The New Woman is a term that referred to women’s more prominent role in the public arena in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Women’s greater visibility manifested itself in colleges, the professions, and reform movements. Economic and social transformations in the mid - to late 19th century contributed to new and different roles for women, particularly women of the upper and middle classes. Social restrictions on middle-class women eased as a market economy changed the dynamics of the household and the relationship of households to the rest of society.
Middle-class white women’s lives were shaped not only by circumstances, but also by their changing status. For
One, they chose to have fewer children, a fact that contributed to their growing power within the family and allowed them greater time and flexibility to pursue activities outside of the home. Once the children of married middle-class women were in school, women could devote their energies to a variety of causes. Temperance, social reform, church activism, and the club movement among others provided women with the opportunity to “work” outside the home and in same-sex organizations.
Colleges served as a politicizing and socializing force for the emerging New Woman. As more colleges began accepting women and more women’s colleges were established, opportunities expanded for women. Women’s colleges in particular allowed women to establish their own social networks that eventually served as stepping-stones into the public arena.
Education provided professional opportunities that characterized the New Woman’s elevated status. The New Woman was often a college graduate who worked as a settlement worker, teacher, or librarian. Previously, female jobs such as nursing did not require a college education, but nursing became increasingly professionalized early in the 20th century. Despite these changes, female college graduates still worked in traditional female occupations believed to require women’s innate skills of nurturing and compassion.
Other characteristics of the New Woman included delaying marriage or remaining single. Delaying or avoiding marriage grew more acceptable by society as long as women devoted themselves to a calling deemed socially valuable, such as charitable or reform work. The women’s club movement channeled some of women’s activism in these areas. Beginning in the 1890s, women began forming women’s organizations for the purpose of coordinating volunteers on issues of social concern. Although these groups had precedents, not until the Progressive Era did such activity become widespread. In 1892, there were 100,000 members associated with the newly formed General Federation of Women’s Clubs; by World War I, there were over a million. Initially, most women’s clubs engaged in cultural discussions, but many soon adopted a reformist, and even radical, agenda, including advocating for WOMAN suffrage. Women’s clubs were a reflection of both women’s growing politicization and their political limits. The women’s club movement staked a claim in the public arena using domestic arguments that women needed to extend their sphere to improve society.
Other movements associated with the New Woman made similar arguments. Temperance galvanized hundreds of thousands of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was the largest women’s organization of the period. It not only worked to eliminate the evils associated with alcohol, but
Satirizing modern role reversals, a woman wearing knickers and smoking a cigarette observes a man doing laundry.
(Library of Congress) also sought to eradicate ills associated with men, including prostitution and political corruption. As such, it was a political association that located women’s position as moral arbiter in public life. The movement’s foot soldiers tended to be white middle-class women, many of whom later converted to the suffrage cause for many of the same reasons that they initially became involved in temperance.
Suffrage, like temperance and the club movement, drew primarily from a middle-class constituency. Arguing that society’s problems could be remedied by women’s influence, suffragists began agitating in earnest for the vote by the 1890s. The movement reflected the New Woman’s emphasis on female organizations and networks to support reform and women’s entrance into previously male domains. Despite these arguments, suffragists were regularly derided by their foes for allegedly acting against nature in attempting to enter politics. Opponents of women’s education made similar claims that women did not have the mental and physical capacity to engage in learning. Intellectual activity, some male physicians maintained, drained blood from a woman’s reproductive organs. Nativists feared that, if native-born American women were educated, they would have less interest in children, causing immigrant women and children to outpace native-born families. Race suicide, they claimed, was the inevitable result of women’s education.
Jane Addams, who founded Hull-House in Chicago, was the model for this generation of New Woman. She came from a prominent Illinois family and attended college. Later traveling to Europe, she was influenced by the settlement house movement there. Never considering marriage an option, Addams returned to the United States to devote herself to uplifting urban immigrants as well as herself, as she had long been searching for a purpose in life. In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, she argued that women needed to relinquish “the family claim” on their lives and find “salvation” in attending to social needs.
Addams represented the cross-class activism that many New Women pursued. The National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL) embodied the reform spirit of the New Woman in labor struggles. Many female reformers worked with poor urban immigrants who labored in hazardous working conditions. The NWTUL was formed in 1903 as a vehicle for upper - and middle-class women to support working-class women. In one of the most famous strikes of the period, the NWTUL lent its moral, financial, and legal resources to thousands of striking garment workers in 1909, raising awareness of the female immigrants’ plight and forging a cross-class alliance that the male labor movement would not.
The New Woman herself was a bridge between Victorian social mores and modern life. She opened up doors to economic, social, and political advancement through singlesex networks and by using society’s sexual divisions to her advantage. The New Woman was one of the most important constituent groups engaged in Progressive Era reform. After such victories as the Prohibition and suffrage amendments, reform waned in the period after World War I, as did many of the women-based groups that had spearheaded reform. As an image of its time, the New Woman was retired, as “modernity” became the new watchword of the age.
See also women’s status and rights.
Further reading: Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).
—Natalie Atkin
World History
