 ‘The woman of the twentieth century’ The feminist vision and its reception in the Hungarian press 1904–14 Judit Acsády In 1901 a book was published in Budapest under the title The Woman of the Twentieth Century.1 This book consisted of four essays, the first of which had the same title as the book itself. The first essay’s importance, in relation to this present book’s focus on New Woman hybridities, is related to the fact that the author, Rozina Mársits, began her piece with an explanation of the meaning of the English expression ‘New Woman’. According to Mársits, the concept ‘New Woman’ was introduced to the Hungarian literary language as the ‘Woman of the twentieth century’ (Mársits 1901: 3). Before taking a closer look at the text itself, I want to discuss its context and social setting: the place, time and the person who wrote the text. As with all the largely-forgotten early feminist Hungarian authors, little is known today about Rozina Mársits’s life and work. The information given in biographical encyclopaedias is that she was a directress of a girls’ high school in the town of Temesvár (now in Romania). She published a trilogy, ‘Three Monologues for Girls’, containing educational advice for young girls. It is also documented that she travelled to England and spent some time there observing English culture, contemporary gender relations and, her primary interest, the educational system. The Woman of the Twentieth Century describes the social status of the English, that is ‘Western’, woman, comparing it with the situation in Hungary. Mársits explains to her Hungarian public what women’s emancipation is about and what ‘Western’, emancipated, ‘New’ women look like. She documents everyday manners, ways of behaviour and communication between men and women as she observed them in Britain. She thinks the appearance of the emancipated, liberated New Woman, who is the product of the long struggle of British women, will have a liberating influence on women’s position in marriage, on gender relations in society in general and on moral standards. Unlike most of her contemporaries in Hungary, Mársits welcomes the emancipatory social changes and believes that the Hungarian woman of the twentieth century will eventually resemble the British New Woman.

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By the time Rozina Mársits published her booklet, Hungarian readers of the newly emerging women’s fiction would already have come across a different version of a New Woman. The first two generations of educated Hungarian women2 served as models for the heroines of women’s fiction (Schwartz 1999: 82). The heroines of these novels were usually described as educated, professionally trained women, employed mostly as teachers or secretaries. Yet they were not described as happy, truly liberated individuals. Although they had a career and earned their own money, there was nothing to make this economic independence enjoyable for them. The new situation was different and difficult to handle, and they ‘did not know what to do with it’ (ibid.: 83). They hardly knew ‘how to live’, as a heroine says in a short story (‘First Love’) published in the most prominent Hungarian literary review of the age, Nyugat (The West).3 The most frequent stereotype attached to educated professional women was that they were not happy in their private lives and had lousy marriages (if they had succeeded in getting married at all). This offers exciting analogies with the heroines of Japanese fiction, as discussed by Muta Kazue in Chapter 12. According to Muta, many Japanese heroines had an equally hard time leading the life of a New Woman. Clearly, the patriarchal societies of neither the West nor the East were ready to accept the New Woman (ibid.). The other explanation as to why the heroines of women’s fiction of the early twentieth century felt so ambivalent about the roles of emancipated women is that the authors themselves were not able to overcome the sexist stereotypes of the age within their own ways of thinking. Although at first glance the British influence might seem very strong in formulating the image of the New Woman in Hungary, I want to argue that there were at least two Hungarian trends, beginning in the nineteenth century, which led to a turn-of-the-century New Woman or emancipated woman discourse. The main catalysts for bringing these concepts to life in public thought were the activists of the women’s education movement in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first-wave feminists in Hungary. Academic research on women’s suffrage, feminism and women’s history is only now emerging in Hungary,4 and it is therefore important to contextualize the New Woman movement within this framework.5 The reason that Rozina Mársits’s approach was unique among contemporary writers was because she gave credit to emancipation and interpreted it as a positive achievement that, in her view, would benefit not only women but society as a whole. In the following I describe briefly the social settings in Hungary at the time and the leading figures within the Hungarian women’s movement who aimed to change existing notions of what a woman was to be like. An overview of a selection of contemporary journals will show how feminism was received and portrayed by the Hungarian press.

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Civil society: progressive women’s movements in the Habsburg monarchy By the turn of the century, Hungary as part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, entered the third decade of its modernization process which had started in the 1870s. Largely an agricultural country under the cultural, political and economic domination of the Habsburg dynasty, Hungary had just started to change. Industrial production became more and more significant, new methods were applied to agriculture and large construction works were carried out (including bridges in Budapest, the Houses of Parliament, railways). New cultural and academic institutions were founded (the National Library, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Kisfaludy Association and others). The turn of the century saw the flourishing of ambitious, progressive civil society associations. At that time 800 women’s organizations were said to exist all over the country. Most of these were charity groups and traditional local women’s clubs. Very few of the women’s groups made political claims. The charity groups, as for example the first reported women’s organization, the Pesti Jótékony No ˝egylet (Women’s Charity Organization) founded in Pest in 1817, did not necessarily challenge the prevailing patriarchal values and gender roles. Feminism and the critique of women’s subordinate position in society had two other roots in Hungary. One was the movement for women’s education starting in the mid-nineteenth century. This movement was part of the national struggle for independence and, to a certain extent, enjoyed the support of reform-party politicians, as the development in women’s education was believed to contribute to the improvement of the Hungarian national culture and the mother tongue. After 1849, with the fall of the national independence movement and the freedom war against the Habsburgs, the question of women’s education came to be foregrounded again thanks to the initiatives of an enthusiastic woman, Hermin Beniczky, also called Pálné Veres,6 who was the founder of the first secondary grammar school for girls. In the wake of this, public debates started on the pages of contemporary journals on what young girls should be taught, whether they should learn the arts, sciences, languages or only household skills. These debates are well documented from the 1880s onwards in the monthly periodical Nemzeti Nönevelés (National Women’s Education), founded in January 1886, and addressed teachers of girls’ schools, those involved in women’s education and the public in general, who were interested in the problems of education.7 The second antecedent of feminism was the organization of whitecollar women workers, No ˝tisztviselôk Országos Szövetsége (National Federation of Women Clerical Workers).8 The membership apparently consisted mostly of lower middle- class women.9 Apart from the labour movement, this organization was probably one of the most important at

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the time in protecting and furthering women employees’ interests and assisting them with information and moral support.

The feminist voice The first feminist organization in Hungary, called Feministák Egyesülete (Association of Feminists), was founded in Budapest in 1904 as part of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance. The Association had local groups in twenty-eight towns all over the country. According to the contemporary press, the members of the Association were from different layers of society, with different professional backgrounds: lower middleclass white-collar workers, factory workers, lower middle-class women teachers, intellectuals, and even urban upper middle-class housewives. It appears that most of the members were women in paid employment. The most successful phase of the Association was from the first decade of its existence until the First World War. Even though feminists defined themselves as politically independent,10 in the following decades they came to be persecuted by different political systems. During the First World War, feminists joined pacifist initiatives and forged closer political alliances with the social democratic women’s movement. They campaigned together in support of the war widows. After the war, the right-wing conservative government that had come to power in 1919 was hostile towards feminists and obstructed their organizations and activities. Afraid of political persecution, the most important members of the Association left the country (Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer settled in New York and later worked as a peace activist; Vilma Glücklich died at a young age in Vienna). After the Second World War the Association was re-established in 1946 and existed for three years, until the communist authorities banned it along with thousands of other civil society organizations. Turn-of-the-century feminists became a well-known feature of public life, not only because of their agitation and street demonstrations, but on account of the large numbers of public events they organized: discussions, meetings, lectures by foreign celebrities, concerts, exhibitions. The significance of the movement can also be illustrated by the fact that, in 1913, the seventh conference of the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance was held in Budapest.11 To help women with everyday problems, the Association of Feminists set up a consultancy, an office where several thousand women were reported to have requested occupational, educational, legal or personal advice. According to contemporary letters and applications by feminists to the City Council of Budapest, the city administration supported feminist activism not only morally but also financially.12 The fact that the city council of Budapest sustained good relations with feminists contradicts readings claiming that feminism was always isolated as a movement and had to contend with hostility and lack of support or understanding. A good example of the support of the city council was the

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opening of day-care centres for children set up with the active contribution of feminists as experts or voluntary workers.

Cultural feminism Beside political activism, a significant effort was made by feminists to challenge the contemporary concept of femininity. They argued against the idea that the characteristics attributed to women at that time were merely of biological origin and refused to take traditional roles for granted. As noted above, the two roots of first-wave feminist thinking in Hungary were the nineteenth-century movement for women’s education and the 1890 organization of employed women. To understand images of and approaches to the New Woman at the time, we must take a third factor into consideration. Hungary formed part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and as with other nations under foreign rule (see Chapters 1, 5 and 6 in this volume), constructions of national identity were always formed within this reference system. In the modernization process there was constant debate about what constituted ‘Hungarian’ identity and what did not. Modernization went hand-in-hand with the independence movement (Hungary’s struggle for independence from the Habsburgs) and the formation of the nation state and ‘national’ culture. Women’s emancipation and the appearance of the New Woman were often criticized as something foreign to Hungarian culture. That is why feminist writers made a determined effort to prove that the new role models did not interfere with Hungarian identity and could be made to fit cultural traditions. Yet these new images inevitably clashed with traditional concepts. As women’s educational movements gained ground in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a strong revival of patriarchal values. Why was there such a fierce conservative reaction? Those who opposed women’s education were afraid of losing the privileges guaranteed by the patriarchal value system. They created their version of the mythological ‘eternal woman’, whose innate femininity would be irretrievably lost once she was granted an education, especially if she were to develop an interest in science. ‘Thinking is not feminine’, they claimed.13 This was a moral base from which to fight against women’s education and their new social roles. The feminist recognition and deconstruction of the contradictions inherent in the myth of the ‘eternal feminine’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century largely contributed to the emergence of new values.

Feminist writers and the New Woman In light of their critical and innovative voices I consider Sarolta Geöcze, Rozina Mársits, Laura Polányi, Szidonia Willhelm, Flóra Perczelné Kozma and Rózsa Schwimmer to be the most significant Hungarian feminist writers of the first decade of the twentieth century. Rózsa Schwimmer was

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a brilliant journalist and famous orator, the founding member of the Feminist Association, and the editor of the feminist monthly No˝ és Társadalom (Women and Society).14 What was new in the approach of these writers was that they distinguished between the biological and cultural differences of men and women. They insisted that women’s subordination could not be justified with reference to their biological characteristics. Features considered typically female – gentleness, emotionality, stupidity, vanity – were not innate female attributes: ‘femininity’ was, they argued, a social construct. They analysed how the patriarchal value system insisted on keeping women ‘feminine’, noting that public life and power was constructed by mobilizing the very opposite qualities, the ‘manly’ kinds of skills. A ‘feminine’ woman did not threaten the patriarchal status quo. The model of the New Woman (Mársits 1901: 24) did not altogether clash with traditional notions of ‘femininity’. What were the new elements, and what can be interpreted as features closer to what we call the traditional woman’s image? In 1905 the Feminist Association published a booklet, Tájékoztatás a Feministák Egyesületének czéljairól és munkatervéro˝l (The Aims and Programme of the Feminist Association). Besides the definition of political goals, the text describes the New (here understood as emancipated) Woman who will be an equal partner of a man in the joint project of reforming society and creating a new way of living. In its wording, the booklet defined the main goal for society as accepting a woman simply as a ‘human being’. Feminists imagined the New Woman as economically independent, educated and engaged in a professional career or undertaking creative work. They saw her as autonomous (not necessarily single) and free to choose her spouse, not depending any longer on material necessity or parents’ preferences in marriage. Aims and Programme emphasized that the feminist agenda was not to break up families and was not against marriage as such, but aimed to challenge women’s subordinate and defenceless position within marriage. Feminists at this point believed in a symmetrical relationship in marriage, yet they reinforced the old myth by calling women the agents of the creation of harmony in the household. Similarly, they invoked the concept of motherhood in order to argue for women’s responsibility for society as a whole. It appears that the Association tried to find a fine balance or, rather, a combination of the new traits and the traditional ones. Other writers, such as Szidónia Willhelm (1908) and Laura Polányi, both of whom were members of the Association and published books about their own versions of feminism, added a new dimension to the question of women’s self-consciousness – their right to enjoy sex. Being liberated sexually and emotionally, they argued, would awaken women’s creativity (Willhelm 1908). The New Woman in Laura Polányi’s understanding would be ‘happy’. Women’s happiness meant their sexual liberation; that is, women should be encouraged to give voice to their own

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desires and to find ways to enjoy sex. Furthermore, the New Woman, as she appears in the writing of early feminists, should take part in political decision-making and public life. To sum up, the notion of political rights (to vote and to be elected) formulated by these feminist writers was not defined as an aim of the movement but rather it was seen as a means to change women’s subordinated position and social condition. Feminists hoped that once women were involved in political and public life, they would transform patriarchal culture. Yet they insisted that the emancipated New Woman would not lose her femininity and become masculinized. The New Woman was not without emotions. She was still responsible for her family, but now her caring, loving attitude as a mother was extended to all of society. In defence against actual political attacks, feminists pointed out that the woman of the twentieth century would remain a ‘Hungarian woman’ (Mársits 1901: 15). That is, following the ‘modernity’ path of the West, women would not lose their national identity; they would work for the benefit of Hungarian culture and society, and they would retain their national characteristics. In light of their colourful arguments and sometimes contradictory views, I see the significance of the early feminist writers in their being able to make distinctions between biological and cultural differences. They made it clear that most of the characteristics attributed to women were the result of socialization and educational neglect. Yet they sometimes shifted into essentialism about women’s roles as mothers and their inherent ability to create harmony.

Feminism as seen by the contemporary press Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), a review that first came out in Budapest in January 1900, was the first periodical of sociology published in Hungarian. In this journal the young science was understood as an interdisciplinary field. Its publishers and editors were open-minded radical democrats believing in social progress. They endeavoured to combine social criticism and politics with exact, scientific studies of society. This is why we can find economists, lawyers and ethnographers among the contributors of the magazine, as well as activists, theoreticians, politicians of different orientations, philosophers, writers and poets. Huszadik Század regularly followed the events of social movements, including feminism. Foreign and Hungarian conferences, lectures, events, publications or feminist actions were all reviewed in the journal. It also published studies about the history of feminism, essays and debates on feminist issues, with most contributors expressing their support of the movement and their criticism of the patriarchal system.15 Thus, in February 1909, Rózsa Schwimmer gave an account of a public debate organized by the Society of Hungarian Social Scientists in Budapest. On the basis of her thorough knowledge of the subject, she

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offered a well-grounded opinion of the different approaches emerging during the debate (Schwimmer 1909a). A series of articles examined women’s position from a sociological point of view. The following problems were discussed: marriage, the double moral standard (Huzella 1910: 278; Michower 1910: 104), women’s higher education (Székely 1911: 739), sexuality, contraception (Szilárd 1911: 161), sexual education (Harasztiné 1907: 237), nurses and breast feeding (Dirner 1906). These articles aimed to give exact descriptions of social issues or expressed political opinions. In 1909, Huszadik Század published a debate about women’s suffrage (9: 90–6). In the feminist journal A no˝ és Társadalom (Woman and Society, 1908: 172), several well-known politicians were quoted on the subject. They were MPs who supported women’s suffrage but did not have sufficient votes to get the principle accepted in the Hungarian parliamentary electoral law reform debate of 1908.

A brief account of daily newspapers and the local press in Budapest Feminism and questions of emancipation greatly excited and stirred the imagination of the turn-of-the-century Hungarian public. In addition to the wide distribution of the feminist monthly, A no˝ és a Társadalom, several hundred more articles in various newspapers, letters from readers and often fierce public debates testify to the enormous interest feminism generated at the time. Both radical and conservative journalism found it important to report on events organized by the international and Hungarian feminist movements. They put considerable effort into compiling arguments for and against women’s rights and the transformation of gender roles. There were numerous contributors expressing their opinions on whether women should change or, instead conform to the ‘traditional’ model. In this case, ‘traditional’ roles were understood mostly as taking responsibility for household matters, such as managing the work of servants and maids in the household (middle-class urban and rural families used to keep at least one servant to carry out several kinds of household duties)16 and overseeing the education of the children (again not necessarily a mother’s duty at the time but rather that of nursemaids). The papers reviewed in this analysis of how feminism and the New Woman were received are from two different collections. One is a set of articles from the years 1904 and 1905 (now kept in the Hungarian National Archive)17 collected ninety-five years ago by members of the Feminist Association who put the articles together, cutting them out from more than a dozen Hungarian journals (published in Budapest) and three foreign newspapers.18 The aim of the collection was probably to compile press responses to their own movement. The articles cover the period of the formation of the Association and the first year of feminist activism. The second set of articles that I review19 is from a special

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private collection dealing with feminism or the ‘woman question’ from contemporary local Hungarian journals of the countryside. At least four to five daily papers in Budapest regularly followed the events of the Association. Among the articles, which range from a few lines to three-page essays in length, we find reports about the foundation ceremony of the Feminist Association. The Friss Újság (Latest News) writes about the big crowded hall where excited women and journalists gathered on 18 December 1904. The Pesti Napló describes the audience as coming from different social classes: ‘university students alongside simple working women, middle-class ladies, spoiled glass-house girls.’ Like other journalists writing about the event, the author of the Pesti Napló (Pester Journal ) article welcomed the new Feminist Association, praising the ‘serious spirit in Hungarian society’ which led to the founding of such an organization. (Pesti Napló, 18 December 1904: 10).20 The speech of the founder and elected president, Vilma Glücklich, was highly appreciated.21 Soon, however, the early enthusiasm of the press seemed to turn into scepticism about feminist goals. The Budapest daily papers covered important events of the association, such as the visit of Carrie ChapmanCatt or other international celebrities like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who gave the opening speech at the Seventh International Suffragette Conference in Budapest in 1913 (Pesti Napló, 17 June 1913: 8). Mrs Chapman Catt gave lectures at several places in the country in 1909. While in the town of Temesvár, she was welcomed by an enthusiastic audience and called an excellent lecturer by the local paper (Temesvári Hírlap [Temesvár News], 16 March 1909: 3); however, a short time later the publicist ‘Margit’ of the Pesti Napló was very sceptical about the novelty and relevance of her lecture in Budapest (2 April 1909). On the occasion of a presentation by the most well-known Hungarian feminist speaker, Rózsa Schwimmer, the press was not reluctant to go into details about her ‘reform dress’22 that was supposed to be evidence of English influence. The feminist ‘uniform’, the reform dress (a straight cut not shaped to the figure, usually of grey or pastel colours) was sharply criticized by journalists.23 The most radical political criticism of the feminists in Hungary came from leftist papers, especially social democrats, who charged feminists with representing only middle-class women’s interest.24 Probably the strongest words ever used against feminism in Hungary were voiced during a debate on the educational law in parliament (1907), when the deputy, Baron Banffy, called feminists ‘cosmopolitan female monsters’.25 He argued that education transformed women into harridans and turned them against their families; it was evidently not in the nation’s interest to educate women. Contemporary local papers did not countenance such strong words, though there was malicious joy in many a journalist’s voice when reporting about the failed lecture by Rózsa Schwimmer in the town of Nagyvárad

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(where she was unable to find a common platform with the local women)26 or, in another local newspaper, reporting about the indifferent reception of Sylvia Pankhurst’s visit to Budapest on 11 April 1914 (Aradi Közlöny [Arad Review] 14 April 1914: 6). The mocking article gives a sarcastic description of the empty railway station, with no one waiting for the Western celebrity’s arrival. Yet an earlier article in the same journal from the year 1908 hailed Rózsa Schwimmer with great enthusiasm. In the report about her presentation in Arad she was described as heroic in her struggle for women’s rights and as someone who enjoyed all of society’s attention. A few months later another journalist reviewing a public lecture by Rózsa Schwimmer admitted that, contrary to his expectation that the invited feminist speaker would be unsightly, she had turned out to be a good-looking, mild, charming, well-proportioned lady (Aradi Közlöny, 4 March 1908: 3).27 On 16 March 1909, a reviewer in Temesvár Hírlap gave a similarly enthusiastic account of Mrs Carrie Chapman Catt’s visit to the town, where the ‘excellent speaker was passionately applauded by the audience’ (p. 3).28 The event of the big international conference, the Seventh International Suffrage Conference in Budapest (1913), received a large amount of publicity. Months before the event, magazines were publishing articles about the preparations and the previous year’s programme.29 During the conference, almost all the dailies gave day-by-day reports of the discussions. The media reflected on the conference in a proud tone (in this case warmly welcoming the suffragettes), expressing satisfaction that Budapest was able to host such a significant international event and thus to attract attention from all parts of the world. When the international suffragette delegation visited a country town in Transylvania, Temesvári Hirlap, on 25 June 1913, again gave an excited description of the warm reception by the local public at the station of Temesvár (‘A szüfrazsettek Temesvárott’ [‘Suffragettes in Temesvár]: 3). In 1914 the local daily of the town Arad, Aradi Közlöny, published an interview with Adél Spády, a leading Hungarian feminist activist, on the event of Sylvia Pankhurst’s visit to Budapest. In her explanation regarding Anglo-Hungarian feminist relations, she wrote: ‘we support the British feminists but we distance ourselves from violence’ (Aradi Közlöny, 11 April 1914: 6).30 She added that the East London Federation of Women Suffragettes was only one of dozens of organizations in England fighting for women’s rights, so one could not generalize when speaking about the women’s movement. It was probably important to calm down the Hungarian public by saying that not all activists followed the same ideas or used the same methods and that Hungarian feminists would remain on the ‘gentle’ side. In conclusion, even though feminism and the emancipated New Woman were first regarded as undesirable Western, foreign political imports, at the beginning of the twentieth century contemporary arguments testify to a

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deep interest in and excitement about the modernization project and women’s new roles in Hungary, especially because the opponents of women’s emancipation took the question seriously. Contemporary critics portrayed the feminist woman as someone wrecking Hungarian traditions. The aims of the movement were seen as being alien to Hungarian culture. In their response to this accusation, feminist authors created the model of the ‘Woman of the Twentieth Century’, attempting to find a balance between the challenges of modernization and local traditions. The images and notions of Hungarian feminists and their version of the New Woman resurfaced in the early 1990s in the transitional period after the five-decade-long problems of the non-democratic, one-party system. This long period in which there was an absence of feminist activism and the lack of any other civil society activism was a result of the years of state socialism.31 It seems, from the reception of recent feminist ideas, that many critics appear to know nothing about the earlier history of Hungarian feminism; they continue to attack feminist initiatives fiercely, having learned nothing from the debates of a hundred years ago.

Notes 1 Like all early Hungarian feminist texts, Rozina Mársits’s book has never been reprinted. This helps to explain why feminist aims and arguments of the turn of the century are largely unknown. A reprint edition of a selection of early Hungarian feminist texts (edited by Irén Elekes and Judit Acsády) is forthcoming with Csokonai in 2004. 2 The first secondary grammar school for girls was opened in 1869 as a result of a long campaign by an ambitious woman, Hermin Beniczky (Pálné Veres) and the society that she founded, No ˝képzo ˝ Egyesület (Association for Women’s Education). Prior to this date, women were excluded from secondary education. Hungarian universities first opened their doors to women in 1895. 3 Wanda Tóth, ‘Elso ˝ szerelem’ (‘First Love’), Nyugat, II (1911): 339–51 (cited in Schwartz 1999: 83). 4 Until recently, the German and Austrian political influences and activities of the turn-of-the-century Hungarian women’s movements have been at the forefront of historical research; see for example N. Szegvári (1988) and Zimmermann (1999). 5 In Chapter 2 of this volume, Nóra Séllei describes a similar situation in the field of Hungarian literary criticism, which still lacks feminist approaches and reinterpretations. 6 Hermin Beniczky signed her works under her maiden name or in conjunction with her married name, Pálné Veres. 7 The original issues of the monthly Nemzeti No˝nevelés are available for researchers in the Hungarian National Library (OSZK). 8 It is worth mentioning here that there was a strong element of women’s activism within the social democratic movement in the early twentieth century in Hungary, yet feminists were often viewed as forming part of the political opposition. 9 This assumption is not yet documented, as no biographical research has so far dealt with the background of the members of this movement, with the exception of the lives of two of the leading figures, Rózsa B. Schwimmer and Mariska Gárdos (Zimmermann 1996).

