The New Woman’s Work: Past, Present, and Future

[ 1 ] A full generation after New Woman fiction was re-introduced to academic readers (by Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own, Lloyd Fernando’s “New Women” in the Late Victorian Novel in 1977 and Gail Cunningham’s The New Woman and The Victorian Novel in 1978) and a decade beyond outpourings of gender-inflected essays, dissertations and books aroused as the most recent fin de siècle approached, the impact of this scholarship — and of the women, the writers and the texts it studies — is far from exhausted. Together, our three papers illuminate the literal work in the public sphere done by middle-class women in the 1880s and 1890s; the cultural work performed by the stereotyped “New Woman” and by the backlash against her; the twentieth-century scholarship on her that reshaped the study of modernity and examined evolving questions about gender, nationality, race, class and empire. [ 6 ] In the thirty years leading up to what I would call the “New Woman panic” of 1894, women earned degrees from London University and outscored men in Cambridge examinations; married women gained control over all of their own property; women were elected to local government posts, appointed to policy-making Royal Commissions, and ordained in the lowest rank of Church of England clergy. By century’s end the Dickensian “Union Workhouse” had been transformed as guardians developed group homes, foster care and vocational training, built public hospitals and free clinics, established old-age homes, and created sheltered workshops for people with disabilities.