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self-willed woman” and “the parasitism of the home woman.” Marie Jenny Howe’s declarations, too, were a source of much joking: “We declare to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves” or “we are feminists!” Feminism, as a term, did not exactly leap into everyday use. (The Oxford English Dictionary would not include it until 1933.) And that was to some extent because it had so quickly, so immediately, been turned into a joke. But it was also true that no one really believed in the prospect of a larger women’s movement. No one really believed much would change.

Even Ida Tarbell, the first woman “muckraker,” author of History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and defiantly never wed (“it would fetter my freedom”), had her doubts. As she wrote, “In an urban setting, there are now simply more women outside, doing things. There is a sense of freedom, due to numbers of women…. But that doesn’t mean freedom.”

In a preview of what would be called “sexological” thinking, psychologist Stanley G. Hall summarized the “new” situation in far more draconian terms. The woman who “abhorred the limitations of domestic life” was not just unconventional, newly or blissfully “devoid of the old femininity.” She was “functionally castrated.”

SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA

To young single women who’d been born just as new womanhood coalesced—say, around 1895—the idea of a “new” woman quickly came to seem kind of old. Even if the woman in question was only thirty, to her younger counterparts she seemed aged due to the impression, even in casual conversation, that she was always giving a speech. Of course there were fights to fight, but as one young woman told Harper’s magazine, “the New Women don’t seem to see how there is…life to live!” This dated “new” character with her upstanding shirtwaist and erect posture made one observer think of “a funereal procession of one.” New womanhood seemed to be set to a dirge while the young(er) world was starting to move to popular songs.

This generational divide is reminiscent of the gap so painfully in evidence during the late 1980s and ’90s. It’s fair to say that second-wave feminists were so successful that the entire Western world changed heroically. But if you were a baby while it was changing, if you missed the big battles—and never experienced the old restrictions and unfairnesses—then how could basic freedoms generate a sense of wonder? Of gratitude? How could you be on your guard for hints of sexist regression?

A young woman, twenty-three, an artist’s model and aspiring dress designer, told Life magazine in 1923 the same thing someone twenty-three might have said eighty years later: “I think many of our women’s rights people expect that everyone is going to work for their ideas and causes, even though the battle’s already won as much as it will ever be…. They get very angry if they sense you have an interest in minor things, in how you dress, not in political talk. Or you are not interested in THEM and their struggle to free YOU and your friends. Why aren’t we all grateful?”

A symbolic battle had been declared against the tedious new woman—its rallying cry a slogan borrowed from a Life magazine cartoon showing a mother draped in a suffrage banner with a daughter in sporty clothes, holding a tennis racket. The mother is lecturing; the daughter smiles but shrieks to herself: “Oh, Mother dear, please I do need to leave to go please, please, SHADDUP!”

A backlash against the educated female had developed from within her own ranks.

In a first-person magazine confessional, “Why I Am an Old Maid” by “A Daughter of New England” (1911), we learn that “men instinctively avoid a woman who can discourse at length on sun spots.” More serious statistics seem to bear out this observation—or at least women’s belief in it.

Consider some figures from Bryn Mawr College. Between 1889 and 1908, the peak political years of new womanhood, only half of all graduates married. Of those who did, some 62 percent continued on to graduate school and nearly all the married new women continued,