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10 They usually made alliances with politicians, who supported women’s suffrage in parliament, but the Feminist Association never followed party politics. Within their membership they tolerated different political values and trends, religious faiths and atheism. 11 The event is well documented in the daily papers, the monthly of the feminists, A no˝ és a Társadalom (Woman and Society) and can also be traced in the archive material of the Association (correspondence, minutes of gatherings, etc.) in the Hungarian National Archive. MOL. P999. Feministák Egyesülete. 12 Letters of the Feminist Association to the City Council. Budapest Archive. IV. 1704b. 4654 Eln. 13 See the debate on women’s right to higher education, the mid-nineteenthcentury debate about women writers, and the position of Gyula Andrássy, Minister of Home Affairs. His response to receiving the feminist delegation handing him the petition about women’s right to vote in 1908 in the Houses of Parliament in Budapest is widely quoted. He indicated that he was not worried about politics if women entered its realm, but that he was concerned about women, as politics was not designed for them. The event is described in the leading article of A no˝ és a Társadalom 2.4 (1908): 53–5. 14 A no˝ és Társadalom, the journal of the Feminist Association and the National Organization of Women Clerks, was first published in 1907. It was distributed all over the country. Letters of subscribers to the editors show the excitement and interest with which they were looking forward to receiving issues of the publication. See Correspondence of the Feminist Association (MOL. Hung. Nat. Archive. P 9999). The journal was renamed in 1913 as No˝ (Woman) and then appeared with a modified outlook and content. From this point onwards, it was politically close to the social democratic party’s women’s movement. 15 See the articles by Sandor Szterenyi, Ede Harkanyi and Rózsa Schwimmer. 16 Although the ‘cseléd’ (maid servant) and ‘dajka’ (nanny) question was on the agenda of the early feminists, a detailed discussion of relevant feminist initiatives is beyond the aims of this chapter. 17 The file of the Feminist Association at the Hungarian National Archive contains an interesting collection of articles titled ‘Sajtókönyv 1904 dec.–1905 dec’. This includes clips from contemporary dailies glued into an album. Most probably one of the members of the association was charged with monitoring the press and collect all pieces where feminists were mentioned. Unfortunately there are often no references as to where a given item originated from. 18 Hivatali Közlöny, Pesti Napló Budapesti Hirlap, M. Estilap, Pester Lloyd, Az Újság, Népszava, Friss Újság, Független Magyarország, Magyar Hirlap, Ügyvédek Lapja, Berliner Tagbladt, N.P. Journal. 19 I am grateful to Irén Elekes (Hungarian National Library, OSZK) for her kindness in allowing me to undertake research in her collection. 20 ‘a teremben egyetemisták, munkásno ˝k, polgárno ˝k, . . . egyszeru ˝ munkásasszonyok, az elkényeztetett üvegházi lánykák mellett érett, kenyerüket maguk kereso ˝ no ˝k’. Literally the Hungarian text translates as follows: ‘in the room [there are] university students, working class and middle-class women, . . . simple working women. Next to the spoiled glass-house girls are these mature working women who earn their own living.’ The author goes on to say: ‘köszöntsük a magyar társadalmat is, amiért komolyságának, lelkiismeretességének, becsületes idealizmusának kincse megszaporodott.’ The English translation is: ‘let’s praise Hungarian society as well because the fruits [treasures] of its serious spirit, consciousness and honest idealism have multiplied’ [as a result of the formation of the Feminist Association]. 21 The journal that seems to have offered most support to feminists was Vilag, a daily published by the free-masonry in Budapest.

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22 A dress not following the shape of the woman, a loose dress. 23 See, for example, an article in the daily local paper Szabadság, 21 July 1908: 3–4, published in Nagyvarad (Oradea, today in Romania). 24 In fact, social democrats misinterpreted the feminist goals, saying that they wanted votes only for educated women. True, feminists insisted on the importance of women’s education in terms of their emancipation, but in their political aims it was evident that they struggled for the universal franchise (for men and women equally), without exceptions. 25 ‘Cosmopolitan female monsters’ reads in the Hungarian original as ‘kozmopolita no ˝i szörnyek’. The Baron’s speech is quoted in the feminist monthly A no˝ és Társadalom, edited by Rózsa Schwimmer, 1.2 (1907): 3. 26 Szabadság, 21 July 1908: 3–4. 27 The article was entitled ‘No ˝k a felolvasóasztalnál. Bédy-Schwimmer Rózsa a Kölcsey-egyesületben’ (‘The lecturing woman B. Schwimmer at the Kölcsey Association’). 28 ‘A kitu ˝no ˝ szónokot lelkesen megéljenezték’. 29 See Nemzeti No˝nevelés, No˝ és a társadalom, 1913. 30 ‘Szolidárisak vagyunk a brit feministákkal, de az ero ˝szaktól elhatárolódunk’. 31 The only feminist event documented is a collection of signatures in 1973 against a proposed restriction of abortion. The three leading organizers of the event (Piroska Márkus, Zsuzsa Ko ˝rösi, Júlia Veres), university students at the time, were persecuted by the police, left the country and settled in Western Europe.

Bibliography Contemporary journals and archival sources A no ˝ és a Társadalom (Woman and Society) Aradi Közlöny (The Arad Review) Correspondence of the Feminist Association. MOL. Hung. Nat. Archive. P 9999. Friss Újság (Latest News) Gergely, J. (n.d.) A feminizmus története (The History of Feminism). Manuscript. Hungarian National Archive. P999. 19.cs. 33. ‘Határozat Feloszlatás Ügyében’ (Declaration) Budapest Archive, 1949. BM SZ. 400.O81./IV. Huszadik Század (The Twentieth Century) Letters of the Feminist Association to the City Council. Budapest Archive. IV. 1704b. 4654 Eln. Nemzeti No˝nevelés (National Women’s Education) Pesti Napló (Pester Journal) ‘Sajtókönyv 1904 dec.–1905 dec.’ (Press Book’, a collection of articles in an album held in the Hungarian National Archive). P 999. File, ‘Feministák Egyesülete’ (‘Feminist Association’). Szabadság (Liberty) Temesvári Hírlap (Temesvár News) Világ (The World)

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Criticism Acsády, J. (1999) ‘A magyarországi feminizmus a századelo ˝n’ (‘Hungarian Feminism at the Turn of the Century’), in L. Püski, L. Timár, and T. Valuch (eds) Politika, Gazdaság és Társadalom a XX. Századi Magyar Történelemben, I. (Politics, Economy and Society in Twentieth-Century Hungarian History), Debrecen KLTE. Történelemi Intézet. ( Jelenkortörténeti Mühely II.) (’University of Debrecen, History Institute), pp. 295–311. Elekes, I.B. (1995) ’Vengerkák, hungarák, kéjhölgyek: A leánykereskedelem és a prostitúció századeleji feminista kritikája’ (‘Hungarian Girls for Sale: The Feminist Criticism of Prostitution at the Turn of the Century), No˝személy (The Female Person), III.6–7: 44–5. Fábri, A. (1999) A no˝ és hivatása: Szemelvények a magyarországi no˝kérdés történetébo˝l 1777–1865 (Woman and her Vocation: Documents of the History of Hungarian Women), Budapest: Kortárs Kiadó. Geöcze, S. (1899) No˝ a modern társadalomban (Woman in Modern Society), Budapest: Franklin. Harasztiné, Sz. A. (1907) ‘Szerelmi nevelésre van szükség’ (‘There is a Need for Sexual Education’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century): 237–44. Horváth, A. (1995) ‘Nôk és a politika a század elsô éveiben’ (‘Women and Politics in the First Years of the Century’), in T. Valuch (ed.) Hatalom és társadalom a XX:századi magyar történelemben (Power and Society in Twentieth-Century Hungarian Society), Budapest: Osiris kiadó.-1956-os Intézet, 370–88. Huzella, G. (1910) ‘A szerelem válsága’ (‘The Crisis of Love’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), 1910, vol. 11: 278–9. Jánossy, G. (1911) A feminizmus Magyarországon (Feminism in Hungary). Szombathely: A szerzo ˝ kiadása (private publication). Kármán, M. (1906) Feminismus és paedagogia: Elnöki megnyitóbeszéd. Zircen Janka Emlékünnepély (Feminism and Paedagogy: Lecture for the Celebration of Janka Zirzen). Budapest: n.p. (private publication). Kenedi, G. (1911) ‘Magyar Feminizmus’ (‘Hungarian Feminism’), Magyar Figyelo˝ (Hungarian Review), I.1: 51–61. Kovács, M. (1994) ‘A magyar feminizmus korszakfordulója’ (‘Hungarian Feminism’), Café Babel, II (Summer): 179–83. Mársits, R. (1901) A XX. század asszonya (The Woman of the Twentieth Century), Budapest: Lampel, Korvin. Michower, E. (1910) ‘Jegyzetek a nemek pszichológiájához’ (‘Notes on the Psychology of Gender’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century): 104–7. N. Szegvári, K. (1988) ‘Az antifeminizmus történelmi gyökerel a no ˝k felvételének ügye az elso ˝ világháború elo ˝tt’ (‘The Historical Roots of Anti-Feminism: The Issue of Women’s Admission to Universities before the First World War’), in N. Szegvári, K. (1988) Numerus clausus intézkedések az ellenforradalmi Magyarországon. (The Regulations of Numerous Clauses in Hungary between the Two World Wars), Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 52–85. Petô, A. (1995) ‘As the Storm Approached. The Last Years of the Hungarian Women’s Societies Before the Stalinist Takeover’, in A. Petô (ed.) History Department Yearbook 1994–95, Budapest: Central European University, 181–206. Polányi, L.S.S. (1906) Néhány szó a no˝ro˝l s no˝nevelésro˝l (Some Words About Women and Women’s Education), Budapest: Czettel-Deutsch.

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Schwartz, A. (1999) ‘The Image of the “New Woman” in the Hungarian Women’s Literature at the Turn of the Century’, Hungarian Studies Review, XXVI.1–2: 81–92. Schwimmer, R. (1909a) ‘Vita a feminizmusról’ (‘Debate on Feminism’), A no˝ és a Társadalom (Woman and Society), III: 35–8. —— (1909b) ‘ Kortörténeti dokumentum’ (‘Document of the Age’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), III.1: 1–2. Székely, A. (1911) ‘Nôk és vagyontalanok a budapesti egyetemeken’ (‘Women and the Poor at the University’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century): 739–40. Szilárd, Ö. (1911) ‘A magzatelhajtás jogi és szociális szempontból’ felolvasás’ (‘Lecture on Abortion from the Social and Legal Point of View’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century): 161–73. Szterényi, S., Dr. (1900a) ‘Feminista propaganda’ (‘The Feminist Propaganda’), Hsuzadik Század (‘Twentieth Century’), I: 362–8. —— (1900b) ‘A feminismus’ (‘Feminism’), Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), I: 461–73. Tájékoztatás a Feministák Egyesületének czéljáról és munkatervérôl (Announcement of the Aims and Projects of the Feminist Association) (1905) Budapest: Márkus Samu Könyvnyomdája. Willhelm, S. (1908) Szerelem házasság feminista tükörben (Love and Marriage in the Feminist Mirror), Budapest: Benko ˝, Röttig ny. Zimmermann, S. (1996) ‘Hogyan lettek feministák? Gárdos Mariska és Schwimmer Rózsika a századforduló Magyarországán’ (‘How Did Mariska Gárdos and Rózsika Schwimmer Become Feminists at the Turn of the Century in Hungary?), Eszmélet, 32: 57–92. —— (1999) Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1915 (The Better Half? The Women’s Movement and the Woman Question in Habsburg Hungary 1848–1915), Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó. Zsuppán, F.T. (1989) ‘The Reception of the Hungarian Feminist Movement 1904–14’, in R. Pysent (ed.) Decadence and Innovation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp. 61–5.

12 The New Woman in Japan Radicalism and ambivalence towards love and sex1 Muta Kazue

The ‘New Woman’ did not only emerge in Britain or mainland Europe. As Richardson in Chapter 14 phrases it, the New Woman was a transatlantic phenomenon. In fact, the phenomenon of the New Woman was more widespread than that. She appeared in the East, in Japan, Korea and China, both on the continent and in Taiwan, at nearly the same time as in the West. Although this New Woman did not arise indigenously and was certainly influenced by the West, she was not merely a carbon copy of her Western counterpart, but displayed distinct characteristics within the respective historical contexts.2 In this chapter I focus on the New Woman in Japan. In Japan, a feminist magazine that started publication in 1911 became the symbol of the New Woman. The name of the magazine, Seito¯ (Bluestocking), was derived from the well-known women’s literary group in eighteenth-century London. This chapter focuses mainly on Seito¯ and the women who were in charge of its publication and content. First, however, I will briefly discuss the preceding historical time frame. It was in the early 1900s that the New Woman became a topic of discussion in magazines and newspapers in Japan. Articles and treatises on a new type of female lifestyle, behaviour and attitude increasingly appeared in the press. Previous research has shown that the term ‘New Woman’ (‘atarashii onna’) was used for the first time by Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯, a Tokyo Imperial University professor of English and a playwright, in a lecture entitled ‘The New Woman in Modern Theatre’ which he gave at the Symposium of the Osaka City Educational Board in July 1910 (see Ide 1987; Horiba 1988; Sasaki 1994). However, the origin of the term dates back slightly earlier. Newspapers and magazines introduced the phrase ‘the latest type of New Woman’ when reporting on women’s movements such as the campaign for women’s suffrage in Europe and America.3 The introduction and diffusion of these new thoughts and movements by women abroad contributed, to a certain extent, to the spread of the general expression ‘The New Woman’, even before Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ introduced the phrase in his lecture. The new type of woman also appeared as a character in fiction. In the early 1900s, many novels depicted a new type of heroine to appeal to the

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popular imagination, such as Mineko in Sanshiro¯ (1908) by Natsume So¯seki, or Oise in Futon (1907) by Tayama Katai. In the novel Inochi no Hikari (Light of Life) (1908) written by Yanagawa Shunyo¯ (serialised in Fujin Shinbun [Women’s Newspaper]: 426) on the awakening of female consciousness, the heroine observes, ‘no matter how hard it might be, from now on we have to live the life of a new woman’ (1908, no. 426, my emphasis).4 Generally, those heroines were portrayed as educated women or high school girls who were unconventional, ambitious and amorous, and therefore destined for eventual degradation. It was unquestionably Sho¯yo¯’s lecture of 1910 that used the expression New Woman as a specific term and led to its use by a wider audience. In that lecture Sho¯yo¯ mentioned the activity of the women’s movements in the West, and in particular discussed a new trend in European theatre portraying a new type of woman, such as the character Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In May 1911, four months before the inauguration of Seito¯, a series of articles appeared in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper on the rise of the New Woman as a trend in Japan. The series, written by Ko¯ten-sei, was entitled ‘The New Woman’ (‘Atarashiki Onna’). The first issue stated: ‘The rise of women’s movements all over the world is unstoppable. This trend is called feminism’ (Asahi 18 May 1911).5 A later issue made reference to the names of several women, both famous and unknown, including a few future Seito¯ staff members. Horiba Kiyoko points out that ‘New Woman’ was initially a concept used to describe the type of decent, young, desirable woman fit for a new society and era, represented by the young ladies attending renowned girls’ schools and with respectable family backgrounds. But she argues that, judging from the women featured in the series, the term here referred to a different idea. According to Horiba, they all differed in their newness, but in the series of articles the term ‘New Woman’ referred to women who diverged from formerly accepted standards and criteria (Horiba 1988: 69–71). Furthermore, the Literary Association led by Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ staged A Doll’s House in November 1911 at the Imperial Theatre, after a tryout in September of that year at the personal residence of Tsubouchi. Boosted by the popularity of leading actress Matsui Sumako, the scenes of Nora’s awakening to a new self and her transformation from an obedient wife into a rebel against her husband became the talk of the town. Within this environment of discourses and media attention, the concept and image of the New Woman spread through early twentiethcentury Japan. Some articles or treatises were simply informative or educational, but most were derogatory, revealing the astonishment and curiosity of Japanese men when faced with a new type of woman. How did the phenomenon of the New Woman arise? First, owing to the expansion of women’s education, schoolgirls and college women grew in

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numbers and became increasingly visible. Their clothing and appearance looked modern and thus ‘new’. Secondary education for girls was institutionalized at the national level in 1899, thirteen years after that for boys. As for higher education, women were not allowed to attend university, but women’s colleges were established, beginning in 1901, albeit in limited numbers. Girls and women educated in those schools generated attention as a result of both their activities and appearance. Their enjoyment of sports such as tennis and bicycle riding was enough to raise curiosity. These female students symbolized an aspect of change in modernizing Japanese society as it encountered the West. People were critical of these women but, at the same time, admired them. Second, in the field of literature, women writers and poets made successful debuts. A literary magazine for women, Joshi bundan (Literary World of Women), started publication in 1905 and was a commercial success. More than a few educated women held ambitions in the field of writing because limited career opportunities were available for middle-class women, excepting work as elementary school teachers. To be a professional writer or novelist was one of the few ways for a woman to gain economic independence. Some of their works were truly distinguished in revealing an unconventional and new womanhood heretofore unseen in Japanese society. For example, the poet Yosano Akiko, who would become an important contributor to Seito¯, expressed the sensual emotions of women in her 1901 work Midaregami (Tangled Hair). It is noteworthy that the New Woman in Japan was different from her counterpart in the West, at least in a very important aspect: the New Woman phenomenon in Japan did not appear in connection with the suffrage movement and related activities. This might sound odd because suffrage was very crucial in defining the New Woman universally, as demonstrated in this volume. As detailed by Brake, even opposition to suffrage was an important part of the phenomenon. In the Japanese case, however, women’s suffrage barely became a real issue until the 1920s, around the time when universal male suffrage was introduced in 1925. The Japanese New Woman came to the scene without political leverage.

The first feminist magazine, Seito¯, and the New Woman It was in September 1911 that the first and most influential feminist magazine in Japan was issued, in Tokyo. The editor and leading executive was Hiratsuka Raicho¯, who had already caused a scandal because of her mysterious love affair with the young male writer Morita So¯hei in March 1908, three years prior to the publication of the magazine. In the front pages of the premier issue, Seito¯ proclaimed women’s spiritual revelation and encouraged women’s talents to flourish. A distinguished poet, Yosano Akiko wrote a verse glorifying the women’s movement

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to celebrate the publication. The lines retain their appeal for feminism even today: The Day the Mountains Move The day the mountains move has come. I claim this, but no one believes me. For a time the mountains have been asleep, But long ago they all danced with fire. It does not matter if you believe this, My friends, as long as you believe: All the sleeping women are now awake and moving.6 (Seito¯ 1, 1911: 1–2) Seito¯ was a monthly periodical and it only appeared for four-and-a-half years; it was primarily a literary magazine without a clear political aim. But it generated greater attention and had more influence than any preceding women’s magazine. Seito¯ soon became a symbol of the New Woman. Right after the publication of Seito¯, several major newspapers and magazines strove to launch special editions on the New Woman, usually including references to numerous staff members of Seito¯. The newspaper Yomiuri ran a series of twenty-five articles on the subject starting on 5 May 1912. Seito¯ staff members such as Yosano Akiko, Senuma Kayo, Tamura Toshi, Naganuma Chieko and Nakano Hatsu were featured. Part nine of the series (9 May) asserted: ‘We can now acknowledge that Seito¯ is the preeminent representative group of New Women.’7 Furthermore, the newspaper Kokumin Shinbun (The Nation) carried a series of four articles between 12 July and 15 July 1912 entitled ‘The socalled New Woman’ (‘iwayuru atarasii onna’), featuring essays by Seito¯ members Araki Iku, Hiratsuka Raicho¯ and Otake Ko¯kichi. The September edition of the magazine Shincho¯ (New Tide) also focused on the appearance of a new kind of femininity and discussed Hiratsuka Raicho¯ and Seito¯, turning their group into a synonym for the New Woman. As a matter of fact, the Seito¯ team eventually became self-declared New Women in bold response to a reactionary attack, as will be shown later in the chapter. The flourishing discourse on the New Woman inspired further articles the following year and continued to influence public opinion. Examples are the June edition of the magazine Taiyo¯ (The Sun) in 1913, which dedicated the full issue to ‘Women’s Problems of the Present Day’ (‘kinji no fujin mondai’), the July extra-edition of Chu ¯ oko¯ro¯n (Central Public Opinion) focusing on ‘Women’s Issues’ (‘fujin mondai’), and the special feature in Rikugo¯ Zasshi (Cosmos) of July entitled ‘Our Attitude Towards Women’s Problems’ (‘fujin modai ni taisuru gojin no taido’). The magazine Seito¯ was radical and rebellious enough to make conventionally minded people angry or uneasy. Seito¯ issued numerous articles

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against patriarchy and the conventional family system. The group advocated romantic love and love within marriage, and protested against the government-promoted ‘good wife and wise mother’ education policy for women.8 Seito¯ further defended women’s autonomy and independence, just as her counterpart did in other countries (for example, the New Women in Hungary as discussed by Acsády in Chapter 11). In several essays that appeared in Seito¯, Hiratsuka Raicho¯ questioned the marital system and the existing morality that restrained women. In the article ‘To the Women of the World’ (‘yo no fujin tachini’) she opposed the existing marriage system in a radical fashion: Why do so few women raise fundamental questions as to why marriage should be the only way of life for so many women in the world, why they should become good wives and wise mothers, why they should have no other choices? . . . I do not know how many women these days are trapped in a loveless marriage just to secure their livelihood. Their whole lives they work as a maid for one man during the day, and depending on his needs, serve him as a prostitute during the night.9 (Seito¯ 3.4, 1913: 156–64) Several Seito¯ New Women managed to realize this new philosophy in actual life. Yosano Akiko, whose work boldly explored her sensuality and her newly awakened feelings of love for the man she was soon to marry, ran away from her home in Sakai, Osaka, to Tokyo to live with the poet Yosano Tekkan, even though he was still married to his second wife. Ito¯ Noe was another woman who led a vagrant life in search of freedom and love. Unsatisfied with the marriage decided on by her parents in her hometown in Fukuoka Prefecture, she left her husband to move to Tokyo to study, where she married Tsuji Jun, a teacher at a women’s high school. Later she left her son with her husband for a relationship with the anar¯ sugi Sakae. She married a total of three times. In an issue of Seito¯ chist O (3.2, 1913: 40) which was censored for causing social disorder, Noe wrote that marriage without love is immoral (‘Konogoro no kanso¯’ [‘My Thoughts on Recent News’]). Hiratsuka Raicho¯, the leading executive of Seito¯, likewise practised what she preached. Before appearing as a pioneering New Woman, she attempted double suicide with Morita. So¯hei on a snowy mountain in March 1908. The attempt failed and the reason remained mysterious, but according to her autobiography, it was a practical test of her love and spirituality (Hiratsuka 1971: 211–46). Furthermore, in the poem ‘From My Round Window, to Chigasaki, to Chigasaki’ [‘marumado yori; Chigasaki e, Chigasaki e’] she depicted her passionate and romantic homosexual relationship with Otake Ko¯kichi, a co-member of Seito¯: ‘I do not know how passionate my hugs and kisses must have felt to Ko¯kichi when I tried to make her part of my world’ (Seito¯ 2.8, 1912: 82–3).10 Also, her relationship with

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Okumura Hiroshi, a young artist who both socially and economically was not on equal terms with her, drew the attention of society. The fact that she did not try to hide her love for Okumura even gave birth to a new vogue word to refer to a younger male lover: ‘wakai tsubame’ (‘young swallow’). She started living with Okumura without legal ties and outside of the system, declaring in a loud voice: I am dissatisfied with the current marital system, therefore I do not want to comply with such an arrangement, and I do not want to enter into a marriage that would need to be approved by such laws. I feel resentment just hearing the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.11 (Seito¯ 4.2, 1914: 115) While being ridiculed and criticized, she made no effort whatsoever to conceal her feelings. Hiratsuka Raicho¯ gave birth to two children, giving them her surname. She was the breadwinner in her family for her entire life. Hara Asao, a poet and staff member of Seito¯, became the protagonist of a love affair that shook public opinion in the Taisho¯ era. While studying at the Japanese Women’s Art College (Nihon Joshi Bijutsu Gakko¯) she was seduced by her teacher, who was married with children, and gave birth to his son. When she joined Seito¯ she was raising the boy at her parents’ house in the town of Kurokawa in Miyagi Prefecture, but before long married and divorced a painter of Western-style art. Thereafter she had a noted affair and break-up with poet and Tohoku Imperial University physics professor Ishihara Jun. Another staff member, Miyagi Fusa, had a relationship with Mushanoko¯ji Saneatsu, which made her the topic of newspaper gossip columns (Tokyo Yomiuri Shinbun, 12 December 1912; Yamato Shinbun, 13 December 1912). Even from a contemporary point of view, or compared to her counterparts in the West, these kinds of behaviour might appear to be transgressive. It is not appropriate to interpret and understand this libertarianism as merely an individual expression of desire. Their motivation was to fight against patriarchy by devoting themselves to romantic love. The concept of romantic love was first introduced to Japan through European and American literature by Kitamura To¯koku around 1880. He invented the word ren-ai, for romantic love between the sexes, which was eventually exported to China and Korea. Young intellectual men in the Meiji era were attracted by the concept. This was not only because they adored Western culture and customs, but also because the concept of romantic love offered a new idea of the individual. As Edward Shorter defined it, romantic love is not simply sentiment between a couple, but an important element of the ‘sentiment revolution’ which began in eighteenth-century Europe. It could upset every social relationship confined within tradition (Shorter 1977: 255–65). For young men in Meiji-era

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Japan, romantic love reflected freedom and independence from the bonds of the traditional family and community. In the late Meiji era, progressive women picked up the idea. In fact, it held more significance for women because they were more oppressed and restricted in the patriarchal family system. For progressive women to be involved in a romantic love relationship with a man of their choice and marry him, instead of being part of a marriage arranged by their family, represented an important aspect of female autonomy. It also should be noted that they did not have much choice in the way they demonstrated their freedom and independence, considering their social surroundings, other than by devoting themselves to an amorous relationship with a man. Japan was industrialized relatively late, so under Japanese industrialization in those days there were few career opportunities for women, even for the highly educated. It was easier for the Japanese New Woman to be progressive in her private love life than in public or social life.

