{"id":1875,"date":"2021-11-22T18:18:53","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T18:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=1875"},"modified":"2021-11-22T18:19:24","modified_gmt":"2021-11-22T18:19:24","slug":"the-new-woman-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2021\/11\/22\/the-new-woman-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Woman (Again)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The article \u201cThe New Woman Fiction\u201d by Dr. Andrzej Diniejko draws a <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">compelling timeline of the challenging and transformation of female gender norms at the tail end of the Victorian era. Diniejko tracks the satirical and parody representations of \u201cNew Women\u201d, or in other words, women who were challenging gender norms and embodying a new level of independence and expression. Consistently, \u201cnew women\u201d were compared to men, represented as \u201cmale-identified, or manhating and\/or man-eating or self-appointed saviour of benighted masculinity.\u201d (Richardson and Willis, as quoted in Diniejko) <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This came off as very queer to me, as it no doubt was offensive to some women who didn\u2019t identify with masculinity, while also possibly being affirming to people of non-normative gender expressions. This reminded me of a 1925-era song, \u201cMasculine Women! Feminine Men!\u201d another example of mainstream gende<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">r parody which has since been reclaimed by queer communities. It\u2019s my aim to briefly illustrate the similarities between the ideas of the \u201cNew Woman\u201d of Diniejko\u2019s article and the song text, hopefully illuminating the pervasive fear of masculine women through time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Masculine Women, Feminine Men (1925)\" width=\"660\" height=\"371\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ba4saYhMYkE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Diniejko writes that a central tenet to \u201cNew Women\u201d philosophy was fashion, and a move towards pants-wearing and bike riding. Many satirical representations included bloomers. In \u201cMasculine Women! Feminine Men!\u201d there is a similar expression of worry about pants challenging the status quo, \u201cKnickers and trousers, baggy and wide\/ Nobody knows who&#8217;s walking inside\u201d Despite being separated by thirty years, the two eras share a worry about pants fundamentally changing women who wear them, and how pants conceal gender once they\u2019re adopted outside of the traditionally male wearers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Diniejko also mentions the role of smoking in \u201cNew Women\u201d art and literature, a symbol of independence, maturity, and manhood. In \u201cMasculine Women! Feminine Men!\u201d the singer quips, \u201c<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Auntie is smoking, rolling her own,\u201d similarly positioning smoking as an independent act that becomes threatening when women adopt it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, more generally, I believe the anxiety around the \u201cNew Women\u201d and \u201cMasculine Women\u201d is fueled by the same desire to return to tradition. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Diniejko writes there was a strong connection between the \u201cNew Woman\u201d philosophy and other cultural revolutions of the time, rejecting the past and imagining a new future. In \u201cMasculine Women! Feminine Men!\u201d the singer laments about the past, \u201cGirls were girls and boys were boys when I was a tot \/ Now we don&#8217;t know who is who or even what\u2019s what\u201d and \u201cThings are not what they used to be, you&#8217;ll see.\u201d Without going into too much detail, I believe the cultural revolutions of the 1890s and 1920s were similar in their embrace of extravagance and pushing cultural norms. The worry about tradition being interrupted is evergreen.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So is the \u201cNew Woman\u201d new? Or has she always existed? I believe throughout time there is an undercurrent of fear of women pushing gender boundaries and experimenting with masculine expressions. The very same fears of the 1890s \u201cNew Woman\u201d, in all her pants-wearing, cigarette smoking, and tradition-interrupting glory, come back in full force in the 1920s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Bibliography\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Monaco, James V, Leslie, Edgar and Hugh J. Ward (Firm). <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Masculine women! Feminine men! <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Melbourne: L.F. Collin, 1925. <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/nla.gov.au\/nla.obj-165802373\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">http:\/\/nla.gov.au\/nla.obj-165802373<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Diniejko, Andrzej. \u201cThe New Woman Fiction.\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Victorian Web<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, 17 Dec. 2011, https:\/\/victorianweb.org\/gender\/diniejko1.html.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The article \u201cThe New Woman Fiction\u201d by Dr. Andrzej Diniejko draws a compelling timeline of the challenging and transformation of female gender norms at the tail end of the Victorian era. Diniejko tracks the satirical and parody representations of \u201cNew Women\u201d, or in other words, women who were challenging gender norms and embodying a new &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2021\/11\/22\/the-new-woman-again\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The New Woman (Again)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2021"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}