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By Root 1954 0

his research, when a “New Woman” appeared to challenge prevailing beliefs about the essential nature of the sexes. “The nineteenth century had cherished a belief in the separate spheres of femininity and masculinity that amounted almost to a religious faith,” comments the distinguished literary scholar Elaine Showalter in Sexual Anarchy, a study of the fin de siecle and that era’s revolutionary retooling of sex. This faith was founded, Professor Showalter and other scholars point out, on the icon of the “womanly woman,” the flower of femininity. The womanly woman was first and foremost a mother and a wife. She was gentle and soft and self-sacrificing. Her natural place was the home, which she sought to make a place of comfort and beauty. “Often compared to a flower, a kitten, or a child, she was modest and pure-minded, unselfish and meek. She knew her place well; naturally fitted to the common round of household duties, she could make a home of a hovel by ministering to the needs of her husband, either as uncomplaining drudge or angel on the hearth. Nothing in herself, the littlest and least of all creation, she achieved greatness not in her own right but in her relat-edness as daughter and wife,” writes historian Patricia Marks. “The ‘womanly woman’ was one of the nineteenth century’s most memorable myths.”

The New Woman, who appeared as if by magic on two continents, Europe and North America, late in the nineteenth century, was an iconoclastic figure who blasphemed this gospel of femininity. She rejected the cult of maternity and self-sacrifice conceived as elements of the essential nature of womanhood. She argued for self-determination and self-fulfillment. She was not exactly a feminist, as her primary goal was not to gain legal or political rights. The defining characteristic trait of the New Woman was her desire to live life on her own terms and her refusal to be defined solely as daughter, wife, or mother. With her masculine thirst for education and work, lack of interest in marriage and motherhood, and demands to be taken seriously as a human being, the New Woman raised disturbing questions about the essential natures of men and women.

In the 1880s, women in England and France were finally granted the right to divorce unfaithful spouses and own property in their own right. Women’s colleges were founded in the United States and England, and in France secular secondary public-school and university education was opened to both sexes. Demographic changes also sent large numbers of women into the workforce, with or without an education. When the 1891 British census revealed that there were approximately nine hundred thousand more females than males in the total population, there was a great deal of public hand-wringing about the eventual fate of such “surplus” women, who might never marry or have children. Instead, they became the first generation of Western women to move to urban areas alone to work as shopgirls, teachers, journalists, and secretaries.

These New Women rejected sexual apartheid in word and deed; the visible emblem of their revolt was their mode of dress. Throwing off corsets, bustles, and back-buttoned bodices, the New Woman advocated “rational dress,” suitable for work, shopping, and exercise. Her divided skirts permitted free movement but were attacked by conservatives as an attempt to usurp the powers and privileges of men. Trousers or “bifurcated garments” defined masculinity, in the same way that restrictive corsets and crinolines defined femininity, and conservatives were determined to enforce not only the inner dichotomy between the sexes but also their external manifestation. The New Woman was in fact a “cross-dresser” of sorts, and she was both mocked and slandered for daring to wear masculine garments. An article in the British medical journal The Lancet declared the wearing of trousers “detrimental to the health and morals” of women. New Women were accused at various times, by various commentators, of being sexually promiscuous, sexually neutered, or lesbians—accusations that were to reappear