Attacks on Seit¯o and the New Woman The media and the public did not hesitate to attack these rebellious women. Right after Seito¯ started publication, most of the major magazines and newspapers ran features on the New Woman. These articles invariably dealt mostly, if not exclusively, with Hiratsuka Raicho¯ and her colleagues at Seito¯. Some articles were objective, but most were derogatory or insulting, commenting on their private lives and morality. The publication of Yosano Akiko’s poetry Midaregami in 1901 led male writers and poets such as Takayama Chogyu ¯ and Sasaki Nobutsuna to sharply criticize the work as obscene, shallow or morally decayed. Ten years later, during the debates on the New Woman, the media launched an attack on the morals of the New Women, spreading gossip about their private lives. An editorial postscript to Seito¯ (2.6, 1912) written by Otake Ko¯kichi, which included a reference to drinking during a Seito¯ editorial meeting, became the focus of criticism (Yomiuri Shinbun 11 June 1912; Chu ¯ oko¯ro¯n, June 1912). The report on the first anniversary meeting of Seito¯ in October 1912 continued the ridicule and slur: ‘The “princesses” residing in the headquarters of the so-called New Women, the Seito¯ company’; ‘Beer is indispensable for this lot’ (Yamato Shinbun 10 July 1912; ‘Women who want to be new’, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun 25 October 1912). The fact that Hiratsuka Raicho¯ and her companions were taken to the Yoshiwara red-light district by Ko¯kichi’s uncle Otake Chikuha provided more material for the gossip columns: ‘Female writers go Yoshiwara’ (Yorozucho¯ho¯ 10 July 1912: 3). Some of these media attacks turned into real threats. Raicho¯ described the tenacity of critical public attacks against her and her colleagues; the Seito¯ group were called ‘self-indulgent villains’, and protesters threw stones at Raicho¯’s residence, demanding to meet with her and her father. She

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even received threatening letters. One after the other, members of Seito¯ resigned for fear of being labelled a New Woman (Hiratsuka 1971: 376–8). Even permission for the use of venues to hold lectures was refused (ibid.: 451). But it did not stop at that. The academic world joined in the criticism. At the 1912 Social Policy Conference, academics such as Professor Wadagaki Kenzo¯ of the Tokyo Imperial University, College of Agriculture, argued that the New Woman corrupted society and could destroy the family system through an increase in children born out of wedlock (Horiba 1988: 143–4). Not only conservative men but also liberal women and men promoting female education launched an open attack. Enlightened women educators and cultured people such as Naruse Jinzo¯, Tsuda Umeko, Hatoyama Haruko and Kaetsu Takako voiced criticism. For example, in the April 1913 issue of Chu ¯ oko¯ro¯n, Naruse Jinzo¯, the founder and president of Nihon Joshi Daigaku, the first university for women in Japan, made the following remarks: ‘The appearance of the so-called New Woman in contemporary Japan is a sick and crazy phenomenon. These people only think about themselves and not about their parents or family. It is my opinion that they have a physiological defect’ (Naruse, April 1913: 187).12 Tsuda Umeko, a pioneer in women’s higher education in Japan, gathered all the pupils of her school and warned them that the Seito¯ group consisted of devils propagating a dangerous philosophy (Hiratsuka 1971: 399).13 Miyazaki Mitsuko, Nishikawa Fumiko and others started the publication of Shin shin fujin (The New True Lady) in 1913 and sharply criticized Hiratsuka Raicho¯ and her fellow New Women as ‘poisonous bees that destroy good-natured citizens’ (Miyako Shinbun (Miyako Newspaper), 17 March 1913). The New Women furthermore had to endure actual political attacks. Authorities censored Seito¯’s publication more than once on the grounds of having corrupted social stability and order. The first censorship was directed at volume 2 number 4, in which Araki Iku wrote the fictional story Tegami (The Letters). Araki described an affair between a young wife and her younger lover in an assertive way and eschewed conventional marriage. Volume 3 number 2, issued in February 1913, was banned from distribution for its alleged connection with socialism. The offending article, written by Fukuda Hideko, advocated women’s rights. The Ministry of the Interior denounced it as an attempt to incite public disorder. Harada Satsuki’s protest against the prohibition of abortion in ‘Gokuchu ¯ no onna yori otoko e’ (‘From Imprisoned Women to Men’) (5.6, 1915) and Hiratsuka Raicho¯’s protest about the family system and advocacy of women’s independence in ‘Yo no fujin tachi ni’ (‘To the Women of the World’, included in the same volume) as well as her collection of critical essays Marumado yori (From a Round Window, May 1913), gave rise to accusations

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that she ‘corrupted the traditional virtues of Japanese women’ (Yomiuri shinbun, 9 February 1913). On 20 April 1913 the Japanese Ministry of Education decided to enforce regulations against women’s magazines: The rise of the self-professed New Woman represents the spread of a certain harmful current of rebellion. People publishing extremely obscene texts and poems in newspapers have increased greatly. Because these contain elements that possibly corrupt the morals of male and female students alike, the Ministry of Education deems it necessary to hereby issue regulations, and in conferment with the Department of Interior to take the suitable measures.14 (Osaka Jiji Shinbun, 21 April 1913) Yet there was also strong female support for the New Women, as well as favourable reactions from male intellectuals. In Chu ¯ oko¯ro¯n of June 1912 ¯ gai highly praised (‘Theories on Yosano Akiko’), the famous writer Mori O Akiko and Raicho¯ (‘On Yosano Akiko’), and Shimamura Ho¯getsu’s review on the inaugural issue of Seito¯ was likewise favourable (Yomiuri Shinbun, 3 September 1911). Seito¯ ’s publication itself was motivated by Ikuta Cho¯ko¯, one of the leading male writers in the Meiji era. Nevertheless, positive public opinion on the ‘New Women’ still lay far ahead. Nowhere in the world was the New Woman immune from attack and criticism, as is well demonstrated in each chapter in this volume. The Japanese New Woman was no exception; moreover, we can point to another specific disadvantage that burdened her. The encounter with the West and the rapid modernization prompted Japanese politicians and academics to establish the idea of a national and cultural identity. They coined the term ‘Western techniques with Japanese spirit’ (wakon yo¯sai). Particularly after the wars against China (1894–5) and Russia (1904–5), nationalism was on the increase. Women played a crucial role in creating Japanese ‘traditional’ national identity or national values. Men might be partly Westernized to keep up with the modern world, but women should stick to the traditional values and the principle of ‘men outside, women inside’; their priority should lie in reproducing offspring with a Japanese spirit. The New Woman was unacceptable because not only did she break the rules, but she also picked up her ideas from Western women and tried to spread them to the detriment and corruption of Japanese women. The New Women also seemed dangerous because of their backgrounds. The most remarkable feature of Seito¯ was the fact that nonpolitical, middle-class young women were at the heart of its publication. The leading executive, Hiratsuka Raicho¯, was a graduate of Nihon Joshi Daigaku and the daughter of a high government official. Most contributors of Seito¯ were, similarly, college graduates from well-off families.

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Their background contrasted with that of Seito¯ ’s predecessors, for Seito¯ was not the first women’s magazine published by women. A female socialist, Fukuda Hideko, who had once been jailed for her socialist activity, published a fortnightly periodical called Sekai Fujin (Women in the World). This magazine appeared for about two-and-a-half years, from January 1907 to July 1909, protesting against capitalism and the oppression of women. In contrast, Seito¯ women had no political or ideological background, were from middle-class families and had been brought up to be obedient ‘good girls’. Yet the magazine published by these privileged women proclaimed women’s independence and opposed patriarchy. This astonished people more than the socialist precedent ever did. Moreover, the Seito¯ women protested against social norms in the private sphere, that is, against patriarchal family norms and oppression by husbands. The socialist women might have been more dangerous and destructive to society than the Seito¯ New Women, but the former were too political and ideologically-oriented to prevail. The Seito¯ women did not have any ideological background, which made them more universally appealing and influential, and thus made them seem more dangerous and threatening.

The ambivalent attitude of the New Woman towards sexuality The Seito¯ New Women were especially radical in expressing women’s sexuality and discussing sexual matters. In the four-and-a-half years of the magazine’s existence, they launched several debates on issues such as virginity, chastity, prostitution and abortion. They defended women’s selfdetermination in sexual matters. At the time women were not allowed to express ideas about sex, and these discussions in the magazine were definitely radical, evoking fierce criticism and disdain. They were no different from the New Women in the West in raising their voice against conventional marriage or advocating free love and sexual freedom, as we can see when comparing chapters in this volume. But the Japanese New Women were, at the same time, quite ambivalent in their arguments, especially concerning the issue of virginity. They played a crucial role in upholding the prevailing restrictive sexual code for women by way of sublimating virginity and romantic love. Surprisingly, the New Women were most eager to advocate female chastity. Keeping in mind their unconventional attitude towards marriage, it might seem odd for them to elevate virginity. Why did the Japanese New Women promote virginity and chastity? To answer this question, the historical context of Japan in those days must be understood. Without a tradition of Christianity, preserving chastity had not been so rigid a norm in pre-modern Japan, with the exception of the elite and the wealthy. Young unmarried women in villages typically would enjoy sexual relationships with young men in their village before marriage. Some schol-

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ars claim that, until an encounter with Western descriptions of anatomy after the Meiji Restoration, the hymen was not known to Japanese people (Ueno 1990: 527). An official document of the Department of Justice of the Meiji Government, issued after nationwide research on local common law to establish a national Civil Law, reveals that people interpreted virginity differently from the way we do now: When a virgin [‘sho-jo’] gives birth to a baby, he/she is usually registered into the family as a brother or sister of the virgin. In case of an adoption, he/she is registered as a real child in the foster parents’ registration.15 (Zenkoku minji kanreirui-shu ¯ , 1874, in Yoshino 1929: 188, my emphasis) This official document obviously contradicts our contemporary usage of the term ‘virgin’. The document shows that, in those days, at least until the 1870s, the word ‘virgin’ did not necessarily mean a woman who has never had sexual intercourse but referred to an unmarried woman. Virginity was not a strict concept nor highly valued. In this cultural and historical context, the Seito¯ New Women took the lead to sublimate virginity. We can find one of the first demonstrations for virginity and chastity in the works of Yosano Akiko. In the history of Japanese literature, Yosano is well known as a passionate poet who sang of women’s desire despite the strict moral norms forced on women at the time. However, at the same time, she was a determined advocate of female chastity. In one essay she wrote: There used to be no virgins among unmarried girls in villages. But the situation changed after the Meiji Restoration. Education at elementary school and girls’ secondary school has succeeded in enforcing a moral code on women. We are very proud to find that so many girls in villages keep their virginity until marriage, similar to girls in cities.16 (Taiyo¯ 23.2, 1917: 43) A debate on virginity appeared in Seito¯ and other magazines in 1915 and 1916. Yasuda Satsuki, who started the debate, declared that virginity is a precious treasure for a woman and that it must be consummated with supreme love (‘Ikiru koto to teiso to’, Seito¯ 4.11, 1914). Yosano Akiko wrote that a virgin must be just as innocent as an angel (Yosano 1980: 87–9). For these writers, the word ‘virginity’ and the code for women to remain virgins until marriage were unambiguous. Hiratsuka Raicho¯ stated that the expression ‘virgin’ had no other meaning than a sexually innocent woman. She said that to keep virginity until marriage represented basic common sense for any woman (‘Shojono kachi’, Shinko¯ron, March 1915). Another Seito¯ woman, Ito¯ Noe, wrote that a woman should have an

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instinctive fear of losing virginity before marriage (‘Teiso¯hi tsuiteno zakkan’, Seito¯ 5.2, 1915). The argument for sublimating virginity was grounded in their belief in women’s autonomy and represented a protest against institutional marriage. The New Women saw virginity as a means to be in command of their own bodies and as a symbol of female autonomy. In their reasoning, women should be in control of their virginity and its ‘loss’. The motivation they espoused was based on the romantic and ‘true’ love they believed in, as mentioned earlier. The New Women combined romantic love with the idea of chastity. For progressive women to be involved in a romantic love relationship with a man of their choice and to consummate this love, instead of sacrificing their virginity in an arranged marriage, signified an important aspect of female autonomy. Rejecting the patriarchal and traditional idea that a woman’s chastity should belong to her father or husband, they insisted on women’s sexual self-determination. Yosano Akiko sang in her poem in 1905 that an innocent female should be filled with rapture when she devoted her virginity to her one and only lover (Yosano 1980: 323). To preserve chastity and virginity for the sake of romantic love, not for the sake of patriarchy, constituted a new and liberal idea for women. It denoted a modern Western idea and an ethic adhered to by the elite and the middle classes, social groups favourable to the New Woman. It is paradoxical, however, that the more women elevated virginity, the more they seemed to be alienated from their sexuality. In the debates on virginity, the writers treated virginity as an object ‘to be thrown away’ or ‘to be robbed of ’, as well as a determinant of a woman’s fate. Hiratsuka Raicho¯ claimed that a woman would commit a sin if she discarded her virginity at the wrong time, or failed to do so at the right time, and that virginity was so precious that it should determine a woman’s fate for her whole lifetime (‘Shojono kachi’, Shinko¯ron, March 1915: 53–4). Yosano Akiko stressed that if an unmarried woman lost her virginity, she should not only be ashamed of herself unto death but should also accept society’s condemnation (‘Watashino teiso¯ -kan’, Yosano 1980: 372). This attitude of the New Women towards virginity was easily incorporated into the oppressive Confucian ideology of sexuality, which had long alienated women from their bodies. However, contrary to Confucianism, in the new ideology established by these New Women, it was the woman herself who enforced her chastity. This attitude soon became prevalent among young women across classes. Women came to consider it as a matter of course that they remain virgins until marriage. Maintaining virginity was no longer a means to gain autonomy.

A newness of her own The Japanese New Woman lost media attention very quickly, in fact in less than two years. As the Great War broke out in 1914, the media concen-

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trated on world politics, the economy and the war. Women’s issues no longer interested people. Although the New Woman phenomenon was not a media-produced illusion but the result of social change in a period of modernization, the Japanese New Woman had few resources that would ensure her survival. She appeared less than half a century after the beginning of Japan’s modernization. With less industrialization and less democratization, and with the middle class just having begun to form a social stratum, economic or social opportunities for women were severely limited. Few professional jobs were available, making it extremely hard for a woman to gain independence from father or husband. As a matter of fact, with the exception of a few distinguished women who succeeded as writers or poets, most women who contributed to Seito¯ ended up in conventional marriages and lived the life of the obedient and dependent wife, despite being college graduates. Compared to the New Woman in other countries – especially the ones who were economically independent and whose images became tied to consumption and stylishness such as fashionable flappers or cigarette smokers or the Gibson Girl, as detailed by Fawcett, Robbins, Köhler and others in this volume – the Japanese New Woman was very much disadvantaged.17 As argued at the beginning of this chapter, she also lacked political power. Within this context the progressive and liberal attitude of the Japanese New Woman in the early 1910s seems all the more remarkable. And yet, as discussed, the Japanese New Woman showed an ambivalent attitude towards sexuality and marriage. The ambivalence arose in response to the traditional norms that had oppressed Japanese women for such a long time. I believe that the New Woman became ‘new’ in a specific way according to a distinct social and historical context within each society, not only in Japan but anywhere, including the West. The New Women’s unique expression of ‘newness’ fits precisely their specific kinds of struggle.

Notes 1 I wish to thank Jiweon Shin, with whom I developed my research ideas from a comparative perspective; Bart Gaens for his contribution to the English version of my chapter; and Linda Simon for her generous help with editing. 2 See comparative research of the New Woman in Japan, Korea and the USA by this author (Muta and Shin 1998). 3 See for example the article by Honda Masujiro¯ in America for Fujo shinbun (Women’s Newspaper) of March 1906, and the report in the same newspaper by Yamawaki Haruki in England ( July 1910); the article by Kikuchi Ogata in the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun of 4–5 July 1910; Joken kakucho¯ shii undo¯ (The Demonstrations for Women’s Rights) by Hasegawa Nyozekan in Tokyo Asahi Shinbun of 1–3 August 1910; Joken Undo (The Movement for Women’s Rights) by Yutani Susumu in Osaka Mainichi Shinbun of 30 July–16 August 1910.

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4 5 6

7 8 For further details on the ‘good-wife and wise-mother’ education in modern Japan, see such studies as Koyama 1991 and Muta 1996. 9

10 11 12

13 This might seem ironic if we consider the fact that Tsuda Umeko studied at Brimmore College after going to the USA in the summer of 1889 and could thus be considered an American type of ‘New Woman’. However, it might be just because of her stay in America that she loathed the Japanese version of the New Woman and her different nuances. 14

15 16 17 In the late 1920s, more than a decade and a half after the New Woman phenomenon that I discuss in this chapter, the ‘flapper’ style gained renewed public attention in Japan, although only for a short period. Flappers were dubbed ‘moga’, an abbreviation of ‘modern girl’. They could be seen as a part of the New Woman phenomenon as defined in other chapters in this volume. In the Japanese connotation, however, the flapper and the New Woman fall into different categories. The connection of the two terms is a topic for later research.

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Bibliography Hasegawa N. (1910) ‘Joken kakucho¯ shii undo¯’ (‘The Demonstrations for Women’s Rights’), Tokyo Asahi Shinbun (Tokyo Asahi Newspaper), 1–3 August. Hiratsuka R. (1971) Genshi, joseiwa taiyo¯de atta (In the Beginning, Woman was the ¯ tsuki Shoten. Sun), vol. 2, Tokyo: O Horiba K. (1988) Seito¯ no jidai (The Age of Seito¯ ), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten. Honda M. (1906) ‘Beikoku hou’ (‘Report from the US’), Fujo shinbun (Women’s Newspaper), March, 305: 89. Ide F. (1987) Hiratsuka Raicho¯ – Kindai to shinpi (Hiratsuka Raicho – Her Time and Her Mystery), Tokyo: Shincho¯sha. Kikuchi O. (1910) ‘Katei shiso¯ no fukkatsu’ (‘The Revival of Reflections on the Household’), Osaka Mainichi Shinbun (Osaka Daily Newspaper) 4–5 July. Koyama S. (1991) Ryo¯sai kenbo to iu kihan (On the Code of ‘Good Wife and Wise Mother’), Tokyo: Keiso¯ shobo¯. Muta K. (1996) Senryaku toshite no kazoku – kindai kokumin kokka keiseito josei (The Family as a Strategy: Women and the Construction of the Modern Nation State), Tokyo: Shinyo¯sha. —— and Shin J. (1998) ‘Kindaino sekushuarithino so¯zo¯to atarashii onnna’ (‘The New Woman and the Creation of Modern Sexuality: A Comparative Analysis of Japan, Korea and the USA’), Shiso¯, 886: 89–115. Naruse J. (1913) ‘Oubei fujinkai no shinkeikou’ (‘New Directions in Women’s Associations in Europe and the U.S.’), Chu ¯ oko¯ro¯n, 15.4: 187. Sasaki H. (1994) Atarashii onna no to¯rai (The Advent of the New Woman), Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku shuppankai. Shorter, E. (1977) The Making of Modern Family, New York: Basic Books. Ueno C. (1990) ‘Kaisetsu’ (‘Commentary’), Nihon kindai shiso¯ taikei (Surveys of Thoughts in Modern Japan), 23: 505–50, Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten. Yanagawa S. (1908) Inochi no Hikari (Light of Life), Fujin Shinbun (Women’s Newspaper), 426. Yamawaki H. (1910) ‘Zappou’ (‘Report from Great Britain’), Fujo shinbun (Women’s Newspaper), July, 532. Yosano A. (1901) Midaregami (Tangled Hair), Tokyo-Shinshisha. —— (1980) Yosano akiko zenshu ¯ (The Complete Works of Yosano Akiko), vol. 9: 323, 14: 372, 16: 87–89, Tokyo: Ko¯dansha. Yoshino S. (ed.) (1929) Meiji bunka zenshu ¯ (Culture in Meiji), Tokyo: Nihon hyo¯ronsha. Yutani S. (1910) ‘Joken Undo¯’ (‘The Movement for Women’s Rights’), Osaka Mainichi Shinbun (Osaka Daily Newspaper), 30 July–16 August 1910.

Part 4

Race and the New Woman

13 ‘Natural’ divisions/national divisions Whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs Jill Bergman

The woman thus portrayed is the real new woman in American life. This woman, as if by magic, has succeeded in lifting herself as completely from the stain and meanness of slavery as if a century had elapsed since the day of emancipation. This new woman, with the club behind her and the club service in her heart and mind, has come to the front in an opportune time. Fannie Barrier Williams (1900)1

Writing shortly after the 1899 convention of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Fannie Barrier Williams optimistically predicted the benefits to be drawn from the organization’s recent formation: The National association (sic) has made it possible for many bright[,] colored women to enjoy the fellowship and helpfulness of many of the best organizations of American women. It has certainly helped to emancipate the white women from the fear and uncertainty of contact or association with women of the darker race. In other words the National Association of Colored women’s clubs is helping to give respect and character to a race of women who had no place in the classification of progressive womanhood in America. (Williams 1900: 402) Williams had great hopes for women’s shared commitment to the American club movement. Transforming progress from a racially exclusive entity to a site of racial diversity, she attributed evolutionary advancement to white women who had experienced ‘emancipation’ – in this case emancipation from racism rather than from slavery. Williams anticipated that the common interest in women’s clubs would be an evolutionary agent, helping to overcome racial prejudice and unify black and white women in the cause of ‘progressive womanhood’. But she spoke too soon.

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Less than a year later, on 3 June 1900 – just prior to the fifth biennial meeting of another national organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) – that organization’s Board of Directors met to prepare for the convention. Among other business, they addressed what would become a pivotal membership issue. They had learned that one club recently granted membership in the General Federation – the Woman’s Era Club of Boston – was comprised primarily of AfricanAmerican women. The GFWC president, Mrs Lowe of Atlanta, Georgia, had approved the membership application as ‘undoubtedly eligible’ ‘without consulting her Executive Committee and in ignorance of the fact that this club was not a club of white women’ (Wells 1953: 363–4). The delegate from the Woman’s Era Club, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, was on her way to Milwaukee to represent her club at the convention. The Board knew that the inadvertent desegregation of the General Federation would not sit well with many of the members – indeed the Board itself was divided on the question. Therefore, they contacted the Woman’s Era Club and informed the members that, without ratification by the entire Board, no club was officially admitted to the GFWC. Although they allowed Mrs Ruffin to attend the convention as a delegate for the Massachusetts State Federation, they returned the Woman’s Era membership dues and asked for the immediate return of their membership certificate. They then suspended the final decision on African-American membership until the next biennial convention (ibid.: 364).2 This event caused a great commotion at the convention and sparked a long and heated discussion in the periodical press. From 1900 to 1902, The Club Woman – official organ for the GFWC and a vehicle of New Womanhood – carried out a debate over the admission of clubs with African-American members.3 The African-American press – The Colored American Magazine, The Wisconsin Weekly Advocate and The Voice of the Negro, in particular – responded. A site of confluence for the rhetorics of progress and Americanness, this debate evolved around the nature of American womanhood and constructed the New Woman as representative of a specifically white national identity. Ironically, while the New Woman often embraced hybridity as a vehicle of freedom and possibility – as the chapters in this volume demonstrate – in the case of race, hybridity registered as threatening. In the GFWC debate, far from embracing hybridity, the New Woman – and the progress she represented – became an ‘ideological site for the struggle to (re)define gender, class and race at the turn of the century’ (Gere 1997: 141). I place this study, then, in the context of recent scholarship on whiteness which has taken as one of its projects the examination of ‘how white dominance is rationalized, legitimized, and made ostensibly normal and natural’ (Frankenburg 1997: 3). The control over language becomes a crucial way of perpetuating hierarchies (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 7), and in this event the GFWC members used the debate to maintain their privi-

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leged position, deploying the rhetorics of nationalism and evolution to assert dominance over the NACW women. In their responses, African– American writers co-opted the same language in order to disrupt the link between progress and white identity. Specifically, by appropriating the ideals and images of New Womanhood, African-Americans extended the New Woman hybridity to include racial diversity.

