Gender Roles in Transition Across the Globe

At the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class women in Europe and the United States began to challenge traditional gender roles that relegated women to the private sphere of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. They demanded the right to attend universities, enter professional workspaces, and—eventually—participate in the political arena. Although the First World War interrupted women’s struggle, at the end of the war they continued to press their claims for a place in the public sphere. A great deal of outstanding scholarship has addressed many aspects of both generations of these New Women as they challenged gender roles rooted deeply in social convention, government policy, legal structures, scientific theory, and religious beliefs. The books under consideration in this essay, while differing in their thematic focuses, methodologies, and locations, contribute to this conversation in new ways. One argues that, in spite of the vast literature, we still do not know exactly who the New Woman was. Two books explore sexual identities and efforts to police women’s evolving sexual behaviors. Two additional books, finally, take us beyond the familiar geographic and thematic parameters of gender. Together, these studies deepen our understanding of how women challenged traditional gender roles and how modernization, colonialism, religion, and nationalism affected their efforts.

At the heart of Gillian Sutherland’s exemplary new study, In Search of the New Woman, lies a central question: Who exactly was the New Woman? She calls the frenzy that surrounded the New Woman in Britain between 1870 and 1914 “a wildly skewed reductive media construct” that did not reflect “the real lives and work of those women it purported to describe” (6). In five tightly written chapters, she explores the relationship between the New Woman presented in media and actual middle-class women in teaching, public service, the caring professions, white-collar jobs, and the arts. Each chapter explores women’s employment opportunities in one of these professions, the educational requirements for that work, and whether it helped women achieve independence or become New Women. Sutherland is particularly interested in the question of how economic independence could be achieved without sacrificing middle-class women’s status as ladies and respectable women.

Sutherland’s first two chapters draw heavily on the records of two women’s colleges, Newnham and Girton, to explore women’s educational options and the employment they opened to women between 1870 and 1914. School records enable her to trace individual women’s trajectories to understand exactly how societal and legal obstacles and familial attitudes influenced women’s lives. Sutherland concludes that for women in teaching, upper-level government positions, and the caring professions, it was possible to achieve economic independence while maintaining one’s status as a lady. But this did not mean they escaped traditional gender roles. Societal pressure prevented these women from marrying. In addition, the strong association of ladies with philanthropy meant that part-time and voluntary work persisted, and educational standards were difficult to apply to women’s work. The scarcity of jobs in many areas, furthermore, forced women to rely on private money while they trained or waited for a job, thus precluding many women...