by Fiona Mcgrath

Created on: February 16, 2009

The fin de sicle witnessed the emergence of the New Woman and according to literary professor, Sally Ledger, "[c]ontemporary with the new socialism, the new imperialism, the new fiction and the new journalism she was part of that concatenation of cultural novelties which manifested itself in the 1880s and 1890s" (Ledger, 1997, p.1). In the 1890s this evolving term described those women who sought financial and professional independence and in the early twentieth century it had expanded to include "all innovators: reformers, athletes, scientists..."(Bordin, 1993, p.1 ). The freedom sought by the New Woman of the late nineteenth century was viewed as their "finest achievement" by US author Winnifred Harper Cooley (Harper Cooley, 1904, p.31).

If one considers the social position of women up to this point in history then one may get a feel for the radical, wonderful, liberating and yet threatening nature of such a position. In a speech given in 1890 by Florence Fenwick Miller (1845-1935), one of the first women to qualify as a doctor and a Victorian feminist, "[u]nder exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held...under the arbitrary domination of another's will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master"(Fenwick Miller (1890) cited in Wojtczak). Women were legally the possessions of the father, husband or even brother. The eighteenth century jurist William Blackstone defined in law the rights of men and women entered in marriage which was still strongly influential in the nineteenth century, "[b]y marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, (Blackstone (1765) cited in Johnson Lewis).

Although a precise definition of New Woman is inevitably an unstable one Bordin sums it up: "common to all generations of the New Woman was an emphasis on independence from male control" (p.3). Though in her exploration of Alice Freeman Palmer, part of the first generation of college-educated women who according to Bordin, "represented the essence of...the New Woman", we are confronted with the complex nature of the term as she concludes that "in many ways [Palmer was] not a feminist" due to her reluctance to eschew her conservative values and "woman's role". In realty this radical New Woman was more concerned with financial independence

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