The Open Arena: white Federation members speak The Club Woman debate among GFWC members took place in a column entitled ‘The Open Arena’. Opinions varied, and although many club members passionately and eloquently supported the desegregation of the Federation, I want to examine the rhetoric of evolution employed by those opposed to the admission of African-American women in order to see how American progress was used to justify white supremacy and to define white New Womanhood. The role of nature and progress in the race question featured prominently in Federation members’ comments. Catharine Schureman, for example, posits a colour line set in place by nature and impervious to the influences of evolution. ‘I agree . . . that all races are capable of education’, she explains, ‘but education does not change the color.’ She supports her point with an anecdote juxtaposing an ‘old mammy’ and ‘her educated grand-daughter’. After the younger woman advocates the designation ‘colored’ over ‘Negro’, the older woman, according to Schureman, responds: ‘Why, bress you hart, chile, I ain’t colored. I’se borned dat-a way, you mought call de brack-burd a wite pigen but he’s de brack-burd jes de same’ (Schureman 1902: 218). Schureman accomplishes much through this tale. First, she places the homey, humble wisdom of the grandmother over the educated notions of the granddaughter. And since, in 1902, a grown woman’s grandmother would likely have been born during slavery, Schureman places the slave – or at least the slave mentality – over what she implies are the uppity notions of the freedwoman. Next, she highlights the grandmother’s lack of education, not only using misspellings where they might communicate, phonetically, a dialect (as in the words ‘bress’ and ‘chile’) but also using gratuitous misspellings where they change nothing in the oral style of the story (as in the words ‘burd’, ‘wite’ and ‘pigen’). Setting the narrator of this story in an awkward relationship to language, Schureman asserts her own central relation to language. Finally, through the mammy, Schureman invokes the power and authority of nature, which made her black, a making impervious to the effects of education and language. The theme of ‘natural’ racial hierarchy came up repeatedly in the debate, typically cast as appeals to – and celebrations of – evolution as an inevitable process that should not be hindered (see Chapter 14 in this volume). Edith Conant of Minnesota writes:

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While Conant sets racial prejudice in the class of nature, in terms of its ability to change, that change comes slowly. Evident here is the appeal to evolution, in particular racial Darwinism: a pervasive and influential rhetoric that attributed social standing to evolutionary factors (Boeckmann 2000: 11–62). Similarly, Elizabeth King Elliott of Baltimore sets her response in the context of nature and evolution, saying that she had ‘hoped that the question of the admission of clubs of Negro women . . . would have settled itself without unnecessary discussion’ since ‘nature has a way of taking matters in her own hands ultimately’ (Elliott 1901: 12). She expresses concern about the effect upon European-American women of socializing with less evolved members of society since, without a selection system, European-American clubs would have no way of avoiding the negative influence of African-American clubs: ‘Colleges and technical schools can protect themselves by examinations from the admission of unsuitable students, and any admission of Negroes to them is a clear instance of the survival of the fittest, but women’s clubs have no such protection’ (ibid.). Invoking the language of social Darwinism, Elliott casts this question of desegregation in terms of a battle in which (white) women’s clubs must protect themselves against the dangers of assembling with ‘unsuitable . . . Negroes’ (ibid.). The flip side of this argument was that African-American clubs could suffer from desegregation as well. The best thing GFWC members could do for African-American women’s clubs was to leave them alone and not interfere with their progress. Invoking her expertise as ‘a Southern woman’, Elliott argues that it would be harmful for African-American club women to be ‘promoted’ to the level of social evolution that the European-American clubs have reached: They have everything to learn, and can no more escape elementary stages of development than they can ignore any other natural laws; they are on a different plane of thought, and must pass through stages of evolution socially before they can meet the cultivated women who have generations of training behind them. (Ibid.) Therefore, she asserts, the best strategy would be for African-Americans to proceed in the ‘natural’ course of evolution. Indeed, ‘any other methods

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would be a reversal of organic laws of growth both physical and sociological and would result in imitation and mimicry, which really retard, instead of helping progress’ (ibid.). The rhetoric of evolution conveniently facilitated the exclusion of AfricanAmerican women’s clubs from the GFWC, both to protect the General Federation from evolutionary regression and to aid the progress of AfricanAmerican women. Thus, through a twist of logical alchemy, racist discrimination becomes benevolence. Anna Whitney’s contribution, ‘Shall We Secede?’, serves as an example. While she acknowledges and sympathizes with ‘the burden of the black men – the servitude, sorrow and stigma that have always been his portion in America’, she sees value in that experience: Not in vain shall he have suffered all these wrongs. They are the price the Negro has paid for a rapid civilization; but for them he would still be in the barbarisms of the jungle . . . Is the price too great, considering the unparalleled and unending results? Let him also have patience. (Whitney 1901: 13) Testimony to the ethnocentrism of the turn-of-the-century United States, Whitney’s statement ranks even the horrific existence of the American slave above life in Africa. Moreover, her claim allows for the possibility of seeing the further exclusion of African-American women from the GFWC as beneficial for their progress.

Rhetorics of progress: the (white) American New Woman Sandra Harmon has convincingly argued that The Club Woman saw itself as a vehicle of New Womanhood at the turn of the century, and that it promoted progress as crucial to the New Woman identity: ‘The theme that club women were developing or evolving in a new and better style of womanhood was a recurring one’ (Harmon 1984: 30). We have seen this theme in the debate over the desegregation of the GFWC. Martha Patterson extends this argument, linking the New Woman to social Darwinism. Patterson asserts that the New Woman held a place as ‘a popular American icon representing American dominance and imperialism on a world stage’ (Patterson 1995: 74). Building on these arguments, I wish to set the GFWC debate against the broader national context and consider the ways these arguments make use, implicitly, of the classifications of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ in order to define a specifically white identity for the New Woman. The turn of the century in the United States was a time of anxiety about national and racial identity as the USA emerged as an imperial power through the annexation of Hawaii, the war in Cuba and the seizing of the Philippines from Spain. Scholars have long noted, in the context of American imperialism, efforts to deploy discourse in the service of solidifying

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an all-too-fluid definition of Americanness, and specifically the use of domestic ideology in the ‘civilizing’ project of Americanness.4 Women bore a unique relationship to this discourse, setting themselves as agents of domesticity in the service of empire. In Woman–Nation–State, Nira YuvalDavis and Floya Anthias usefully articulate the role of women in nationalism. Among other functions, they assert that women serve as ‘symbolic signifiers of national difference’ and as ‘reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (through restrictions on sexual or marital relations)’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989: 7). Building on this work, Anne McClintock has observed that white women held a liminal position in the colonial setting: ‘white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting’ (McClintock 1995: 6). I am arguing that in the debate over desegregating the GFWC, the Federation members enacted these nationalist impulses in the protection of their precarious position.5 The GFWC saw itself as part of the project of American imperialism. In her contribution to the desegregation debate, Whitney invokes ‘the white man’s burden’ in her discussion of the North and South’s shared responsibility for the African-American population. More overt connection came in Mrs Lowe’s presidential address at the 1900 GFWC convention: A great new field for practical operation has been opened for the Federation of women’s Clubs in the islands of the sea, to which we must see it, that our army carries civilization as well as conquest. To Cuba and the Philippines, American women will flock in thousands, during the next few years. . . . Let us see to it, that these women carry with them the propaganda of the woman’s club idea and plant it there securely to bring forth fruit of individual development for the future. (Fifth Biennial 1900: 49) Touting the club woman as an agent of progress via ‘individual development’, the president claims the responsibility for spreading civilization to implicitly barbaric areas of the world. The urgency behind this message (‘we must see it’) betrays the threat felt by one who, as a white woman, experienced only ‘borrowed’ power (McClintock 1995: 6) and who felt her identity to be dependent upon the presence – and inferiority – of an other. In his study of American women in the American-occupied Philippines, Vicente Rafael examines this binary relationship and argues that owing to this dichotomy, women in the colonial context felt a need to protect the home from the encroachment of the other: In a bourgeois-colonial setting, both [whiteness and domesticity] are dramatically articulated under conditions of pressure experienced as the potential subversion of the interior, private, and sovereign self by

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the exterior, public and contingent other. Poised on the frontier between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, colonial domesticity shelters the sense of whiteness as constitutive of a gendered agency forged in crisis and displacement. For this reason, it can claim to reorder differences and regulate the representation of self and other. (Rafael 1995: 654–5) And while the post-reconstruction USA is not strictly a colonial setting, the race relations established under the institution of slavery bears reading from a post-colonial perspective. Certainly the fear, described by Rafael, of the encroachment of the barbaric other upon the civilized self comes through in ‘The Open Arena’. Several contributors make a distinction between legal – or outside the home – equality, ‘settled thirty-six years ago’, and social – or domestic – equality. According to GFWC member Schureman, ‘they who settled the legal and moral question had not the slightest idea that any white woman would ever dream of social equality’ (Schureman 1902: 218). The social character of club life adds to the fear of the infiltration of the home through desegregation, as indicated in a letter from Frances Dickinson of the Social Economics Club of Chicago. She writes that while her club has African-American members, the club holds ‘no social meetings in homes’ (Dickinson 1902: 251), a crucial difference, to her mind. Schureman makes explicit what Dickinson implies: Is there anything which brings women nearer together socially than the intellectual club? Nothing but the home life. If Mrs I. And Mrs W. are on equal footing intellectually and socially, their children become very intimate and their grandchildren marry . . . Now, if Mrs I. does not want Mrs W.’s grandson to ask the hand of her granddaughter in marriage she must not encourage social equality. (Schureman 1902: 218) The GFWC members insist upon a segregated organization through the rhetoric of progress so as to impose the binary of civilization/barbarism on the question. By defining African-American clubs as barbaric – as other – they invoke the language of colonialism, borrowing power from white men and maintaining the social hierarchy.

‘It will be done only by colored women’: the AfricanAmerican press responds I have shown that the discourse of evolution and progress used by the members of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to argue against the desegregation of the Federation participated in a widespread national discourse that linked American progress and white supremacy. But

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European-Americans were not alone in appealing to progress in support of their agenda. In the wake of the 1900 GFWC convention, the African– American press offered surprisingly diverse responses to the denied membership to the Woman’s Era club and the postponed vote on the Federation’s colour line. But whatever position they took, like their European-American counterparts, they tapped into the rhetoric of evolution and progress. The Wisconsin Weekly Advocate – a newspaper ‘devoted to the interests of the negro race’ and edited by a man who described himself as ‘black of skin’ and ‘born in slavery’ – ran a front-page story entitled ‘The Color Question: Its Unnecessary Agitation in the G.F.W.C. Convention’. Accepting unquestioningly the racist evolution position posited by the GFWC members, this article uses nature and evolution to applaud the actions of the General Federation – and to praise GFWC president Mrs Lowe as a ‘noble woman’ – in refusing membership to the Woman’s Era Club. Establishing that nature has designed the separate races, the author appeals to ‘one of the highest keynotes of nature’s laws’ – ‘harmony’ (‘The Color Question’: 1). Voicing the conservative position associated with Booker T. Washington, the writer asserts that the ‘natural’ solution to the colour question would be found complete when the colored race . . . forever ceases trying to force itself where it does not belong, and takes its position by itself, a patient and willing student of the methods, progress and accomplishments of the white race, fortified by centuries of grand development and citadeled upon a pinnacle of civil and social achievement, matchless, unparalleled in the world’s history. (Ibid.: 1) The newspaper acknowledges and praises the great progress made by African-Americans since emancipation, but it attributes this progress to white benefactors: ‘the colored race in America has not wrought out its progress alone. At every step from the dawn of its freedom it has been led, guided, aided and lifted up by the grand hand of the white race’ (ibid.: 1). It calls now for the independent endeavour of African-Americans for racial progress – the same notion of self-help touted by GFWC members: let ‘the race and its representatives . . . be content to occupy the position assigned it by infinite wisdom and patiently [continue] to try to lift itself to that eminence to which it may eventually attain’ (ibid.: 1). With their adherence to the racial inferiority ascribed to them by GFWC members, the editor appears to articulate the colonized mindset described by Stuart Hall, whereby the dominated subjects internalize the inferiority ascribed to them, thus experiencing themselves as other (Hall 1990: 225). Other responses, however, resisted the claim of inferiority, appropriating the language of evolution in order to disrupt the link between

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progress and white identity. A noteworthy inclusion in The Club Woman’s ‘Open Arena’ debate was a letter from Josephine Silone Yates, the president of the NACW. The debate having carried on for nearly two years, Yates wrote ‘From the Other Side’ in 1902. Like those contributors before her, she fills her message with the language of progress. But she uses this rhetoric to criticize as regressive the practice of basing decisions on race: to make race, or the color of one’s skin, the basis of one’s right to membership . . . in organizations supposed to be formed for the elevation of humanity, is a long step backward, and . . . embodies a principle entirely too narrow for the assumed broadly-gauged mentality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Yates 1902: 186) And yet Yates was probably not surprised by the position taken by the GFWC. Self-help had long been understood as a necessary means of progress among African-American women (Gere 1997: 161–2). In this instance, too, the message of self-help became a standard response. Pauline Hopkins, in The Colored American Magazine, found in the GFWC’s discrimination against African-American women’s clubs a reason to despair of any united work for progress among women across racial lines, and she encouraged African-American women to depend upon themselves for their own progress (Hopkins 1902: 445). This call for agency appears to have been taken up as the official version of the GFWC’s denial of membership to the Woman’s Era Club. Four years after the GFWC’s Milwaukee convention, The Voice of the Negro referred to the 1900 event – evidence of its lasting memory. An anonymous piece, ‘The National Association of Colored Women’, tells its own story of the founding of this national organization: The women of this race were forced by circumstances to organize a self-existing National Association. The results attained and the large awakening among the women of the race justify its existence . . . The opposition they encountered at the door of the white women has proved a benediction, for it gave to the race this organization of colored women who, for genius for work, for faith in the ultimate success of their work, for culture in consecrated service, and for noble, true, intelligent, pure-minded and great-souled women, are not surpassed by the best of any other race . . . If colored women are lifted up it will be done only by colored women. (‘National Association’ 1904: 310) This author’s claim that the GFWC’s exclusion of the Woman’s Era Club was the formative event in the founding of the NACW contradicts evidence that the NACW was formed in 1896, four years prior to this event

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(Shaw 1991: 11). This revision, therefore, suggests a tradition of race progress that rose up around this event and the NACW’s history. Part of this revision includes the appropriation of General Federation members’ claims that self-help would lead to progress for African-American women. ‘Opposition’ becomes a ‘benediction’ in this account of the event, leading to a population of African-American women unsurpassed by any other group. Self-help was crucial in the post-reconstruction USA since, as Fannie Barrier Williams observed, far less help was available from whites than there had been prior to emancipation. She explains: the voice of public opinion today seems to say: The white race quite exhausted itself in fighting for and winning emancipation and the amendments. Emancipation was the door of opportunity, it is for you to keep open this door for your progress. (Williams 1904: 32) Williams astutely grasps the reasons for this failure of help, locating it in the European-American efforts to position African-Americans as other: The American Negro is a great deal of a foreigner to the average white American. It is true that he has been in this country almost longer than any one else, except the Indian, but the conditions under which he came and has been permitted to remain and increase have given him a character and a status that separates him from intimate and equality relationships with the rest of his countrymen. (Ibid.: 31) Here, Williams subtly puts forward African-Americans’ credentials of Americanness in the form of history. Ruth Frankenberg, in Displacing Whiteness, argues that ‘the repressed memory of the brownness of the original residents of this land . . . forms another crucial dimension’ in linking ‘ “ownership” of the nation with “whiteness” and “Americanness” ’ (1997: 6). With her reference to the native ‘owners’ of the country, and her reminder of the long history of Africans in America, Williams brings this memory to the fore, providing a wedge with which to displace whiteness from the seat of privilege. In a report on women’s progress at the Chicago World’s Fair, Joan Imogen Howard makes this claim more explicitly, crediting African-Americans with an Americanness as deeply seated ‘as those who proudly trace their ancestry back to the Pilgrim Fathers [or] the Puritans of England’ (Gere 1997: 156). Supporting these claims of Americanness, the African-American press answered the GFWC’s discrimination by appropriating the language of progress and the icon of the New Woman for black womanhood. Josephine Silone Yates answers GFWC members’ charges of black

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women’s inferiority by asserting their already elevated status, evident in their ‘intelligence, morality, education, refinement, culture’ (Yates 1902: 186). A similar manoeuvre became popular in the African-American press in the form of articles celebrating the achievements and refinement of African-American women. Between 1900 and 1904, Pauline Hopkins frequently highlighted accomplished ‘race women’ in the Colored American Magazine, both in its ‘Here and There’ column and in her twelve-part series on ‘Famous Women of the Negro Race’. With photographs and biographical information, these pieces touted the accomplishments of artists, educators and vocalists (Figures 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3). And in 1904, the Voice of the Negro featured (along with an article on ‘The Progress of Colored Women’) ‘Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman’ (Adams 1904: 323–6). Prompted by his experience of

Figure 13.1 ‘Mrs. Geo. W. Forbes, Boston, Mass.’, ‘Famous Women of the Negro Race XII: Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges’, Colored American Magazine, October 1902: 449.

Figure 13.2 ‘Mary A. Rector, New York.’ Cover illustration for the April 1901 number of Colored American Magazine. The story of this actress appeared in ‘Here and There’: 472.

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Figure 13.3 ‘Miss Florence A. Aytes, Richmond, VA’, ‘Here and There’, Colored American Magazine, March 1901: 376.

seeing a black and a white woman in conversation together – equally cultivated, equally beautiful – the author celebrates the refined beauty of African-American women (Figures 13.4 and 13.5). With upswept hair and statuesque poses, the illustrations bear an unmistakable similarity to the Gibson Girl, illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s icon of American New Womanhood (Patterson 1995; see Angelika Köhler, Chapter 9 in this volume). But the models are also dark skinned, as are the subjects in Hopkins’s ‘Famous Women’ and ‘Here and There’ photos, offering the visible disruption to the GFWC’s implicit assertion that the New Woman was white. The authors therefore appropriate the form and language of the American New Woman, staking a claim to the New Woman identity and revising that ideal to include racial diversity. An example of ‘counter discourse’, their manoeuvre attempts to ‘expose and erode [the biases] of the dominant discourse’ (Tiffin 1995: 96). Fannie Barrier Williams went a step further, asserting that if progress is a defining feature of the New Woman, then surely the great advancement of the African-American

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Figure 13.4 From ‘Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman’, Voice of the Negro, 1904: 323.

woman who, ‘as if by magic, has succeeded in lifting herself as completely from the stain and meanness of slavery as if a century had elapsed since the day of emancipation’ (1900: 424), qualifies as exemplary progress. Indeed, based on this evolution, Williams claims that the black club woman is ‘the real new woman in American life’ (ibid.), reversing the centre and margin to the advantage of African-American women. In some ways, New Womanhood was founded upon hybridity and fluidity. As an example of how far fluidity could be pushed, men were welcomed to the GFCW convention in June 1900 – the same year the Woman’s Era Club was refused membership. The men were touted as ‘the best club women of their sex’ (Harmon 1984: 32), and while certainly there is an element of joking here – men did not threaten the identity of women by claiming access to it – this moment highlights the energy with which the GFWC members felt threatened in their position as American New Women by the presence of African-American women. What could have been a moment of gender solidarity became instead a women’s movement divided along the lines of race.

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Figure 13.5 From ‘Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman’, Voice of the Negro, 1904: 326.

Notes I wish to thank Suzanne Gould at the headquarters of GFWC and the interlibrary loan staff at UM’s Mansfield Library for their assistance in the research of this chapter. Kathy Ford, in particular, helped me locate hard-to-get sources. I also wish to thank Brady Harrison for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1 Williams (1900: 424). 2 For other discussions of this event, see Ann Firor Scott (1993: 127) and Anne Ruggles Gere (1997: 165–7). 3 For a discussion of The Club Woman as a New Womanhood publication, see Harmon (1984) and Gere (1997: 142).

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4 On Americanness, see Priscilla Wald (1995), Amy Kaplan (1998), and Alan Trachtenberg (1982). On the deployment of domesticity in the service of imperialism, see, for example, Rosemary Marangoly George (1993) and Laura Wexler (2000). For a discussion of women’s role in Irish nationalism, see Louise Ryan, Chapter 5 in this volume. 5 Interestingly, African-American clubwomen, specifically members of the Woman’s Era Club, were outspoken against the US imperialistic endeavours. In an 1894 resolution on the US annexation of Hawaii, they described their opposition as ‘especially fitting from us as colored women and Americans’ (cited in Gere 1997: 159).

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‘The National Association of Colored Women’ (1904) The Voice of the Negro, 1: 310–11. Patterson, M. (1995) ‘ “Survival of the Best Fitted”: Selling the American New Woman as Gibson Girl, 1895–1910’, American Transcendental Quarterly, 9: 73–85. Rafael, V.L. (1995) ‘Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines’, American Literature, 67: 639–66. Schureman, C.D. (1902) ‘The Open Arena: A Question of Color’, The Club Woman, 9: 217–18. Scott, A.F. (1993) Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shaw, S.J. (1991) ‘Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women’, Journal of Women’s History, 3: 10–25. Tiffin, H. (1995) ‘Postcolonial Literatures and Counter-discourse’, in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 95–8. Trachtenberg, A. (1982) The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, New York: Hill and Wang. Wald, P. (1995) Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form, Durham: Duke University Press. Wells, M.W. (1953) Unity in Diversity: The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Washington, DC: General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Wexler, L. (2000) Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Whitney, A.M. (1901) ‘The Open Arena: Shall We Secede?’, The Club Woman, 9: 13–14. Williams, F.B. (1900; 2nd edn 1969) ‘The Club Movement Among Colored Women of America’, in B.T. Washington, N.B. Wood and F.B. Williams (eds) A New Negro for A New Century, New York: Arno Press, pp. 379–428. —— (1904) ‘The Negro and Public Opinion’, The Voice of the Negro, 1: 30–1. Yates, J.S. (1902) ‘The Open Arena: From the Other Side’, The Club Woman, 9: 186. Yuval-Davis, N. and Anthias, F. (eds) (1989) Woman–Nation–State, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

14 The birth of national hygiene and efficiency Women and eugenics in Britain and America 1865–1915 Angelique Richardson In 1871, in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin remarked that Britain was a seedbed of unfitness: we do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poorlaws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment . . . It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. (Darwin 1871, I: 168) Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, founder of eugenics, or selective human breeding, had first broadcast his eugenic ideas in 1865 in a two-part article in Macmillan’s Magazine, expanding these into a book, Hereditary Genius, in 1869. For Galton, Darwin’s idea of evolution brought about a new mental attitude . . . one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to, the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavour to further evolution, especially that of the human race. (Galton 1883: 337) In 1873 he urged his contemporaries to try to render our individual aims subordinate to those which lead to the improvement of the race. The enthusiasm of humanity, strange as the doctrine may sound, has to be directed primarily to the future of our race, and only secondarily to the well-being of our contemporaries. (Galton 1873: 120)

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The following year, 1874, the publication of Sex in Education by the Harvard physician Dr Edward H. Clarke provided a fillip for the AngloAmerican debates over national health and sex roles, warning of the debilitating effects on girls of intellectual work. In the wake of the new biology, concern over the future of women was converging with concern over national fitness. Sex in Education addressed both the Woman Question and the issue of national efficiency; curious bedfellows, perhaps, which were nonetheless thrown increasingly together at this time of social and sexual instability. Clarke soon had a flock of followers on both sides of the Atlantic. The psychiatrist Dr Henry Maudsley, co-editor of the Journal of Mental Science from 1863 to 1878, lent his support, detailing the ill effects that ‘excessive mental application’ had upon the bodily health (Rowold 1996: 43). Quoting Clarke, he warned that if the strain of education on the ‘reproductive apparatus and its functions’ were to continue at the present rate, ‘the Sons of the New World will have to re-act, on a magnificent scale, the old story of unwived Rome and the Sabines’ (ibid.: 42). American medical men, notably the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, were repeatedly given as authorities, and Maudsley also cited the American physician Dr Nathan Allen, author of Lessons on Population Suggested by Grecian and Roman History (1871); Hereditary Disease (1873); and The Normal Standard of Women for Propagation (1873): ‘today the American woman is, to speak plainly, physically unfit for her duties as a woman’ (ibid.: 45). America was increasingly seen as an example of the ill effects of educating girls along the same lines as boys. The British anti-feminist journalist Eliza Lynn Linton spoke out against any weakening of the ideal of separate spheres, which she saw as tending to ‘universal topsyturvydom’ (1892: 463). She argued that science would necessarily determine – and curb – the political power of women, declaring ‘science is dead against it’, knowing that to admit women into politics would be destructive to ‘the physical well-being of the future generation’ and disastrous – in equal measure – ‘to the good conduct of affairs in the present’ (1891a: 88). She considered new – or, as she termed them, ‘wild’ – women to be unnatural ‘like certain “sports” which develop hybrid characteristics’ (ibid.: 79), and urged women entering higher education on the same terms as men to remain celibate rather than risk enfeebled children if they were unable to resist such foolhardy ambition (1886). She emphasized ‘the raison d’être of a woman is her maternity. For this and this alone nature has differentiated her from man, and built her up cell by cell and organ by organ’; motherhood was a woman’s ‘first great natural duty and her first great social obligation’ (1891a: 80; see also 1891b and 1892). Already a number of seeming paradoxes present themselves. Lynn Linton’s complex relation to the emancipation of women has been welldocumented (Anderson 1987; see also Brake, Chapter 3 in this volume), and much of her work pandered to patriarchal beliefs – expressed in misogynous terms – that the rise of women would lead to the fall – or

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abdication – of men (Linton 1889), so it is perhaps no surprise to see her championing the idea that books for women could mean fewer, or unfit, babies – or none at all. But what could early feminism have to do with national efficiency? Curious though it might seem, there was common ground between medical authorities such as Weir Mitchell – whose ‘rest cure’ for women diagnosed with neurasthenia or hysteria is the malignant monster that haunts Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s gothic tale ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – and many of his feminist opponents. Both camps were prepared to turn to biology as the key to – and panacea for – social issues, as the sex debates that heralded the dawn of the New Woman unfurled. Central to these debates was the question, how fundamental was biology to society and social change? In late Victorian Britain differential class fertility was perceived as likely to lead to racial degeneration. A biologistic discourse was developing on class, and eugenics within this national context would aim at regulating population by altering the balance of class in society. By contrast, in America, immigration and miscegenation were held to be the cause of degeneration. In both countries distinctions between the social and the biological were increasingly blurred, and a sizeable percentage of women activists presented their sex as the biological solution to racial degeneration and the vehicle for regeneration. The ideological hybridity that marks the work of women whose vision of female emancipation co-existed with racist beliefs or class prejudice might usefully be termed eugenic feminism. In this chapter I will outline the appeal of eugenics to feminists in Britain and America in the half-century that followed Galton’s public eugenic appeal, considering ways in which eugenic ideas were inflected by different national concerns, and questioning the extent to which the New Woman was a genuinely progressive figure. I shall conclude by situating Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels alongside contemporary American films engaging with issues of race and national health.

