New Woman

According to historian Ruth Bordin, the term New Woman was: intended by [James] to characterize American expatriates living in Europe: women of affluence and sensitivity, who despite or perhaps because of their wealth exhibited an independent spirit and were accustomed to acting on their own.

[5]Peggy Meyer Sherry notes in her article: "Telling Her Story: British Women of Letters of the Victorian Era": "[It was] Sarah Grand who invented the "New Woman," saw society as her laboratory and her novels as case studies.

Some were obtaining a professional education and becoming lawyers, doctors, journalists, and professors, often at prestigious all-female colleges such as the Seven Sisters schools: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley.

The emergence of education and career opportunities for women in the late 19th century, as well as new legal rights to property (although not yet the vote), meant that they stepped into a new position of freedom and choice when it came to marital and sexual partners.

[15][16][17] Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who started her writing career with a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneered bicycle touring with her travelogues around England and Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) also deserves mention, especially within the context of narratives derived from Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), both of which chronicle a woman's doomed search for independence and self-realization through sexual experimentation.

[citation needed] Successful illustrators included Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Rose O'Neill, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Violet Oakley.

When you mean, by the term, the women who believe in and ask for the right to advance in education, the arts, and professions with their fellow-men, you are speaking of a phase in civilisation which has come gradually and naturally, and is here to stay.

But when you confound her with the extremists who wantonly disown the obligations and offices with which nature has honored them, you do the earnest, progressive women great wrong.In the early 1890s, daughters of middle class Catholics expressed a desire to attend institution of higher education.

Influenced heavily by the New Culture movement, which emphasised condemning the “slavish Confucian tradition which was known to sacrifice the individual for conformity and force rigid notions of subservience, loyalty, and female chastity," the New Woman who emerged in the 1910s were far less progressive than their later 1920s counterparts.

[38] However, like minded male reformers to Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu promoted a very different kind of women for China’s changing political, social, and economic landscape pre-May Fourth era.

[39] Thus “customs of concubinage, foot binding, widow chastity, and female seclusion”, from these male intellectual's view points, needed to be eliminated to allow women to freely participate in the nation's rebuilding.

Regardless of Lu Xun's warning, Western literary figures, like Nora in A Doll's House (1879), came to be seen as great examples of New Women to female and male readers of the time.

Nora, the heroine of A Doll's House, who leaves her patriarchal marriage and ventures out into the world alone, was used as an ideal archetype by female and male Chinese writers in their own stories and essays.

[41] Her 1927 essay published in the New Woman magazine, noted how women wished to remain single and thus able to “pursue their own personal fulfilment and livelihood”, becoming “active participants in civic life”.

[41] Influenced by her single-mother, Ding Ling presented herself as the epitome of a New Woman as she was starkly against foot-binding, chopped her hair into a short bob cut, went to male and female schools, and refused an arranged marriage.

[40] Her most influential work, Miss Sophia's Diary, inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, details a New Woman's journey with "sexual and emotional frustrations of romantic love as a 'liberated' women in a patriarchal society".

[40] New Women, according to Barbara Molony, emerged in the late 1920s, out of the New Culture Movement and were viewed as the "educated, patriotic embodiment of a new gender order working to overcome the oppressions of the Confucian family system and traditional society".

[45] New Women were usually female students who in appearance wore eyeglasses, had short bobbed hair, and unbound feet, and in practice usually lived on their own, had open, casual relationships, and aimed to be economically independent from their family.

[36] While neither of these two women were necessarily beloved by males wishing to keep the status quo, the New Woman was more accepted as she was believed by men, even though she advocated for free love and economic independence, to still uphold family and national values.

[36] Even with these apparent newfound freedoms (ability to work outside the domestic domain, economic stability, and choice in marriage partners), some New Women still felt constricted by the system and thus, unheard.

[35] After women gained the right to vote and be elected in the wake of World War I in Germany, the Neue Frau became a trope in German popular culture, representing new discourses about sexuality, reproduction and urban mass society.

This German New Woman was portrayed by authors such as Elsa Herrmann (So ist die neue Frau, 1929) and Irmgard Keun (Das kunstseidene Mädchen, 1932, translated as The Artificial Silk Girl, 1933).

[55] Nonetheless, the majority of representations of New Women and Modern Girls in mass media reduced them to caricatures with short hair, make-up, and Western clothing, while ignoring their strides in knowledge, skill, and identity.

This exploration of changing gender roles was further debated in cartoons, particularly around the departure from the hyeonmo yangcheo (wise mother and good wife) rhetoric and women’s increased participation in public life.

Despite male opposition to the new fashion styles, modern women held their own ideas of what was attractive, comfortable, and functional, particularly in the work setting, and defined their beauty, sexuality, and identity for themselves.

Kim Eun-Ho’s representation of the New Woman using warm, soft colors and sloping lines portrays her in a romantic light, where she is the passive female being caught unexpectedly in a private moment.

"[61] Another revolutionary female writer, Yosano Akiko, wrote a poem celebrating the women's movement in Seitō's inaugural issue, entitled "The Day the Mountains Move".

[62] What made Seitō simultaneously controversial and powerful was how it rallied against Japan's existing family system based on patriarchy, instead championing romantic love and a woman's independence.

Like Hiratsuka Raichō, Seitō writer Ito Noe similarly practiced the ideals she preached in writing in her own life, leaving an unsatisfactory marriage to study in Tokyo and marrying twice more.