Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- 25 War
- 26 Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State
- 27 Modernism of the Streets
- 28 Late Modernism
- 29 Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
- 30 The American Metropolis
- 31 Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms
- 32 Southern Modernism
- 33 Transpacific Modernism
- 34 Indigenous Modernism
- 35 Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
- 36 The New Woman and American Modernism
- 37 Celebrity and American Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
36 - The New Woman and American Modernism
from Part III - Situating US Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2023
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- 25 War
- 26 Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State
- 27 Modernism of the Streets
- 28 Late Modernism
- 29 Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
- 30 The American Metropolis
- 31 Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms
- 32 Southern Modernism
- 33 Transpacific Modernism
- 34 Indigenous Modernism
- 35 Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
- 36 The New Woman and American Modernism
- 37 Celebrity and American Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The American New Woman is an archetype for the generations of women who, in the early twentieth century, were engaged in defining new forms of femininity and forging new public identities, through work, leisure, art, education, and politics. The New Woman also signaled a complex, and sometimes contradictory, modernizing of embodied femininity. Beginning with the New Woman as a sociopolitical individual, mobilized in feminist discourse and suffrage politics, this chapter goes on to explore Greenwich Village women, Black women’s responses to the New Woman, fashions for bobbed hair, and the bodies and performances of different kinds of women dancer (Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Irene Castle). The chapter concludes with Djuna Barnes’ ambivalent encounters with the fashionable New Woman in her work, and Gertrude Stein’s engagement with the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, a crucial pioneer for the women’s suffrage movement and modern feminism, in her final opera The Mother of Us All (1947).
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism , pp. 609 - 629Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023