The rise of the New Woman Developments in Britain and the USA that were crucial to the birth of the New Woman were parallel and interlinked. In Britain the push for progress for women was marked most notably by the more or less annual presentation to parliament of Suffrage Bills in the last three decades of the century, by the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 and by the opening of higher education to women (albeit a privileged few) with the establishment of Girton College, Cambridge in 1869. The same year saw the founding of two suffrage societies in America, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (in 1890 they united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association – NAWSA – under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton), and women’s colleges began to appear apace. However, as Laurel Brake

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details in Chapter 3 of this volume, many women active in public life were opposed to the vote. A form of citizenship based on contribution rather than entitlement, and which was not necessarily predicated on the vote, began to develop; a gendered citizenship which formed the ideological basis for eugenic feminism in Britain and America (see Richardson 2003). Although the interests of the New Woman diverged according to different national agendas, it is worth remembering the extent to which the New Woman was a genuinely transatlantic phenomenon. Literary critics have tended to focus on her development in Britain, and this volume takes an important step in redressing this balance, with the chapters by Trina Robbins, Angelika Köhler, Françoise Le Jeune and Jill Bergman demonstrating the pervasiveness of the American New Woman in the early twentieth century. As Christine Stansell writes in American Moderns, ‘nowhere in Europe – or in the world, for that matter – did modern culture orient itself to the New Woman as its defining figure as it did in America’ (2000: 232). Sarah Grand introduced the term New Woman into popular transatlantic currency in a prominent American journal, the North American Review (1894) (see Forbes 1900: 883; see also Tusan 1998) and lectured in America and Britain during the 1890s.1 In 1893 her infamous novel The Heavenly Twins, a sustained attack on the sexual double standard, took the public by storm, selling over 100,000 copies in the United States (The Times obituary 22 May 1943, 6d; see also Mott 1947: 181–2), where it made the overall best sellers list for the 1890s (Mott 1997: 311), and over 20,000 copies in Britain, where it was reprinted six times in its first year (Anon., The Times 13 May 1943; The Times obituary 22 May 1943). Soon after, the American novelist George F. Hall published A Study in Bloomers, or, The Model New Woman (1895), a lavishly illustrated exploration of this female phenomenon, and Ella D’Arcy’s Pleasure-Pilgrim made her brief and striking appearance: ‘the newest development of the New Woman’, an ‘American edition’ who is ‘the pioneer of the army coming out of the West, that’s going to destroy the existing scheme of things, and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire’ (Richardson 2002: 150). The North American Review noted in ‘Petticoat Government’ that the New Woman was ‘flourishing throughout the length and breadth of this huge continent’ (O’Rell 1896: 102). As Angelika Köhler and Trina Robbins demonstrate in this volume (Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 respectively), new images of femininity – in particular, the Gibson Girl – were a growing subject in American popular magazines. Robbins notes that the Gibson Girl was, in part, a conservative figure. But how different was this image from the reality of the New Woman, in Britain and in America (see Harrison 1978; Pugh 2000; Richardson 2003)? Jill Bergman demonstrates that the New Woman in America was inherently conservative, coming to represent a specifically white national identity. The New Woman in Britain shared this position of relative privilege, enjoying a status that was pre-eminently middle class.

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Grand, for one, urged middle-class women to ‘learn to appreciate the value and weight of their own class, the great middle class’; she stressed ‘it is in the middle class itself that the best breeding, the greatest refinement, the prettiest manners and the highest culture are now to be found’ (Grand 1913: 209).

The appeal of biology The concern over the reproductive effects of women overtaxing themselves, that Clarke had so effectively detailed, found continued expression in the decades that followed. According to Karl Pearson, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College London from 1884, founder of biometrics and the Men and Women’s Club in 1885 (for the frank discussion of sexual matters) and, from 1911, Britain’s first Professor of Eugenics, if women sought to compete with men during the years of child-bearing, then ‘the race must degenerate’ (Pearson 1894: 569–70). Countering these claims, several New Women worked within the same discourse of racial regeneration but constructed themselves not as villains but rational saviours, urging the need for rational reproduction. This idea had its origins in the social purity movement which developed apace in the 1880s. Prior to this, feminist energies had been focused on the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) of 1864, 1866 and 1869, which began in the late 1860s under the leadership of Josephine Butler. The acts were introduced as exceptional legislation to control the spread of venereal disease in garrison towns and ports. Demanding the registration and compulsory examination of suspected female prostitutes in these areas, the acts effectively gave state backing to the sexual double standard, legitimizing male promiscuity. They were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886. By this time the social purity movement, a loose association of religious and moral crusaders, had become increasingly interventionist, adopting a new, more coercive policy towards the urban poor, or the ‘residuum’, and becoming more likely to use the instruments of the state to enforce their moral code (see Bland 1995: 97 and, especially, Walkowitz 1980: 251).2 Following W.T. Stead’s sensational exposure of juvenile prostitution, or ‘white slavery’, in the Pall Mall Gazette earlier that year, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed. It raised the law of consent from thirteen – to which it had been raised in 1875 – to sixteen, and reformed the law on sexual assault. The act was hedged with moral opprobrium, coming down harshly on brothels and prostitutes and criminalizing ‘acts of gross indecency’ between men. While it was supposed to raise the age of consent, in practice it was directed at workingclass sexual behaviour. A National Vigilance Association was formed with the initial function of ensuring the local enforcement of the act, but, in keeping with the increasingly hostile approach to working-class culture that was developing in the 1880s, it turned its attention to burning

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‘obscene’ books, and attacking music halls, theatres and bogus registration offices (see Coote 1916; Walkowitz 1980: 251). Social purity groups began to distribute prescriptive literature on morals and child-rearing.3 Borrowing from, and transforming, the language of Darwinian sexual selection, social purists sought to reverse its androcentric bias, reinvesting women with the agency of selection on the grounds that they alone were sufficiently race aware to make responsible sexual choices. However, social purity began to be transformed by the very ideas it had sought to transform, having set out to challenge the sexual double standard, and oppose the justification of social and sexual inequality though biological means. It now began to endorse fundamental sexual difference, feeding off discourses of degeneration, and biologizing male sexuality as brutish if left unchecked. In this way, social purity developed along increasingly eugenic lines. According to one leading social purist, Frances Swiney, ‘women are always the pioneers to the humaner and nobler civilisation’. As she saw it, ‘from the time that woman lost her power of selection, and man exercised upon her the abuse of sexual excesses, the race began to degenerate’ (1908: 29, 45). The doyenne of the movement, Ellice Hopkins, author of countless didactic pamphlets, offered a biologistic solution: ‘it is this great upward movement, lifting man to a higher level, which is given into the hands of us women, touching, as it does, all the great truths of our womanhood’ (1899: 182). These ideas would find their most extensive expression in fiction, notably the novels of Sarah Grand and the short stories of George Egerton. This shift from the defensive to the offensive must not be ignored. The social purity movement that had begun as a way of countering the sexual double standard was now endorsing a new and newly biologized model of sexual behaviour. To read this shift as pragmatism, as part of a strategy which would ultimately bring about feminist freedoms, is to succumb to a reading as reductive as it is seductive and to whitewash the class and race biases of early feminism. Ignoring the increasing appeal of biologistic and racialist ideas, it risks replicating the nineteenth-century idea that women are ultimately morally superior. It is an uncomfortable but irrefutable fact that in some instances these ideas were appealing because rather than in spite of the fact that they served racialist ends. The powerful appeal of eugenics to women continued, and increased, in the early years of the new century. In 1907 the feminist Sybil NevilleRolfe (née Burney) (1886/7–1955) founded the Eugenics Education Society (the Eugenics Society from 1912, and – since 1989 – the Galton Institute), which aimed at promoting, in Galton’s words, those agencies under social control that would lead to racial improvement.4 The society was committed to Galtonian hereditarianism: it saw class as a matter of heredity, and inherited defects as underlying all the problems associated with the residuum, including lack of character. It remained closely associated with the New Woman, holding lectures on topics such as ‘The New

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Woman and Race Progress’, ‘Eugenics and Womanhood’, and ‘The Biological Aspect of Women’ (see, for example, the Society’s Annual Report, 1910/11: 34–5; cited in Kevles 1995: 317, n. 34). By 1913 women outnumbered men among the society’s members and associate members (see Jones 1995: 482). The developing interest in Britain in heredity and its concomitant narratives, racial degeneration and improvement, was paralleled in America (see Ludmerer 1972; Gordon 1974; Reed 1978; Davis 1981; Haller 1984; Stepan 1991; Smedley 1993; Kevles 1995; Larson 1995; Hasian 1996). In 1865, the year that Galton had made public his vision of human selective breeding, the Circular declared: ‘human breeding should be one of the foremost questions of the age, transcending in its sublime interest all present political and scientific questions’ (Kevles 1995: 21). The Circular was the newspaper of the Perfectionist Oneida Community in Upstate New York, founded by John Humphrey Noyes. In 1869, further inspired by Galton, Noyes launched a programme of selective human breeding (for a full account of Oneida’s eugenic experiment, see Muncy 1973: 186–92). In 1879, the editor of the North American Review wrote to Galton: ‘your name and your work are so well known and so highly esteemed in this country, that a direct contribution from your pen to the American Review would, it is needless to say, be considered by them a great compliment and obligation and command a large and appreciative audience’, and again, in 1889, ‘I am very glad to hear that you will attempt to popularize your recent researches in heredity for the American Review’ (Galton Papers 291/3). In a private letter to Galton, Pearson wrote: ‘you hardly know perhaps how much of weight your sympathy expressed in some form will carry with it, especially in America’ (18 April 1901; Pearson 1914–30: IIIA 244). In America eugenic enthusiasm was hot-housed by immigration. In 1882 Congress acted for the first time to restrict immigration, seeking to bar paupers, convicts and the insane, but, nonetheless, immigration to the US increased steadily, peaking at nearly one million in 1907 and then fluctuating at a level above 650,000 per year until the outbreak of the First World War (see Higham 1988: 159). Most of the new arrivals came from eastern and southern Europe (Russia, Poland, Austria–Hungary and Italy), and began to be figured as racially other, and inferior to northern Europeans (see Higham 1988: 110; see also Hofstadter 1955; Handlin 1959; Kevles 1995: 46–7; Yans-McLaughlin and Lightman 1997; Jacobson 1998). In 1890, in Looking Backward 1887–2000, the US writer Edward Bellamy describes a society in which for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation. The necessities of poverty, the need of having a home, no longer tempt

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women to accept as the fathers of their children men whom they can neither love nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from personal qualities . . . Each generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last. (Bellamy 1890: 191) Bellamy’s vision is based on a maternalist politics, embracing both the woman question and the race question. Speaking out against individualism (ibid.: 192) he stresses that ‘the effect of untrammelled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations’ has tended to ‘race purification’; ‘not only a physical but a mental and moral improvement’ and ‘one of the great laws of nature [is] now freely working out the salvation of the race’ (ibid.: 191, 192). Julian West, the narrator, learns from Doctor Leete that women play a central role in the regulation of racial quality: our women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood. (Ibid.: 192) Motherhood is presented as the condition of full – and fulfilled – womanhood: ‘the highest positions in the feminine army of industry are entrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex’ (ibid: 187).5 There was growing support among American women for such a vision, and in redefining their social roles a number adopted eugenic lines of argument. In 1883, the year in which Galton named eugenics, the US Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), led by Frances Willard, established departments of Hygiene and Heredity alongside departments such as Social Purity, Colored Work and Scientific Temperance Instruction (see Bordin 1990: 97–8). The WCTU also set up a Journal of Heredity which published extracts from Galton’s work, and discussed social reform in relation to hereditarian concerns (see Haller 1984: 31). Both white and black women in America embraced biologistic forms of thinking as they developed social and political claims, evidencing the complex relation between early feminism and racial and biologistic ideas (see Athey 2000). In 1890, discussing the male black vote, Willard declared: ‘the colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is its center of power. The safety of woman, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment’ (1890 interview, New York Voice, cited in Wells-Barnett 1969: 82–4). During the 1890s, the US magazine Arena, with its large middle-class readership, began to publish articles on sex education, free love, heredity and marriage (Kevles 1995: 66). At the

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beginning of the new century America’s leading eugenist, Charles P. Davenport (1866–1944), joined Galton, Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon (who had been appointed Professor of Zoology at University College, London, in 1890) as the American editor on the board of the journal Biometrika. Returning from a visit to England, he wrote to Galton of his ‘renewed courage for the fight for the quantitative study of Evolution’ (11 October 1902, Galton Papers, 235; see Rosenberg 1961: 270; Kevles 1995: 45). By 1904 he was directing a station for the experimental study of evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island’s North Shore, founded by the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, also at Cold Spring Harbor, studying family records over three generations. Andrew Carnegie of the Washington Carnegie Institution donated ten million dollars to the project. In 1911 Davenport published a widely noted study, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, urging the compulsory sterilization of those deemed to be unfit. He feared that immigrants from south-eastern Europe would make the country’s population ‘darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial . . . more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality’ (Davenport 1911: 221–2, cited in Kevles 1995: 47). In the same year, Charles Reed, Chairman of the American Medical Association section on obstetrics and the diseases of women, published Marriage and Genetics, in which he wrote: The subject of marriage, especially in its relation to the great problem of heredity, may now, upon proper occasions, be discussed in the drawing room without violence to ‘good form’. The family newspapers and the magazines discuss the question without reserve. The school teacher and the minister of the gospel are within the pale of propriety, when they consider it in their respective stations. Clubs are formed, books are printed and lectures are delivered on this subject, all with not only the approval but the patronage of good society. (Reed 1913: 14–15) The rise of eugenic thinking in America directly informed the new state sterilization policies. Between 1907 and 1917 sterilization laws were enacted by sixteen states, giving states the power to compel the sterilization of habitual or confirmed criminals, and persons guilty of a particular crime, for example rape. Most of the statutes also included epileptics, the insane and ‘idiots’ in state institutions (Kevles 1995: 100). In 1914 the superintendent of Davenport’s Eugenics Records Office, Harry H. Laughlin, co-editor of Eugenical News, drafted the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law which demanded the compulsory sterilization of a large range of social groups, ranging from the ‘feebleminded’ to the physically disabled, state dependents and the homeless (see Chase 1977: 16). The German Sterilization Act of 1933 was based on Laughlin’s Model Eugenic Sterilization Law (see Kühl 1994: 43).

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Eugenics was supported by five American Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (see Chase 1977: 15; Kevles 1995: 74, 97 and 114), and recent scholarship has explored collaboration between American eugenists and Nazi racial scientists before the outbreak of the Second World War, and the support they received from the US Pioneer Fund, which continues to fund research that lends support to the idea that intelligence is inherited (see Kühl 1994).6

Eugenic feminists and racist films In 1895 Grace Thorne, the fictional heroine of Hall’s novel on the American New Woman, lectured candidly across America on ‘the race question’: Whoever asks admission at our gates, East or West, and is unwilling to conform to our habits, learn our language and become naturalized and patriotic American citizens, should be unceremoniously dismissed. The springing up of immense foreign colonies in our midst, where our language is despised, our Bible scoffed at, our flag trailed in the dust, and our institutions generally demeaned, is a menace of mighty magnitude. No party should be so anxious for votes as to wink at these things. Strict immigration laws should be enacted and enforced to the letter. ‘America for Americans’ should be the watchword of all. (Hall 1895: 196) Thorne had many real-life counterparts. Victoria Woodhull, the first US female presidential candidate, US publisher of the Communist Manifesto, advocate of ‘free love’ or woman’s sexual freedom, was also a staunch eugenist and author of ‘The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit’ (1891). Her career offers further testimony to the co-existence of eugenics with progressive ideas. Generally praised for a subversive ‘pro-sex’ position (see for example Clark 1991: 30), she toured the USA giving lectures which advocated ‘the scientific propagation of the race’, and underscoring the role that women would play in this process. Banding together ‘imbeciles’, ‘paupers’ and ‘criminals’ as biologically defective, she urged that if they were ‘undesirable citizens’, then ‘they must not be bred’ (Woodhull 1891: 38; see also Woodhull 1874, 1888; Kevles 1995: 21). Woodhull stressed the importance of economic independence for women if they were to fulfil their eugenic role: ‘to woman by nature belongs the right of sexual determination . . . As to the difficulty of freedom for woman: there is but one, and that is pecuniary independence’ (Woodhull 1974: 40–1). Among American feminist writers, eugenics was taken up with a vengeance by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose work has also tended to be celebrated

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for its emancipatory aspects (see, as notable, historicized, exceptions, Lanser 1989; Ganobcsik-Williams 2003). For a fuller understanding of her work, Perkins Gilman needs to be read not only alongside overtly feminist fiction, but alongside other fictions that were produced at this moment in American history. Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued that improving the economic situation of women was the key to racial improvement, for it would allow women to exercise their powers of sexual selection. In Women and Economics (1898), her sustained plea for women’s economic independence from men, She wrote: ‘competition among males, with selection by the female of the superior male, is the process of sexual selection, and works to racial improvement’ (pp. 110–11). Ganobscik-Williams (2003) examines a shift from Gilman’s late nineteenth-century optimism about immigrant potential (from 1895–6 she worked and lived at the Chicago Hull House settlement) to a position of increasing unease about, and hostility towards, immigrants, and notes the influence of Progressivist philosophies of managerialism in educational and social reform in the new century (see also Weibe 1967). The main forum for Gilman’s views was The Forerunner, her own monthly magazine which ran between 1909 and 1916 and for which she wrote the entire content. Her earliest plan for managing immigration is contained in her novel Moving the Mountain, serialized in The Forerunner in 1911. The novel’s assimilationist scheme – which requires all immigrants to be ‘antiseptically clean’ (p. 56) before they drop anchor – is developed by women. By 1914 Gilman was proposing a compulsory National Training School of Citizenship (see Gilman 1914). Gilman’s next novel, Herland, also serialized in The Forerunner (1915), depicts a eugenic feminist utopia set deep in the Amazonian jungle, and stresses the importance both of immigration controls and assimilation, emphasizing the importance of the rational mind, and rational reproduction, which is elevated to the status of a religion. Over-population in Herland has been solved through eugenic means, and passion, defined as masculine, has been so thoroughly excised that the male reproductive function, and indeed men themselves, have been removed. The narrator, American sociologist Vandyck Jennings, tells his Amazonian audience that there is much less poverty in the United States than in Europe, where there are ‘wretched paupers and beggars’. He proceeds: I explained that the laws of nature require a struggle for existence, and that in the struggle the fittest survive, and the unfit perish. In our economic struggle, I continued, there was always plenty of opportunity for the fittest to reach the top, which they did, in great numbers, particularly in our country; that where there was severe economic pressure the lowest classes of course felt it worse, and that among the poorest of all the women were driven into the labor market by necessity. (Gilman 1915: 63)

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Vandyck’s interlocutor, Moadine, remarks: ‘this inferior one-third have no children, I suppose’, to which Jeff responds: ‘on the contrary, the poorer they were, the more children they had . . . “Reproduction is in inverse proportion to individuation”’ (ibid.). His words embody the driving concern of eugenics both in Britain and America – the Malthusian concern that the stock perceived as inferior was the most reproductive. The novel reveals the complex interconnections between feminism, social inequality and eugenics. Rejecting ‘a “struggle for existence” which would result in an everlasting writhing mass of underbred people trying to get ahead of one another – some few on top, temporarily, many constantly crushed out underneath, a hopeless substratum of paupers and degenerates . . .’ (ibid.: 68) – the inhabitants of Herland view mothers as ‘Conscious Makers of People’ (ibid.): mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere ‘instinct’, a wholly personal feeling; it was – a religion . . . There followed a period of ‘negative eugenics’ which must have been an appalling sacrifice. We are commonly willing to ‘lay down our lives’ for our country, but they had to forego motherhood for their country – and it was precisely the hardest thing for them to do. (Gilman 1915: 69) Motherhood is now ‘the highest social service – a sacrament, really . . . it is only undertaken once, by the majority of the population . . . those held unfit are not even allowed that . . . and to be encouraged to bear more than one child is the very highest reward and honor in the power of the state’ (ibid.: 69). We learn that, as a result of these practices, ‘sickness was almost wholly unknown among them, so much so that a previously high development in what we call the “science of medicine” had become practically a lost art. They were a clean-bred, vigorous lot’ (ibid.: 72). The short hair of the women in Herland serves to emphasize their role as selectors – a reversal that was central to eugenic feminism, realigning humans with the rest of the animal kingdom in which selection was, almost without exception, a female prerogative (Darwin 1871, II: 371). ‘ “If their hair was only long”, Jeff would complain, “they would look so much more feminine.” ’ Vandyck, a man of reason, muses to himself: I rather liked it myself, after I got used to it. Why we should so admire ‘a woman’s crown of hair’ and not admire a Chinaman’s queue is hard to explain, except that we are so convinced that the long hair ‘belongs’ to a woman. Whereas the ‘mane’ in horses is on both, and in lions, buffalos, and such creatures only on the male. But I did miss it – at first. (Gilman 1915: 30) The following year Gilman published the sequel, With Her in Ourland, in which Vandyck tours the world with his Herland bride Ellador, a fellow

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sociologist. Through Ellador who has left Herland for the United States (Ourland), Gilman denounces slavery. Ellador declares to Vandyck: ‘about the first awful mistake you made was in loading yourself up with those reluctant Africans . . . if it wasn’t so horrible, it would be funny, awfully funny. A beautiful healthy young country, saddling itself with an antique sin every other civilized nation had repudiated.’ (1916: 119). However, her critique is underpinned by her belief in racial purity, and Gilman’s deployment of racialized evolutionary discourse is intensified in this novel. Diagnosing America as ‘bloated and verminous’ (ibid.: 118), Gilman turns to the question of white immigration, arguing that democracy will never be achieved in the United States on the basis of an ‘illassorted and unassimilatable mass of human material’ (ibid.: 118, my emphasis). Democracy, Ellador advises Vandyck, must ‘pick and choose’ its people, for races were at ‘different stages of development’ (ibid.: 120, 121). She draws a comparison with Europe: ‘you go to England, and the people are English. Only three per cent of aliens even in London, I understand. And in France the people are French – bless them! And in Italy, Italian’ (ibid.: 118). Ellador praises Jews for their concern over racial purity – an attitude which was not uncommon among early British eugenists.7 At this time racialist ideas were taking centre stage in the emerging medium of film, and, most significantly, in D.W. Griffiths’s film The Birth of a Nation, one of the most controversial films in the history of cinema (Lang 1994: 31). On 8 February 1915, it premiered in Los Angeles as The Clansman where it ran for seven months; the title was changed to The Birth of a Nation when it began to show in New York the following month. It was based on the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s interpretation of the relations of the North and South and their bearing on the race question, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). It was seen by millions more people than had ever seen any other movie, or than would see any other movie, for half a century (ibid.: 250). Dixon claimed that, before the Civil War, the South was ruled by an ‘aristocracy founded on brains, culture, and blood’, the ‘old fashioned dream of the South which, but for the Black curse . . . could be today the garden of the world’ (Carter 1960: 350). In the preface to The Clansman, he wrote: how the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon’s death, and saved the life of a people forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race. (Carter 1960: 348) In 1915, Rolfe Cobleigh, associate editor of The Congregationalist and Christian World, reported:

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[Mr Dixon] said that one purpose in his play was to create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men. Mr Dixon said that his desire was to prevent the mixing of white and Negro blood by intermarriage . . . Mr Dixon said that the Ku Klux Klan was formed to protect the white women from Negro men, to restore order and to reclaim political control for the white people of the South. He said that the Ku Klux Klan was not only engaged in restoring law and order, but was of a religious nature. (Cobleigh 1915; see Geduld 1971: 9) The Birth of a Nation opens with the statement: ‘the bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion’; Griffiths represents this with a tableau of a minister praying over manacled slaves to be auctioned in a town square. The suggestion is that previous to the arrival of Africans, America was a place of peace and harmony. The scene then switches to a mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist meeting. Through the film, Griffiths promotes his vision of unity through the subordination of blacks. Near the end, as a caption states ‘disarming the blacks’, black voters are intimidated by mounted Clansmen at an election; at the next election three blacks are shown turning away as a line of mounted Clansmen stand with their guns drawn. The last intertitle reads ‘Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever!’ The film also indicts – and implicitly biologizes as a separate race – white people of a different social group – carpetbaggers: ‘adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much enemies of the one race as of the other.’ A synopsis of the film submitted to the US Copyright Office on 8 February 1915 states: ‘to the American people, the outcome of four years of fratricidal strife, the nightmare of Reconstruction, and the establishment of the South in its rightful place, is the birth of a new nation’, noting ‘Lincoln’s plan of restoring the Negroes to Africa was dreamed of only, never carried out’ (Cuniberti 1979: 196–8). Another synopsis, submitted the following week, added: ‘at the next election the negroes dare not vote and the threat of a black empire is dissolved’ (ibid.: 180). The following year a five-reel documentary Where Are My Children?, adapted by the director–writer Lois Weber (1881–1939) and her husband Phillips Smalley from a story by Lucy Payton and Franklyn Hall, premiered in New York. A stringent indictment of abortion among the affluent professional class, it simultaneously encouraged birth control among the working class, promoting a class-based eugenics. Weber, working then as a director for Universal, was an evangelist and prominent figure in early silent cinema. A vehement opponent of abortion and a supporter of classbased eugenics and birth-control, she referred to her films as ‘missionary pictures’ (Acker 2002; see also Acker 1991). Among her many other films was The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1917), a tribute to the eugenist and birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger, editor of The Birth Control Review from 1917 to 1938.8 Advertisements for Where Are My Children?

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heralded ‘a powerful portrayal of the premeditated destruction of the unborn’, declaring it ‘society’s greatest weapon against race suicide’, and highlighting its conservative aspects (New York Tribune, 13 April 1916: 14; 15 April 1916: 7; and 18 April 1916: 16).9 The film opens with a display of heaven, and the words: the great army of ‘chance’ children. They went forth to earth in vast numbers. Then came back those sad, ‘unwanted’ souls, that were constantly sent back. They were marked morally or physically defective and bore the sign of the serpent. And then in the secret place of the Most High were those souls, fine and strong, that were sent forth only on prayer. They were marked with the approval of the Almighty. (Where Are My Children?) The lead character, Richard Walton, a District Attorney, is introduced as ‘a great believer in eugenics’. Upon a sighting of criminals, he tells an acquaintance: ‘these poor souls are ill-born. If the mystery of birth were understood, crime could be wiped out.’ The film notes: ‘Walton’s sister had contracted an eugenic marriage’; her baby is healthy and beautiful. The same year the film was released, the eugenist Michael Guyer, zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, published Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Eugenics, and the Harvard biologist William E. Castle, Professor of genetics, published Genetics and Eugenics. This was the most widely used college text in its field, going through four editions over the next fifteen years. At this time, most American colleges and universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Winsconsin, Northwestern and Berkeley, were offering courses in eugenics, or genetics courses that drew on eugenic material (Kevles 1995: 69). Also in 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, urging that intermarriage between Nordics, whom Grant positioned at the top of the white race hierarchy, with lesser Alpines or, worse, Mediterraneans, would lead to ‘mongrelization’ (ibid.: 75). In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the wealthy Tom Buchanan discusses this issue: the idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved . . . it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things. (Fitzgerald 1925: 13) In the wake of Perkins Gilman’s utopias, eugenic ideas continued to exercise and seduce American feminists. Looking across the Atlantic to Britain, the eugenist and birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger, editor of The Birth Control Review from 1917 to 1938 (see Murphy 1990), argued in The Pivot of Civilization (1922) that birth control was a necessary step to the further improvement of human life as a whole:

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A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying industrial centers of the United States, published during the past decade by the Children’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding. Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children’s Bureau reports only incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies [. . .] I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime of modern civilization – that of permitting motherhood to be left to blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant and irresponsible classes of the community. (Sanger 1922a: 43–4) Her treatise, published in Britain the following year, rehearsed the Victorian commonplace: ‘those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly’, decrying charity: ‘funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born’ (Sanger 1922b: 251).10 Such rhetoric had characterized the novels of Sarah Grand at the fin-de-siècle. In The Heavenly Twins, following the early death of her first husband, Evadne remarks: ‘he for one should never have been born. With his ancestry, he must have come into the world foredoomed to a life of dissipation and disease’ (1893: 662). The racial and class-biased motivations of early feminism did not go unchallenged. In Britain the polemical New Woman Mona Caird, who had inspired the 1888 debate ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’, began a sustained attack on contemporary enthusiasm for biological explanation and solution, infusing the terms of her opponents with radically different meaning (see Richardson 2001, 2003). Writing in the major periodicals of the day she challenged the ways in which Darwinian ideas were being used to justify barbaric social practices, and employed a language of biological transmission to address and highlight cultural transmission, and to highlight the fact that much that is explained along biological lines is actually socially determined. In her articles in the Westminster Review, ‘the race’ ceases to denote a fixed biological category, and, instead, signals a fluid social grouping: ‘the race, therefore, even more than the individual, is clay in the hands of the potter: Circumstance’ (Caird 1894: 141, 162–79). She emphasized: we must on no account admit . . . local ‘human nature’ as a constant factor, but must regard it as a mere register of the forces that chance

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Caird engaged directly with eugenic practice. Condemning the ‘perpetual renunciation for a race that never comes’, she opened her Westminster essay ‘Children of The Future’ with a quotation from the British eugenist socialist and novelist Jane Hume Clapperton on the ‘Humanity of the Future’, and attacked this privileging of the unborn; of ‘children of the future’ (1897a: 150). For Caird, the unborn – the children of tomorrow – were not to take precedence over the contemporary; the real: the rights of the present race were ‘at least as great as those of the coming one’ (1892: 811–29). In Bellamy’s Looking Backward 1887–2000, Dr Leete presents Julian West with Berrian’s Ruth Elton, a eugenic romance in which the very practice which Caird condemns is endorsed, and made analogous with the care of a Christian God: how different is the course which Berrian takes, and with what tremendous effect he enforces the principle which he states: ‘Over the unborn our power is that of God, and our responsibility like His toward us. As we acquit ourselves toward them, so let Him deal with us’. (Bellamy 1890: 193) In her 1913 Presidential Address to the Personal Rights Association, Caird outlined the threat eugenics posed to individual liberty: ‘if Society is obsessed by a crude and unproved theory of heredity, how are we to resist interference with our marriages, or being treated as hysterical, or feebleminded, or degenerate, or insane?’ (pp. 8–9). In her next novel, The Stones of Sacrifice (1915), she attacked eugenics and racism head on. The involvement of American and British New Women with eugenics points not only to the hybrid nature of late nineteenth-century feminism, but to the complex relationship between feminism, biology and biological essentialism which emerged in the nineteenth century, and resurfaced as ‘difference’ feminism in the closing years of the twentieth. It also points to the powerful appeal of the narrative of biological determinism, which ultimately denies individual autonomy and freedom and yet, repeatedly over the last one-and-a-half centuries, has underpinned social strategies purporting to be emancipatory.

Notes 1 For contemporary American responses to Grand see, for example, Anon. (1894, 1897).

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2 For an informative treatment of the response to venereal disease from 1870 in Britain and several other European countries, which explores links between VD control, colonialism and imperialism, see Davidson and Hall (2001). The collection also explores ways in which a new preventative public health response had notably different national histories. In Britain the First World War Royal Commission on VD led to the institution of a clinic system based on voluntary, open and confidential access; in France, by contrast, police regulation of prostitution continued until 1960. For an account of how fears about the effect of venereal disease on the family led physicians in the USA to ally with the nascent eugenics movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, see Brandt (1987, especially Chapter 1). For an informative interpretation of the American social purity movement, see Pivar (1973). 3 On opposition to the repressive elements of this movement, from, among others, Josephine Butler, see Walkowitz (1980: 252). Walkowitz also notes the latent coercive impulses of the Butlerite feminists in their responses to working-class girls (ibid.: 249). 4 For further details on Neville-Rolfe, see Richardson (2003) and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. See also Jones (1995). 5 On the development of maternalism, see Davin (1978); Koven and Michel (1993); Digby and Stewart (1996). 6 See Dowbiggin (1992, 1997) on the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury endorsement by US physicians and, in particular, psychiatrists of eugenics (1992). Dowbiggin considers the case of G. Alder Blumer, editor of the American Journal of Insanity and Director of the Utica State Asylum (1992). See also Rushton (1994). 7 For example, the crusading eugenist Robert Reid Rentoul, author of Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? (A Plea for the Unborn) (1906), selected Jewish people as worthy of admiration and emulation: ‘no race had been so scrupulously particular as has the Hebrew in prohibiting the intermarriage of their own race with the Gentiles’ (p. 5). 8 For further discussion of Sanger and The Birth Control Review, see Murphy (1990). 9 For further discussion see Stamp (2000, 2003). Where Are My Children? is held at the Library of Congress. See Stamp for censorship in relation to the film, and discussion of its reception. On eugenics and babies in American film and medicine, see Pernick (1996). 10 On eugenic attitudes towards charity, see Richardson (2003: 58–77).

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Index

A nó és Társadalom see Nó és Társadalom Aaron, Jane 17, 21, 31n1, 31n3, 33n11, 33; A View Across the Valley 21, 33n11 Aberdeen, Lady 86 abolitionism xiii, 253 abortion 137, 202n31, 212, 214, 253–4 Acker, Ally 253, 257 Acsády, Judit 3, 4, 9, 10, 35, 46n2, 190–204, 209 activism, activist 4, 7, 10, 52, 58, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71n18, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 191, 196, 199, 200, 200n8 actress 9, 110, 150 adultery 38, 40, 41, 42, 126, 136 advertisement, advertising 4, 76, 77, 91, 97, 98, 99, 120, 123, 127–31, 132, 134, 136, 148 advice column 8, 95, 102–17 Aesthete, Aestheticism, Aesthetic movement 56, 160, 175n4 affluence 126, 253 African 94, 95, 227, 253 African-American 5, 11, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238n5, 238n6, 253 agency 4, 7, 9, 195, 231, 245 Ágoston, Julián 38, 48 alcohol 95, 106, 114, 123, 179 alien 18, 22, 29, 30, 39, 61, 94, 95, 102 alienation 26, 42, 169, 216 Allen, Grant 54, 56 Allen, Nathan 241 Altschuler, Glenn C. 176n13, 176 ambiguity 5, 8, 9, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 28, 30, 35, 36, 64, 97, 98, 106, 118, 162, 164, 165, 205, 214, 217 ambition 160, 162, 172, 206 ambivalence see ambiguity America, American 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11,

75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 104, 118, 124, 125, 147, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 175, 179, 181, 184, 185, 187, 217n2, 218n13, 223, 226, 228, 241, 242, 243, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257n2 American Artist 179 American Associated Press 76, 77, 78 American Journal of Insanity 257n6 Americanness 11, 168, 169, 185, 224, 228, 232, 238n4 Anderson, Nancy Fix 241, 257 androgyny 18, 125 Angel in the House, The 158 Anglican 21, 32n7, 63 Anglocentric 17, 31n2 Anglo-Irish war 92, 103 Anglo-Saxon 95 Anglo-Welsh 4, 6, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 30, 31, 31n2 Anthias, Floya 92, 100, 228 anti-feminist 7, 29, 79, 241 anti-patriarchal 43 anti-suffrage 29, 51–3, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 70, 71n17 Antler, Joyce 176 anxiety 1, 42, 122, 129, 168, 172; gender 118, 120, 122 ‘Appeal Against Female Suffrage’ 7, 51, 57–8, 61–3, 71 appearance, physical 107, 111, 114, 118, 119, 124, 128, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 145, 146, 158, 159, 160, 161–2, 190 Aradi Közlöny 199, 202 Araki Iku 208, 212 Archer, William 56 Ardis, Ann 12n1, 175, 176

264

Index

Arena 247 aristocrat, aristocratic, aristocracy 147, 150, 152, 252 Arling, Nat 68, 72 art, artist 4, 8, 9, 19, 22, 24, 29, 35, 66, 80, 83, 110, 121, 136, 144, 149, 150, 155, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 174, 179, 182, 209, 233 assimilation 21, 22, 31, 250 art nouveau 179 Art Students’ League 160 Asahi 206 Association for the Education of Women 71n19 atarashii onna 205, 206 Atlantic Monthly, The 165, 175 Austin, Alfred 60, 69 Austria, Austrian 200n4, 246 Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 192, 194 authenticity 17, 18, 19, 21, 26, 32n4, 67 autobiographer, autobiographical, autobiography 6, 35–48, 209 automobile 103, 114 autonomy 10, 163, 195, 209, 211, 216, 256; bodily 10, 216 Ayter, Florence A. 235 Bachelor Girl/Woman 8, 103, 109, 110, 116; see also spinster woman, single Bakhtin, M.M. 36, 37, 40, 41 Banner, Lois 89, 176 Banta, Martha 89, 168, 176–7 Bara, Theda 156 barbarism 227, 228, 229, 255 Bauer, Ervin 45 Baum, Vicki 8, 127, 132–5, 137, 140; stud. chem. Helene Willfüer 127, 132–6, 140 beauty 4, 8, 91, 103, 105, 107, 114, 115, 130, 131, 150, 154, 156, 160 Becker, Lydia 70n12 Bédy Schwimmer, Rózsa see Schwimmer, Rózsa Bédy Beeching, Henry Charles 72 Beesly, Emily 62 Beetham, Margaret 1–14 Bellamy, Edward 246, 258; Looking Backward 246–7, 256, 258 Beniczky, Hermin, Pálné Veres 192, 200n2, 200n6 Bentham, Jeremy 54 Bergman, Jill 10–11, 12, 223–39, 243 Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ) 123, 124,

125, 128–9, 130, 131, 132, 134, 137, 137n1, 139 Beniczky, Hermin, Veres, Pálné 192, 200n2, 200n6 Bhabha, Homi K. 3, 12, 18, 19, 33 bicycle 6, 18, 29, 207 Bing, Lady Rachel 152 biological essentialism 11, 61, 196, 256 biology 241, 242, 243, 247, 249, 255, 256 biometrics 244 Biometrika 248 bio-textual 19, 32n5 birth control 110, 147, 176n13, 253, 254–5; see also contraception The Birth Control Review 253, 254, 257n8 The Birth of a Nation (originally The Clansman) 252, 253 birth rate 121, 122, 156n3 Black, Clementina 54, 56 blackness 11, 19, 32n5, 227, 253 Blain, Virginia 20, 33 Bland, Lucy 145, 146, 157, 244, 258 Blixen, Karen 80 bloomers 83 body 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 27, 29, 79, 93, 97; female 9, 10, 93, 97, 134, 150, 153; racial 11; body beautiful see beauty Bohata, Kirsti 4, 5, 17–34, 36, 41, 194 Bow, Clara 153 Brake, Laurel 3, 4, 5, 7, 51–73, 76, 207, 241, 242–3 Branca, Patricia 156n3, 157 Brinkley Girl, The 9, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188n1 Brinkley, Nell 4, 9, 176n7, 179–89, 184 Britain, British 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19, 20, 26, 30, 32n5, 51, 55, 66, 74, 75, 76, 80, 84, 88, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 145, 146, 149, 150, 190, 191, 199, 205, 241, 242, 246, 252, 254, 255, 257n2 British Colonist, The see Daily Colonist, The British Columbia 1, 7, 74–89 Buckley, Cheryl 150, 154, 157 Bund für Mutterschutz 119 Burton, Richard 150 Bury, Marie Blaize de 56 Butler, Josephine 244, 257n3 Caird, Mona 55, 255–6, 256, 258; ‘Children of the Future’ 256; ‘Ideal Marriage’ 55; ‘Is Marriage a Failure’ debate 255; ‘Marriage’ 55; The Stones of Sacrifice 256

Index Cameron, Agnes Dean 85, 86, 87 Canada, Canadian 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 84 Canadian Confederacy 75 Canadian Council of Women 85 capitalism 145, 155, 214 career woman see professional woman caricaturist see cartoonist Carnegie, Andrew 248 Carribean 19 Cartney, Wilfred 19 cartoon, cartoonist 4, 9, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 175, 176n8, 179, 184 Castle, William E. Genetics and Eugenics 254 Catholic, Catholicism 4, 7, 8, 63, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 114, 116n1, 176n13 Catt, Carrie Chapman 10, 198, 199 celibacy 241 censorship 7, 96, 118, 137, 212, 213 Chapman, Elizabeth Rachel 54 Chapman, John 54, 55, 68 charity 83, 110, 111, 127, 257n10 charm 94, 113 Chase, Allan 249, 258 chastity 134, 214–15, 216 Chicago Hull House settlement 250 China 205, 210, 213 chivalry 87 Christian, Christianity 57, 68, 105, 214, 256 Christian World, The 252 Christie, Ella R. 72 Chu ¯oko¯ ro¯n 208, 211, 212, 213 church 58, 98, 99, 115 Churchill, Lady Randolph 62 cigarettes see smoking cinema see also film 91, 94, 97, 98, 99, 103, 106, 115, 252–53 Circular, The 246 citizenship 82, 88, 243; gendered 243 city, the 90, 98, 112, 148 civilization 95, 226, 227, 228, 229, 245 Clapperton, Jane Hume 256 Clark, Suzanne 249, 258 Clarke, Edward H., Sex in Education 241, 244, 258 class, social 3, 4, 6, 11, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 31n2, 41, 57, 58, 60, 65, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 85, 86, 97, 100n2, 119, 145, 146, 147, 148, 159, 181, 198, 216, 217, 224, 242, 243,

265

244, 245, 250, 253; class division 181, 224, 245, 253 Clements, Patricia 20, 33 Clifford, Lucy 56 clothes see dress Club Woman, The 11, 224, 225, 227, 231, 237n3 club movement, clubs 4, 11, 54, 74–5, 82, 83, 84, 85, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229; women’s 11, 54, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 236, 238n5, 238n6 Cobleigh, Rolfe 252–3, 258 Coleman, Kit (later Carson) 77 college education see higher education Colonial Office 74 colonialism, colonial 31n2, 75, 87, 92, 226, 228, 229, 257n2 coloniser, colonist 74, 75, 98 colony 74, 75, 83, 98 Colored American Magazine, The 11, 224, 231, 233, 234, 235 Communist Manifesto 249 Community 5, 8, 62, 79, 97, 105 Conant, Edith 225–6, 238 Confucianism 216 Congregationalist, The 252 Connacht Sentinel, The 100 Connacht Tribune, The 90, 93, 97, 100 Conner, Eliza Archard 76, 78, 79, 80–6, 87, 88 conservative, conservatism 4, 5, 7, 28, 23, 35, 45, 46n2, 60, 66, 69, 70n13, 71n21, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 103, 118, 121, 122, 124, 145, 147, 162, 163, 165, 169, 193, 194, 197, 212, 243, 254 consumer, consumerism 7, 8, 91, 96, 97, 99, 120, 124, 127, 146, 217; consumer culture 4, 120, 124, 127, 149, 155, 169, 217; consumption 4, 120, 122, 124, 127, 145, 154, 155, 156, 217 Contagious Diseases Acts 244 Contemporary Review, The 53, 57, 67, 70n10 contraception 110, 122, 147–8, 156n3, 197; see also birth control Coolidge, Calvin 249 Corelli, Marie 151 Cork Examiner, The 93, 95, 96, 100, 107, 109, 114, 116n1, 116 Cornhill, The 55 corrupt, corruption 69, 93, 94, 95, 99, 102; corruptibility 92

266

Index

corset 96, 153, 154, 160, 179 cosmetics 99, 150, 152, 154, 156n4 Cosmopolitan 179 Cott, Nancy F. 89 Council of Women 86 counter culture 8; counter discourse 19, 110, 114 Courbet, Gustave 150 Crawford, Elizabeth 72 creativity 3, 6, 194, 195 Creighton, Louise 57, 58, 59, 62, 64, 67–8, 70n13, 70n14, 71n19, 72 Creighton, Mandell 57 crime, criminology 118, 121, 122, 123 Criminal Law Amendment Act 244 cross-dressing 23 cultural 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 31n2, 32n4, 36, 41, 52, 59, 62, 64, 80, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99; anxiety 4; differences 196; politics 59, 64; tradition 92 culture 3, 4, 6, 18, 21, 26, 36, 56, 58, 66, 75, 91, 92, 93, 99, 149, 169, 190, 231, 233, 243; popular 145, 146, 149, 153 Cumann na nGaedheal 102 Cuniberti, John 258 Cupid 9, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 182, 188n4 Cymraes Newydd 17 Daily Colonist, The 7, 75–88 Daisy, Annette 83; colony of women 83 Dame, Die 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 132, 139 dancing 94, 95, 97, 99, 104, 106, 114, 181; dance halls 95, 98, 103 Daniels, Bebe 98 D’Arcy, Ella 243, 258; ‘The PleasurePilgrim’ 243, 258 Davidson, Roger 70, 257n2 Davies, Marion 183 Darwin, Charles 240, 251, 259; The Descent of Man 240, 259; Darwinism 226, 227, 245, 255 Daughters of the Empire 7, 74–6, 79, 84, 86; see also Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire Davenport, Charles P. 248, 259; Heredity in Relation to Eugenics 248, 259 Davidoff, Leonore 147, 157 Davidson, John 70n1, 71n18 Davies, Marion, 183 Davis, Richard Harding 160, 176n5

decadence, decadent 56, 93, 94, 113, 114, 125–6, 136 degeneration 99, 121, 122, 124, 240, 245, 256; racial 121, 240, 242, 245, 246, 256 Deland, Margaret 175, 177 dependence 83, 92, 128, 133 Descartes, René 83 desegregation 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 242, 244 desire 4, 8, 9, 33n10, 99, 147, 156, 160 dialogue, polemic 51, 52 dialogic see also Bakhtin 37, 38, 41, 43, 46, 52, 53; qualities 37, 38; relationship 40, 41; structure 53; text 43, 46 Dickinson, Frances 229, 238 diet 95; see also slimming Digby, Anne 257n5, 259 Dilke, Emilia 54, 56, 67, 70n11 Dilke, Margaret 57, 70n11, 72 Dinnerstein, Leonard 176n13, 177 discrimination 227, 231, 232 disintegration 43, 44 dislocation 31, 39, 44, 46 Disraeli, Benjamin 60 dissent 7, 110, 114, 115 diversity 235; racial 235 divorce 147, 167 Dixon, Thomas, The Clansman An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan 252, 259 domestic 6, 8, 9, 27, 28, 66, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 97, 102, 108, 109, 113, 121, 123, 134, 136, 167, 169, 175, 228, 240; sphere 81, 102, 108, 115, 121, 158, 163, 167, 169; violence 84; see also the home, separate spheres domesticity 6, 8, 65, 71n21, 115, 116n2, 121, 158, 169, 174, 228, 238n4 double standard 35, 106, 197; sexual 106, 243, 244, 245 Dowbiggin, Ian Robert 257n6, 259 Dowden, Edward 56 Downey, Fairfax 158, 177 dress 1, 42, 83, 90, 94, 95–6, 97, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124, 125, 132, 134, 145, 149, 158, 160, 202n22, 207, 217; dress code 126, 160; dress reform 83, 126, 145, 162, 198; dress style 1, 119, 122, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132, 133, 149, 158, 160, 207, 217 drinking see alcohol

Index Dublin Literary Society 94 Du Maurier, George 160, 175n2, 177; Trilby 160, 175n3, 177 Duncan, Sara Jeanette 77 duty (women’s) 66, 71n21, 74, 79, 82, 108, 110, 122, 168, 171, 241 dystopia 66 Earhardt, Amelia, 187 East, the 56, 150, 151, 191, 205 East London Federation of Women Suffragettes 199 economy 91, 118, 122, 217; political 68 education 7, 20, 21, 22, 29, 30, 41, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70n5, 74, 76, 82, 85, 87, 88, 94, 100n2, 129, 134, 136, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 181, 190, 192, 197, 198, 200n2, 202n4, 207, 211, 212, 213, 215, 217, 225, 226, 233, 241, 242, 250; educational reform 9, 11, 29; movement for women’s education 194, 202n24, 212; women’s education 7, 134, 136, 192, 194, 197, 198, 200n2, 201n13, 202n24, 206, 209, 211, 213, 215, 225, 241, 242, 244; see also higher education Education Society see Eugenics Society Edward VII 146 effeminacy 136 Egerton, George 245 Egypt 151, 257 Elekes, Irén 200n1, 201n19, 203 Eliot, George 54 Elliott, Elizabeth King 226, 238 Ellis, Havelock 55 Ellison, Gracie 153 Elsie, Lillie 156n5 emancipation 68, 79, 80, 84, 118, 119, 121, 123, 127, 156, 162, 190, 195, 197, 199, 223, 230, 232, 236, 241, 242, 250, 253, 256 emasculation 66, 67, 119, 120 emotion, emotional 10, 127 Empire 80, 150, 228 employment 82, 90, 99, 103, 106, 109; see also professional woman England, English 1, 4, 6, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31n2, 31n3, 32n8, 56, 61, 63, 66, 76, 116n1, 118, 148, 190, 199, 252 entertainment 78, 92, 95, 98, 99, 147, 148, 156, 164

267

equality 26, 82, 87, 102, 104, 118, 122–3, 133, 136, 165, 229 equal pay 7, 81, 185 eroticism 4, 145, 150, 153 escapism 9, 155, 156 Escott, T.H.S. 56 eternal feminine 194 ethnic, ethnicity 4, 5, 21 ethnocentrism 227 Eugenical News 248 eugenics 3, 6, 10, 11, 29–30, 240, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253, 254, 256, 257n2, 257n6, 257n9; see also hygiene, national Eugenics (Education) Society 11, 245 Europe, European 23, 30, 35, 146, 147, 160, 164, 205, 226, 243, 246, 248, 250, 252 European-American 227, 230, 232 Evangelism 253 Everett, E.H. 72 evolution, evolutionary 133, 224, 226–7, 229, 230, 236, 240, 248, 252 exercise 83; see also sports exotic/ism 8, 9, 29, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156 experimentation 2, 6, 8, 25, 26, 45, 83, 134–5, 136, 172 Fábri, Anna 203 family 3, 24–5, 27, 84, 110, 158, 164, 166, 167, 168, 195, 196; nuclear 110; parent-child relationship 24–5, 79; relations 24–5, 28, 79; traditional 166, 195 fantasy 1, 9, 123, 149, 150, 152, 155 fashion 4, 8, 9, 76, 77, 78, 80, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 105, 106, 115, 124, 125, 126, 127, 136, 137, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 162, 217; democratization of 146; designer 9, 95–96, 146, 148, 153; industry 8, 96, 147, 149, 152; window display of 149 Fawcett, Hilary 4, 8, 9, 145–57, 217 Fawcett, Millicent 51, 52, 53, 57, 61, 66, 67, 69, 70n13, 72 Felski, Rita 3, 12, 149, 152, 157 femininity 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 18, 27, 35, 36, 42, 43, 44, 80, 91, 94, 99, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 145, 146, 147, 148, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 194, 195, 196, 243; commodification of 4,

268

Index

femininity continued 145, 150; iconographic 8, 9; images of 91, 119, 125, 126, 146, 151, 154, 156, 160, 164; Orientalized 9, 151–2; traditional 99, 119, 125, 166, 194, 195 feminization 66, 67, 96, 97 feminism, feminist 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 35, 46n2, 52, 108, 109, 115, 145, 161, 174, 179, 184, 187, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 200n5, 201n16, 202n24, 202n31, 206, 242, 247, 250, 251, 254, 256; American 9, 161, 184, 187, 250, 251, 254, 256; British 242, 256; conservative 3, 4, 52; cultural 9; ‘difference’ 256; eugenic 11, 28, 29, 242, 243, 250, 251; first-wave 10, 191; Hungarian 10, 190; Irish 108, 109, 115; Japanese 10 Feministák Egyesülete 10, 193, 195, 197, 198, 201n10, 201n11, 201n12, 201n14, 201n17, 201n20; Tájékoztatás a Feministák Egyesületének czéljairól és munkatervérõl 195 femme fatale 119 fertility 154, 242 fetishization 4, 145, 155 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, Iphigenie 135 Fianna Fail 102 film 97, 98, 99, 137, 242, 249, 252–4, 257n9; Brenda Starr 179; Dance Magic 98; film star 125; Fire 98; The Hand That Rocks The Cradle 253; Jazz Mad 98; She’s a Sheik 98; Where Are My Children? 253–4, 257n9; see also cinema fin-de-siècle x, xi, xii, xiii, 6, 9, 25, 31, 86, 119, 120, 123, 146, 148, 158, 164, 191, 193, 197, 200n4, 224, 227, 255 First World War 6, 8, 35–6, 37, 38–9, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 91, 103, 118, 120, 179, 185, 193, 216–17, 246 Fitzgerald, Scott 254, 259; The Great Gatsby 254, 259 the flapper 7, 8, 10, 90–101, 102–17, 145, 179, 181, 217, 219n17 flirtation 104, 105, 106, 147 Földes, Anna 38, 40, 48 food 112, 113, 154, 156 Forbes, Mrs Geo. W. 243, 259 foreign, foreigner 4, 8, 21, 30, 38, 40, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 102, 104, 115

Forerunner, The see Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fortnightly Review, The 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70n7, 70n8, 70n11 Forward, Stephanie 12n1, 13 Foucault, Michel 45 fragmentation, fragmented 2, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46; fragmented hybridity 36; textual fragmentation 35, 37, 43 Frame, Lynne 120, 135, 140 France, French 23, 24, 56, 66, 76, 83, 104, 146, 158, 187, 252 franchise see vote; suffrage Frankenberg, Ruth 224, 232; Displacing Whiteness 232 Fraser’s Magazine 20, 32n6 Fredericksen, Andrea 176n10, 177 freedom 12, 68, 88, 94, 95, 99, 110, 115, 122, 166, 209, 211, 224, 230, 240, 256; of movement 126; sexual 122, 166, 249 freedwoman 225 frigidity 123 Friss Újság 198, 201n18, 202 frivolity, frivolous 94 Fujin Shinbun 206 Fukuda Hideko 212, 214 Fülöp, László 46, 47n8, 48 Gaelic 92 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 95, 98 Gaelic Ireland 102 Gaelic League 98 Galton, Francis 240, 242, 245, 246, 247, 248, 259; Hereditary Genius 240, 259 Galton Institute 11, 245, 255 Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics 255 Ganobscik-Williams, Lisa 250, 259 Garnett, Lucy 62 Geduld, Harry M 259. gender 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32n8, 37, 43, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70n6, 74, 91, 92, 98, 103, 106, 114, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 146, 152, 155, 156, 163, 165, 167, 224; anxiety 118, 120, 146, 154, 156n1; formation 57; ideology 91, 103, 114, 224; legislation 103; politics 54; relations 103, 119,

Index 133, 190; roles 6, 24, 31, 43, 103, 163, 166, 167, 168, 175, 197; solidarity 11, 236 General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) vi, 10–11, 223 Gentileschi, Artemisia 187 Geöcze, Sarolta 194, 203 George, Rosemary Marangoly 238n4, 238 Gere, Anne Ruggles 224, 237n2, 237n3, 238n5, 238 Gergely, Janka 202 German, Germany 1, 3, 8, 39, 118, 187, 200n4 Gibson, Charles Dana 9, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 175n1, 176n5, 176n9, 179, 180, 181, 187, 235 Gibson Girl 9, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 176n5, 176n6, 176n7, 176n10, 179, 180, 181, 187, 217, 235, 243 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 10, 11, 161, 176n6, 198, 242, 249–50, 252, 254, 259; Forerunner, The 250, 259; Herland 250–51, 259; Moving the Mountain 250, 259; With Her in Ourland 251, 252; Women and Economics 161, 177, 250, 259; ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ 242, 259 Girton College 242 Gladstone, William Ewart 58 glamour, glamorous 4, 8, 11, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156 Glennie, J.S. Stuart 52, 53, 61, 72 Globe and Mail, The 77 Glücklich, Vilma 193, 198 Glyn, Elinor 9, 151, 152, 153 Good Housekeeping 179 ‘good wife and wise mother’ 209 Gordon, Lady L. Duff 153, 157 Gosse, Edmund 56 Grand, Sarah 12n3, 20, 80, 243, 244, 245, 255, 256n1, 259, 260; The Heavenly Twins 243, 255, 259 Grant, Mrs Gordon 85, 86 Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race 254 Great War see First World War Green, Charlotte 62 Griffiths, D.W 252, 253, 260 Grossmann, Atina 123, 140 Grundy, Isobel 20, 33 Guyer, Michael, Being Well-Born An Introduction to Eugenics 254

269

Habsburg monarchy 192, 194 hairstyle 1, 95, 96, 97, 99, 118, 125, 127, 131, 132, 133, 150, 251 Haldane, Elizabeth Sanderson 71n18, 72 Haldane, Richard Burdon 67, 71n18, 72 Hall, Franklyn 253 Hall, George F. 243, 260; A Study in Bloomers; Or The Model New Woman 243, 249, 260 Hall, Stuart 230, 238 Haller, Mark H. 246, 247, 260 Halifax, Viscountess 62 Handlin, Oscar 246, 260 Hannigan, Denis F. 68, 70, 72 Hara Asao 10, 210 Harada Satsuki 212 harem 150, 151, 152 Harmon, Sandra 227, 237n3, 238 Harper’s 179 Harris, Frank 53, 55, 56, 70n9 Harrison, Brian 70n2, 72, 243, 260 Harrison, Constance Cary 160 Harrison, Frederic 58, 59, 60, 64, 70n14; wife of 62 Hasegawa Nyozekan 219 Hasian, Marouf Arif, Jr. 246, 260 Hatoyama Haruko 212 Hayden, Mary 109, 110, 111, 116n3, 117 health 10, 94, 96, 99, 112, 122, 123, 134, 154, 240, 241, 242 Hearst, William Randolph 179, 83 Hearst Newspapers 179, 180, 182, 183 hegemony 5, 11, 31n2, 64, 65, 67, 91 Heilmann, Ann 1–14, 18, 34, 72 Held, John, Jr. 181, 187 heredity 245, 246, 247, 248, 256 heterogeneity 5, 26 heteroglossia 2, 6, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46; heteroglossic fragmentation 6, 36; heteroglossic text 38, 46; see also Bakhtin heterosexual, heterosexuality 111, 123 hierarchy 62, 92, 96, 97, 224; racial 224, 225 Higham, John 176n12, 176n13, 177, 246, 260 higher education 1, 52, 53, 58, 79, 81, 82, 197, 207, 215, 217, 241, 242; see also university higher journalism 52, 58, 60, 61, 77

270

Index

Hiratsuka Raicho¯ 10, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 219; Marumado yori 209, 212 Hitler, Adolf 8 Hodgson, W. Earl 68, 69, 73 Hofstadter, Richard 165, 177, 246, 260 Hogarth, J.E. 146, 157 Holcombe, Lee 156n2, 157 Hollywood 92, 94, 95, 148, 150, 153 home, the 19, 23, 26, 32n8, 38, 39, 64, 67, 74, 75, 85, 86, 88, 102, 103, 104, 108, 111, 113, 119, 130, 132, 158, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169; see also domestic sphere homeliness 38, 39, 40, 42 homogeneity 36, 38, 44, 46 homosexual, homosexuality 137, 156n1; see also love, same-sex Honda Masujiro 217 Hopkins, Ellice 260 Hopkins, Pauline 11, 231, 233, 235 Horiba Kiyoko 206, 219 Hoover, Herbert 249 Hope, Anthony 176n9, 177 housekeeping 8, 27, 109, 110, 112, 113, 167–8, 197 housewife 85, 112, 119, 131, 168, 169, 172–4 Houssaye, Arsene 56 Howard, Joan Imogen 232 Hughes, Ellen 17, 34 Hughes, Linda 12n1, 13 humour 42, 77, 112, 158 Hungarian, Hungary 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 35–48, 190–204, 246 Hungarian Academy of Sciences x, 46n1, 192 Hungarian National Archive 197, 201n11, 201n17 Huszadik Század 196–7 hybrid, hybridity 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33n10, 35, 36, 37, 38, 46, 55, 87, 88, 89, 99, 190, 224, 236, 241, 242 hygiene: national 10, 11–12, 29, 240, 242, 247; personal 29, 130, 240, 242, 247; see also eugenics hysteria 67, 80, 134, 242, 256 Ibsen 56, 206; A Doll’s House 206 identification 2, 6, 19, 26, 30, 43, 44 identity 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 32n10, 36, 38, 44, 52, 53, 60, 74,

91, 92, 93, 99, 102, 105, 115, 121, 145, 146, 151, 153, 166, 213; black 224, 225; cultural 52, 91, 99, 213; imperial 26; political 7, 52; stable 38; white 225, 227, 231; see also national identity ideology, ideological 6, 7, 10, 12, 25, 59, 66, 69, 98, 103, 214, 216, 224, 228, 242, 243 idyll 22, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44 Ikuta Cho¯ko¯ 213 imagination, the popular 91 immigration 169, 176n12, 176n13, 242, 246, 249, 250, 252 immodesty 94, 98 immorality 91, 248 imperial, imperialism 11, 22, 26, 30, 74, 75, 151, 227, 238n4, 257n2; American 227, 228; cultural 22 Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire 75 independence: movement for 92, 194, 212, 214, 250; national 92, 94, 99, 102, 103, 122, 192, 193, 194, 195, 209; personal 9, 20, 26, 28, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 91, 94, 99, 110, 122, 123, 134, 136, 145, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 179, 191, 195, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 249, 250 India 151 individualism 8, 66, 69 inequality 244, 245, 251 inferiority 87; racial 229, 230 Ingram, John Henry 21 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 150 innocence 93, 114 insecurity 42, 43 insider 6, 33n10 instability 5, 6, 12, 19, 36, 118, 241; political 118 intellectual 53, 65, 79, 80, 87, 113, 127, 136, 241 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance 93 intimacy 41, 45, 104 Ireland, Irish 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 32n8, 68, 90–101, 102–17, 118, 238n4; Republic of 100n1 Irish Free State 7, 92, 93, 98, 99, 100n1, 102, 103, 114, 115, 116; Civil Service Employment Act 103, 109; Conditions of Employment Bill 103, 109; Constitution 103; Juries Acts 103; Marriage Bar 103

Index Irish Catholic, The 112, 116n1, 116 Irish Ecclesiastical Record 117 Irish Independent, The 116n1, 117 Irish Monthly, The 104, 113, 116n1, 117 Irish Press 116n1, 117 Irish Times 116n31, 117 Italy, Italian 24, 37, 246, 252 Ito¯ Noe 10, 209, 216 Jacobson, Matthew Frye 246, 260 Japan, Japanese 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 24, 151, 191, 205–19 Jazz 92, 94, 95, 99, 103, 104, 105, 181 Jerome, Jenny 149 Jeune, Mary 54 Joshi bundan 207 Journal of Heredity 247 Journal of Mental Science 241 Journalism 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 51–73, 76–88, 90–117; see also press, the Kaetsu Takako 212 Kaffka, Margit 2, 6, 35–48; ‘Lyrical Notes of a Year’ (‘Lírai jegyzetek egy évro ˝l’) 6, 35–48 Kahlo, Frida 187 Kaplan, Amy 238n4, 238 Kelly, Richard 177 Kerryman, The 93, 94, 95, 96, 100 Kevles, Daniel J. 246, 248, 249, 260 Khayyam, Omar 151 Kikuchi Ogata 219 King, Lynda 132, 133, 140 Kisfaludy Association 192 kissing 103, 105, 106, 113, 114 Kitamura To¯koku 210 Klimt, Gustav 146 Knowles, James 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 70n14, 72; wife of 62 Köhler, Angelika 2, 3, 4, 9, 158–78, 181, 182, 188n4, 217, 235, 243 Kokumin Shinbun 208 Kollontai, Alexandra 123, 140 Korea 205, 210, 217n2 Kõrösi, Zsuzsa 202n31 Koten-sei 206 Koven, Seth 260 Kozma, Flóra Perczelné 194 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 147 Kranidis, Rita 12n1, 13 Krauss-Fessel, Meta 119, 140 Kropff, Hans 127–8, 140 Kühl, Stefan 249, 260

271

Ku Klux Klan 252, 253 Ladies’ Home Journal, The 166 Lady, The 148 Lady’s Realm, The 9, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156 Langtry, Lily 9, 146, 153 Lao, Tse 40 Larson, Edward J. 246, 260 Laughlin, Harry H. 248 Laughlin’s Model Eugenic Sterilization Law 248 law of consent 244 Leach, William R. 155 Ledger, Sally 12n1, 13, 18, 34 Leed, Eric J. 120, 140 Leighton, Frederic, Lord 150 leisure 21, 147, 162, 164 Le Jeune, Françoise 5, 7, 74–89, 243 Lempicka, Tamara De 187 Lenten pastoral 97, 104, 114, 116, 116n1 lesbian, lesbianism 137; see also love, same-sex Leslie, Mrs Frank 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 88 Lewes, George Henry 55, 56, 57 Lewis, Beth Irwin 121, 140 Lewis, Reina 151 liberal 53, 55, 61 Liberal Party 55, 71n18 liberation: personal 10, 94, 99, 161, 164, 195; national 5, 161 Life viii, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176n16, 188n4 lifestyle 7, 28, 44, 45, 81, 87, 91, 94, 97, 99, 104, 115, 116, 124, 205 Limerick Leader, The 93, 95, 97, 98, 100 Linton, Eliza Lynn 4, 13, 56, 61, 62, 66–7, 68, 69, 71n21, 73, 241–2, 260 Lloyd, Marie 147 London Society 20 love 10, 41, 83, 98, 103, 105, 106, 108, 120, 130, 134, 136, 164, 169, 172, 205, 209, 214, 247; free 147, 214, 247, 249; romantic 10, 133, 209, 211, 214, 216; same-sex see also homosexuality, lesbianism 10; true 105, 106, 216 Lowe, Mrs 224, 228, 230 Luckhurst, Roger 18, 34 Lucile (Mrs Duff Cooper) 9, 148, 152–3, 153 Ludmerer, Kenneth M. 246, 260

272

Index

luxury goods 97, 99, 145 lyrical, lyricism 6, 35, 36, 40 Lys, Gaby de 149 Macmillan’s Magazine 58, 70n13 madness 25, 43, 44, 256 Madonna/Whore dichotomy 120 magazines, see press, the Magnus, Lady Katie 53, 70n5, 73 Mangum, Teresa 12n1, 13 manliness, manly 123, 124, 136, 168, 195 market value 130–1 Marks, Patricia 12n2, 13 Márkus, Piroska 202n13, 203 marriage 2, 3, 8, 10, 23, 26, 45, 47n22, 67, 68, 75, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 94, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137n1, 147, 148, 164, 167, 171, 172, 182, 185, 190, 191, 195, 197, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215–16, 217, 228, 247, 248, 254, 256; arranged 10, 211, 216; companionate 109, 113; debate 55; romantic 134, 147; self-fulfilment in 108, 123 Married Woman’s Property Acts 156n2, 242 Mársits, Rozina 9, 10, 190, 195, 200n1; ‘Three Monologues for Girls’ (trilogy) 190; The Woman of the Twentieth Century 190, 200n1 Martyn, Elizabeth 68, 70, 71n20, 73 Marwick, Arthur 157 Marx, Eleanor 147 masculinity 3, 41, 59, 61, 66, 71n21, 93, 113, 120, 122, 124, 126, 145, 147; models of 113, 114, 122, 126 masculinization of women 4, 119, 124, 125, 196 masquerade 126 maternalism 8 maternity see motherhood Matrimonial Causes Act 156n2 Matsui Sumako 206 Maudsley, Henry 214, 260 McAvoy, May 98 McClintock, Anne 92, 100, 228, 239 Meaney, G. 100 Media, the see the press medical establishment 11 Mehr, Linda Harris 161, 164, 165, 177

Melman, Billie 91, 100 Melville, Pauline 19, 23, 34 Men and Women’s Club 244 Merode, Cleo de 150 Messick, Dale 179 Metaphysical Society 58, 70n4 metropolitan, metropolis 26, 29, 30, 80, 93 Mill, James 54 Mill, John Stuart 20, 32n6, 54, 61, 68, 70n3; The Subjection of Women 20, 32n6 Miller, Jane Eldridge 12n1, 13 millinery 27, 28, 32n12, 152, 156 mimicry 5 miscegenation 242 misogyny 44, 61, 241 Mitchell, Sally 12n1, 13 Mitchell, Silas Weir 241, 242 Miyagi Fusa 210 Miyazaki Mitsuko 212 modern see modernity modern boy, the 113, 114 modern girl, the 4, 6, 79, 80, 87, 88, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 113, 219n17 modern woman, the 1, 4, 9, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 104, 108, 114, 124, 134, 145, 168 modernism, modernist i, 2, 35, 37, 46, 91, 116; and experimentation; female 37, 46 modernization 118, 192, 194, 196, 199, 207, 213, 217 modernity 2, 3, 4, 8, 29, 30, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 116, 118, 121, 123, 124, 131, 133, 134, 145, 156, 162, 165, 196, 207; discourses of 103, 116; gendered 156, 165 modesty 8, 94, 106, 107, 115, 134 montage 40 Moody, Winfield Scott 166–7, 177 Moore, Albert 150 morality, morals 8, 37, 75, 95, 102, 104, 113, 114, 115, 118, 126, 135, 146, 148, 149, 190, 209, 211, 213, 215, 229, 233, 240, 245; new 8, 115; old 8, 118, 209; morality story 104 Mori Ogai 213 Morita So¯hei 207, 209 Morley, John 55, 56 Mosse, George L. 120, 140 mother 74, 79, 82, 86, 88, 94, 99, 108,

Index 120, 133, 147, 164, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 196; country 75, 76; culture 75; of nation 92 motherhood 8, 9, 86, 94, 110, 111, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 133, 134, 135, 154, 167, 168, 196, 241, 246–7, 251, 255, 257n5 Mothers’ Union 20 motor car see automobile Mott, Frank Luther 243, 260 Munch, Edvard 146 Mushanoko¯ji Saneatsu 210 music hall 147, 156n5, 245 Muta Kazue 2, 3, 4, 10, 191, 205–19 mystery, female, feminine 153 Naganuma Chieko 208 Nagyvárad (Oradea) 198, 202n23 Nakano Hatsu 208 Nan, R. 89 narrator 22, 27, 29, 32n10, 35–48, 225; autobiographical 35–48 Naruse Jinzo¯ 212, 219 nation, national 1, 3, 4, 5, 12, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 31, 32n8, 36, 60, 62, 66, 69, 83, 91, 93, 118, 223; nation state 92, 93, 103, 194 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) 242 National Association of Colored Women (NACW) 223, 225, 231, 232, 238n6 national character 3, 4, 91, 102, 118 national efficiency 240–62 national identity 2, 4, 11, 17, 36, 91, 99, 115, 194, 213; American 168, 175, 224, 227, 253; German 118; Hungarian 192, 194, 196; Irish 115; Japanese 213; white 11, 224, 227, 243 nationalism, nationalist 7, 8, 22, 36, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 118, 168, 213, 224, 228, 238n4, 253; cultural nationalism 8, 93, 95, 97, 99; iconography 92 nationality 17, 18, 24, 26, 32n8, 33n10 National Review, The 51, 53, 54, 60, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70n13, 71n21 National Socialism 122 National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS) 51, 56, 60, 61, 70n8, 70n12 National Vigilance Association 70n9, 244 Natsume So¯seki 206

273

Nava, Mica 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 100 Negro 11, 225, 226, 227, 230, 232, 233, 236, 253 Nelson, Carolyn Christensen 12n1, 13 Nemzeti Nönevelés 192, 200n7, 202n29, 202 nerves 80, 134 nervous disorder 120 Nesbitt, Evelyn, 179 neurasthenia 242 neutrality 55, 57, 64, 69, 71n17 Neville-Rolfe, Sybil 11, 245, 257n4 New Girl 4, 79, 104 New Journalism 52, 53, 66, 67, 69, 76, 81 New Man 119, 176n5 New Morality 118, 119, 122–3 New Woman 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 31n3, 35, 36, 37, 44, 45, 46, 52, 58, 65, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 96, 102, 105, 145, 161, 162, 165, 166, 174, 176n10, 190, 206, 213; American 7, 9, 10, 74–89, 158–89, 218n3, 223–62; Anglo-Welsh 4, 17–34; black 223–39; British 9, 10, 51–73, 145–57, 240–62; British Columbian 4, 74–89; German 8, 118–41; Hungarian vi, 9, 35–48, 190–204, 209; Irish 7, 90–117; Japanese 10, 205–19; white 5, 11, 223–62 newspapers, see press, the New York Times, The 164 New York Tribune, The 254 Nihon Joshi Daigaku 210, 212, 213 Nineteenth Century, The 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70n10 Nishikawa Fumiko 212 Nó és Társadalom 10, 195, 197, 201n11, 201n13, 201n14, 202n25, 202n29, 202 No ˝képzo ˝ Egyesület 200n2 non-conformist 21, 31 North America(n) 76, 77, 84, 88 North American Review, The 243, 246 nostalgia 8 No ˝tisztviselôk Országos Szövetsége 192 Noyes, John Humphrey 246 Nyugat 35, 37, 191, 200n3 Odd Woman 20

274

Index

Okumura Hiroshi 210 Old Maid 80; see also spinster and woman, single Old World 75, 88 Oneida Community Onslow, Barbara 70n2, 73 Orientalism 4, 150, 151–2 O’Shea, Alan 91, 100 Otake Chikuha 211 Otake Ko¯kichi 208, 209, 211 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) 80 outsider 6, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32n7, 39 pacifism, pacifist 37, 45, 193; pacifist protest 45 pagan 91, 95, 97, 105 Pall Mall Gazette 55, 244 Pankhurst, Sylvia 10, 199; the Pankhursts 145 Parliament, British 20, 51, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 75 Parsons, Deborah 90, 100 Paquin 148 passing 6, 22 passion 98 passivity 43, 44, 91, 92, 107 Pater, Walter 56 patriarchal, patriarchy 3, 25, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, 168, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 208–9, 210, 211, 214, 216, 241 patriotic, patriotism 33n10, 168, 169, 184, 187, 249 Patterson, Martha 227, 235, 239 Payne, Annie M. 70, 71n21, 73 Payton, Lucy 253 Pearce, Lynne 32n8, 34; Devolving Identities 32n8 Pearson, Karl 244, 246, 248, 260 perfume 152 periodicals see press, the Pesti Jótékony No ˝egylet 192 Pesti Napló 198, 201n18, 202 Peterson, Linda 46–7n8, 48 petitions 3, 5, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70n13, 71n17; anti-suffrage 51, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61–3, 64, 65, 67, 71n17; suffrage 56, 65, 66, 70n13 phallocentric, phallocentrism 6 philanthropy 52 Philosophical Radicals 54, 68 photography 97, 123, 124, 150, 153, 154

Pilgrim Fathers 232 Pivar, David J. 260 pleasure 8, 9, 93, 94, 109, 110, 114, 115, 145, 147, 152, 154, 155 point of view 43, 45, 79, 80, 86, 91 Polaire, Emile-Marie 150 Poland 246 Polányi, Laura, Strickerné 10, 194, 195, 203 political, politics, the 7, 9, 10, 11, 18, 39, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71n21, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84, 87, 91, 94, 102, 103, 114, 115, 118, 145, 200n8, 201n10, 213, 214, 217; see also the private; the public pornography 118 Positivism, Positivist 58, 59 postcards 150, 151, 154, 155 post-colonial 4, 5, 6, 17, 32n5, 32n8, 36, 102, 115, 229; state 102, 115; theory 3, 229 post-war 119, 122, 136 Potter, Beatrice 62 Pougy, Lianne de 150 poverty 119 power 29, 36, 37, 39, 43, 45, 59, 61, 66, 67, 68, 96, 159, 225; relations 129, 225 powerlessness 43, 44 prejudice 226; class 242; racial 226 Pre-Raphaelite, Pre-Raphaelitism 149–50 press, the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 51–73, 75, 76, 80, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 98, 103, 104, 119, 137, 145, 155, 193, 196, 205, 206, 216–17, 229, 230; African-American 11, 229, 231, 232, 233, 237n3; anonymity and signature 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 78; columns 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102–17; daily 5, 7, 55, 75–89, 98; ecclesiastic 8, 102–17, 252; and editorial politics 7, 51–73, 77, 78, 85, 88, 116n1, 123, 132, 149, 192, 196, 205, 211, 212, 250, 255; feminist 10, 205, 250; gender coverage in 153; journals 5, 191, 192, 196, 201n21; magazines 123, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 155, 158, 160, 175n2, 179, 199, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 224, 230, 231,

Index 243, 246, 248, 250, 252, 255; and monthlies 5, 10, 52, 54, 55, 60, 64, 68, 69, 116n1, 123, 192, 201n11, 208; and names/naming 53, 57, 58, 60, 62–3; and neutrality 52, 55, 57, 64, 69, 71n17; newspapers 55, 60, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 123, 146, 149, 150, 179, 197, 198, 205, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 248; periodical 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 51, 57, 69, 119, 123, 124, 137, 149, 158, 175n2, 192, 224, 255; popular vi, 8, 67, 102–17, 118, 120, 123, 147, 149, 158, 243; provincial 90–101; and quarterlies 54, 55; and Review genre 55, 57; and reviews 196, 246; secular 7, 8, 57, 103, 104, 106, 108; and symposium structure 53, 56, 57, 58, 64, 68, 69; syndicated 75, 76, 77, 78, 95, 116n1; and transgression; and weeklies 5, 55, 93, 116n1, 123, 158, 224; and women journalists 54, 56, 57, 66, 67, 68, 69, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80–6, 87, 132, 133, 149, 155, 205, 250, 255; and women’s page 5, 7, 76–8, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95, 96, 97, 99, 106, 107, 116n1, 116n2; and women readers 53, 59, 60, 64, 71n16, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 95, 103, 123, 127, 146, 149, 155, 160, 197, 201n14, 207 Preston, Jessie 156n5 pre-war 6, 36, 124 Priestley, Eliza 54 Pritchard, Mrs Eric 148, 149, 157; The Cult of Chiffon 149, 157 private, the 2, 6, 36, 46, 79, 110, 121, 214, 228–9; see also the public; the political professional woman 2, 9, 23, 27, 28, 66, 81, 83, 87, 109, 110, 119, 127, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 172, 174, 175, 181, 182, 191, 193, 195, 211, 253 progress, progressive 11, 12, 29, 69, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 223, 225, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 236, 242, 249 prostitution 67, 119, 121, 214, 244, 257n2 Protestantism 146 Psomiades, Kathy Alexis 175n4, 177 public, the: the domestic sphere 2, 3, 4,

275

6, 7, 8, 10, 36, 46, 55, 56, 57, 59, 64, 68, 86, 87, 91, 95, 102, 103, 109, 110, 116; opinion 8; sphere 158, 164, 166, 169, 196, 228–9; see also the private and the political Pugh, Martin 3, 52, 70n2, 73, 243, 260 Punch 160, 175n2 Puritan(s) 146, 232 purity 5, 8, 11, 12, 32n4, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99, 105, 106, 114, 115; cultural 22, 32n4; racial 5, 11, 22, 252 Pykett, Lyn 12n1, 13 race 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 74, 122, 223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 232, 236, 240, 242, 244, 245, 253, 254, 255; mixed 3, 4, 18, 19; question 230, 231, 247, 249; race women 11 racial 5, 11, 225, 227, 246; discourse 5 racism 10, 230, 242, 245, 249, 256 radical, radicalism 8, 10, 28, 54, 79, 86, 88, 103, 116n1, 145, 147, 196, 205 radio 91 Rafael, Vicente 228–9, 239 Rappaport, Erika 148, 149, 154, 157 rationality 123, 133, 244, 250 reactionary 61 reader, readership 5, 7, 29, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71n16, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 95, 103, 120, 123–4, 125, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136 rebellion 31, 84, 89 Reed, Charles 248, 260; Marriage and Genetics 248, 260 reform 11, 29, 61, 65, 69, 82, 88, 165, 192; Reform Bill 55, 70n3; sexual 118, 122–3; social 30, 82, 118, 146, 160, 195, 250 regeneration 8, 11, 120, 242; racial 11, 120, 242, 244 Reklame, Die 127 Race Suicide? 257n7, 260 religion, religious 3, 21, 30, 32n7, 57, 68, 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 103, 163, 176n13, 201n10, 244 ren-ai 210 Rentoul, Robert Reid, Race Culture; or, reproduction 9, 11, 121, 122, 123, 154, 156, 241, 243, 247, 250, 255; rational 123, 250, 255 resistance 2, 6, 45, 46 respectability 92, 103, 114, 116

276

Index

responsibility 105, 158, 167 Reuter, Gabrielle 136 revolt of the daughters 80 Richardson, Angelique 1, 3, 6, 11–12, 12n1, 13, 30, 117, 145, 240–62 rights 68, 83, 86, 87, 88, 102, 103, 115; of man 52, 60, 68; of woman 7, 10, 20, 28, 52, 58, 60, 61, 66–7, 68, 71n21, 79, 84, 86, 158, 167, 197, 199, 201n13, 212; political 103, 196, 201n13 Rikugo¯ Zasshi 208 Riley, Glenda 178 Riviere, Joan 156n1, 157 Robbins, Trina 4, 9, 162, 176n7, 179–89, 217, 243 romance 8, 10, 28, 98, 136, 145, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 182, 183 Romania 190 Romilly, Lady Arabella 154 room of one’s own 21 Roosevelt, Eleanor 187 Roosevelt, Theodore 168, 169, 178, 249 Rosenberg, Caroll Smith 89 Rosenberg, R. 89 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 150 Rowbotham, Sheila 189 Rowold, Katharina 260 Rubenstein, David 73 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre 224 rural 7, 27, 28, 29, 30, 37, 41, 90, 91, 93, 98, 99, 103, 115 Rushton, Alan R. 260 Russia 24, 213, 246 Rutherford, Susan 12n1 Ryan, Louise 3, 4, 7, 90–101, 102, 117, 145, 194, 238n4 Said, Edward 152 Sand, George 17, 21, 24 Sanders, Valerie 70n2, 73 Sanger, Margaret 253, 254–5, 257n8, 260; The Pivot of Civilization 254, 260 Sasaki Nobutsuna 211, 219 satire 20, 158 Schaffer, Talia 175n4, 178 Schiele, Egon 146 Schöpflin, Aladár 46 Schreiner, Olive 147 Schureman, Catharine 225, 229, 239 Schwartz, Ágota 191, 200n3, 204 Schwimmer, Rózsa Bédy 10, 193, 194,

195, 196–7, 198, 199, 200n9, 201n15, 202n25, 202n27, 204 science 11, 61, 110, 134, 136, 196, 240, 241, 246, 249, 251 Scott, Anne Firor 3, 189, 237n2, 238 Second World War 193, 249 seduction 9, 58, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156 segregation 11, 229 Seito¯ 10, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211–17 Sekai Fujin 214 selective breeding 240 self: self-confidence 42, 158, 168; selfdenial 136; self-determination 163, 216; self-expression 155; selffulfilment 10; self-help 231, 232; selfreliance 9, 82, 84, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166; self-sacrifice 28, 115 Selfridge, Gordon 154 Séllei, Nora 2, 6, 35–48, 200n5 sensation fiction 25 sensual, sensuality 95, 114, 134, 149, 150, 152, 155 sentimentality 134 Senuma Kayo 208 separate spheres 7, 59, 76, 86, 241; see also sphere serialisation (of novels) 132, 133, 134 sex (female/male), sex debates in v, 7, 25, 27, 51, 52, 66, 67, 71n21, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 96, 126, 242; the sex question 52, 56, 88; see also press, the sex(ual activity) vi, xi, 3, 43, 103, 106, 118, 121, 122, 124, 195, 196, 205, 214, 217, 244, 245 sex education 215, 247; sexology 147 sexual 9, 10, 11, 80, 105, 106, 113, 114, 115, 121, 156, 214, 228; anarchy i; desire 121, 147, 215; enlightenment 121, 151; freedom 10, 80, 118, 121, 123, 166, 214–15, 216; fulfillment 122, 147; knowledge 121, 133, 151, 152, 214–15; licence/looseness 114, 115, 121, 122, 147; murder 121; oppression 214; reform 118, 122, 123; satisfaction 122, 123, 195, 196; selection 250; technique 123, 151, 152; see also reform sexuality 1, 2, 67, 91, 136, 137, 145, 146, 156n1, 169, 179, 197, 245; female 1, 2, 121, 136, 137, 146, 152, 214–16; medicalization of 147

Index Sharp, Ingrid 3, 4, 8, 118–41 Shaw, Flora 56 Shaw, G.B. 67, 73 Shimamura Hôgetsu 213 Shincho¯ 208 Shin shin fujin 212 Shorter, Edward 210, 219 Showalter, Elaine 12n2, 14, 35, 48, 151, 157 sisterhood 4, 43, 83, 84; shrieking 4, 67 skaz 37, 40, 41 slave, slavery 133, 223, 225, 227, 229, 230, 236, 244, 253 slimming 127, 153; see also diet slimness 96, 135, 154 Smalley, Phillips 253 Smedley, Audrey 246, 260 Smith, Goldwin 61, 69, 70n13, 73 smoking 97, 106, 118, 127, 145, 179, 217 social democratic movement 201n14, 202n24 Social Economics Club 229 Socialism 15, 80, 118, 119, 147, 212, 214; state Socialism 200 social purity 11, 244, 245, 247, 257n2 social reform see reform society 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 98, 99, 110, 111, 114, 116 Society of Hungarian Social Scientists 196 Sollors, Werner 176n13, 178 Spády, Adél 199 Spain 227; Spanish Civil War 9, 187 spectator, spectatorship 148, 151, 165 sphere: spheres female 26, 108, 111; male 86, 103; see also separate spinster 111, 116; see also Old Maid; woman, single sports 134, 154, 163, 164, 181, 207, 241 Spring, Carolyn 67, 73, stability 46, 99, 103, 114, 116, 122; national 99, 116, 122 Stamp, Shelley 257n9, 260 Stanley, Maud 54 Stansell, Christine 243 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 242 Stead, W.T. 71n16, 244 Stepan, Nancy Leys 246, 260 Stephen, Mrs Leslie 62 stereotype 18, 28, 29, 81, 91, 92, 164, 184, 191

277

sterilization 12; laws 248 Stöcker, Helene 119 Stopes, Charlotte Charmichael 20, 32n6, 34; British Freewomen 20, 32n6, 33 structure (narrative) 40, 42, 53, Studholme, Marie 151, 156n5 subversion, subversive i, 5, 7, 8, 9, 38, 45, 46, 79, 99, 116 suffrage 3, 7, 18, 20, 26, 32n6, 51–73, 75, 76, 79, 82, 83, 86, 102, 118, 171, 179, 183, 185, 191, 196, 197, 201n13, 202n24, 207, 242, 243; and conservatism 207; female 7, 20, 118, 153, 155, 171, 179, 191, 196, 197, 201n13, 202n24, 232, 236, 241, 243; male 32n6, 61, 202n24, 207; and the nineteenth century press 7, 51–73; Suffrage Bill, see Women’s Suffrage Bill; suffrage movement 26, 60, 67, 71n18, 191, 202n24, 205, 207, 242, 243; suffragette, figure of 145, 199; suffragism, suffragist 83, 145, 147, 148; see also vote Sumner, John Bird 20 Sumner, Mary 20 supremacy 225, 229; racial 225, 229 survival of the fittest 226, 250 Sutherland, John 58, 59, 70n14, 73 Symonds, J.A. 56 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 56 Swiney, Frances 245, 260 Tadema, Alma 150; wife of 62 Taft, William 249 Taiwan 205 Taiyo¯ 208 Takayama Chogyu¯ 211 Tamura Toshi 208 taste 71n21, 78, 99, 107, 112, 114, 145, 154 Tatar, Maria 121, 140 Tayama Katai 206 Taylor, Harriet 54, 68; ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ 54 Temesvári Hírlap 198, 199, 202 Ten Kortenaar, Neil 32n4, 34 Tergit, Gabriele 132, 140–1 Terris, Ellalaine 154, 155 Thaw, Harry K 179, 189 Theatre: Our Miss Gibbs 148; The Prince of Pilsen 148 Third Reich 8

278

Index

Thomas, Bertha 4, 6, 17–34, 36, 41; Camera Lucida 18, 23–4, 27; ‘A Compelling Occasion’ 23–4, 25; Elizabeth’s Fortune 23, 25; ‘Hand in Hand’ 27; In a Cathedral City 6, 23, 25; ‘Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus’ 20, 32n6; ‘The Madness of Winifred Owen’ 6, 25, 29, 33n11; ‘My Friend Kitty’ 27, 28; ‘The Only Girl’ 25, 29–30, 33n12; Picture Tales from Welsh Hills 6, 18, 21–3, 25, 27, 29; The Son of the House 24–5; ‘An Undesirable Alien’ 6, 22; ‘The Way He Went’ 22–3, 25, 27, 32n7, 32–3n10, 33n12 Thompson, J. Arthur 147 Ticknor, Caroline 165–6, 176n6, 178 Tid-Bits 160 Tiffin, Helen 239 The Times 75, 243 Tóth, Wanda 200n3 Tory 54, 55, 60, 71n21 Trachtenberg, Alan 238n4, 239 trades union 54, 82 tradition, traditional 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 19, 26, 27, 28, 33n10, 68, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 106, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 145, 160, 165, 194, 200, 210, 213, 216, 217, 226; traditionalism 96, 98, 213 transatlantic 1, 10, 12 n2, 205, 243 Trevelyan, Janet 58, 59, 70n14, 73 Trollope, Anthony 55 True Woman, True Womanhood 28, 45, 86, 163, 164, 165, 167 Tsubouchi Shoyô 205, 206 Tsuda Umeko 212, 218n13 Tsuji Jun 209 turn of the century see fin-de-siècle Turner, Mark 56, 70n7, 73 Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth 243, 260 UHU 123, 124, 127, 132, 137, 140 Ullstein 123, 124, 132, 136 United Kingdom 22, 100n1 United States 1, 2, 3, 80, 81, 102, 160, 164, 169, 217n2, 227, 229, 232, 242, 243, 250, 251, 255 Universal (film studio) 253 university 81, 82, 200n2, 201n20, 202n30, 207; see also higher education

unmanly 105 unwomanly 2, 91, 147 urban 6, 8, 28, 29, 30, 41, 90, 98, 99, 115, 155 US Pioneer Fund 249 US Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 247 Usborne, Cornelie 119, 141 utopia 11, 147, 242, 250–1, 254 Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella 3, 4, 7, 8, 92, 95, 101, 102–17, 120, 145 Vanderbilt, Consuelo 149 vegetarianism 29, 30 venereal disease 244, 257n2 Veres, Pálné see Beniczky, Hermin Versailles treaty 118 Victor, Horace 56 The Victoria Daily Times 76 The Victoria Daily (British) Colonist (previously The British Colonist) 7, 75–88 Victorian 31, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 88, 154, 160 virgin, virginity 2, 10, 214, 215–16 virtue 8, 71n21, 75, 81, 83, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 107, 113, 114, 115 visual arts 121, 127, 135, 146 The Voice of the Negro 11, 224, 231, 233, 237 Vossische Zeitung, Die 134 vote, the 51, 52, 67, 68, 71n21, 75, 79, 82, 83, 86, 102, 171, 179, 196, 201n13, 202n24, 243; see also suffrage Wadagaki Kenzo¯ 212 wakai tsubame 210 Wald, Priscilla 238n4, 239 Wales 1, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31n2, 31n3, 32n7, 32n8; see also Welsh Walker, Lynne 148, 157 Walkowitz, Judith R. 244, 245, 257n3, 260 war, warfare 6, 36, 42, 43, 45, 46, 118, 120; see also First World War; Second World War Ward, Mary (Mrs Humphry) 58, 59, 64, 70n14; Robert Elsemere 58 Warwick, Daisy 146, 149, 153 Washington, Booker T. 230 Weber, Lois 253

Index Wehrlin, Thomas 122, 141; Das Tagebuch 122, 141 Weimar press 118, 119, 123 Weimar Republic 8, 118–41 Weldon, W.F.R. 248 Welsh 6, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31n2, 32n5, 32–3n10 West, the, Western 4, 10, 150, 151, 190, 191, 196, 199, 202n3, 205, 206, 207, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 243 West, Mae 156 The Westminster Review 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 68, 69, 70n6, 70n7, 255–6 Wexler, Laura 238n4, 239 Whig 55 White, Stanford 179 whiteness 4, 5, 10, 11, 19, 74, 76, 105, 223–39, 253 Whitney, Anna 227, 228, 239 The Wicklow People 93, 94, 100 widow, figure of 61, 121 wife, wifehood 61, 74, 79, 83, 86, 108, 113, 120, 123, 131, 132, 147, 149, 152, 164, 167, 169, 171, 175, 210, 247 Wilde, Oscar 56, 151, 156n1; Salomé 151 Willard, Frances 247 Willhelm, Szidónia 10, 194, 195, 204 Williams, Charlotte 6, 18–19, 21, 23, 32n5, 34; Sugar and Slate 32n5 Williams, Fannie Barrier 223, 232, 235, 237n1, 239 Willis, Chris 13, 117 Wilson, Margaret Gibbons 176n11, 178 Wilson, Woodrow 249 Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, The 224, 230 Wollstonecraft, Mary 55 woman the ideal(ised) 92, 94, 103, 107, 150, 159; the married woman, see wife; the older woman; 150, 153; the single woman 82, 109, 110–12, 116, 136, 164, 185; woman student 136, 145, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 201n20; the wild woman 4, 80; the womanly woman 83, 86, 124, 126, 127, 134,

279

136, 147; see also Bachelor Woman; spinster womanhood 3, 91, 245, 246, 247; black 232; progressive 223 the woman question, see also feminism and sex question 31n3, 52, 54, 56, 77, 79, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 241, 247 woman reader, 9, 120, 123–4, 125, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136, 169; see also press, the, women readers woman writer 9, 10, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 35, 79, 80, 132–5 Woman’s Era Club 11, 224, 230, 231, 236, 238n5 Women Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 85, 86, 247 Women’s Liberal Association 62 women’s movement 10, 11, 26, 60, 71n18; 121, 191, 195, 196, 197, 200n4, 201n14, 205, 206, 207, 236 Women’s Suffrage Bill 51, 52, 55, 56, 60, 61, 65, 68, 69 Woodhull, Victoria 249, 260; ‘The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit’ 249 World War One see First World War World War Two see Second World War Worth, Charles 146, 148 Wulffen, Erich 121, 122, 141 Yanagawa Shunyo¯ 206, 219; Inochi no Hikari 206, 219 Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia 246, 260 Yasuda Satsuki 215 Yates, Josephine Silone 231, 232–3, 239 Yezierska, Anzia 169, 178 Y Gymraes 17 Yomiuri 208, 211, 213 Yosano Akiko 10, 207–8, 209, 211, 213, 215, 216; ‘The Day the Mountains Move’ 208; Midaregami 207, 211 Yosano Tekkan 209 Yuval-Davis, Nira 92, 100, 117, 228, 239 Ziegfeld Follies, the 179