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135 “The New Woman” Lillian W. Betts R Known for her work chronicling tenement conditions in New York City and the efforts of settlement workers to ameliorate them, Lillian W. Betts (?–1938) wrote essays and at least two books, The Leaven in a Great City (1902) and The Story of an East-Side Family (1903). From 1893 to 1900, Betts served as editor of the home department of the Outlook.1 By 1893, under the editorship of Lawrence F. Abbott, the weekly Outlook had moved away from its religious roots to become a broader family magazine devoted to coverage of the arts and news. In 1894 its circulation topped 30,000.2 For more information about the Outlook, see the introduction to Eleanor Tayleur’s“The Negro Woman—Social and Moral Decadence”in part I. The“new woman”has been the subject for illustration and description more or less in earnest. She is described as smoking, drinking, and demanding what she calls liberty. This seems to be not the liberty of law, but of license; the right to live without restraint. So vivid have the descriptions become, the artists, the writers, the speakers are so terribly in earnest, that we must accept the fact that they believe that they are describing, depicting, that which exists. There is a new woman, the product of evolution, the result of domestic, social, and commercial changes. Every year the giants of science and invention have been taking out of her control the industries that had been the objects of her effort, the subjects of her control. As they were lost, the unemployed activity found for itself some new field. Before woman realized the change, she found herself in a world that needed the cultivation of new powers, and she met the demand. Her education grew broader, her range of interest larger,her field of opportunity greater,and,without intending it,the woman of to-day finds herself a different being from her grandmother. Her standards of life have changed. Health has become an object most desirable, and, beginning the struggle in behalf of her children, the new woman has reached the point where she blushes for shame if health be not the normal condition of her family. She has Outlook, Oct. 12, 1895, 587. american new woman revisited 136 learned that her child is not divided into parts that can be taught and trained separately , and now she has her eyes opened to the relation between home and school. She is a member of a kindergarten association. She owns several books on the kindergarten, and knows that between the kindergarten and the college graduation there is the unbroken link of an immortal soul being trained to live. The new woman has learned that if she would have a clean house she must have a clean street; she must go further and have a clean neighborhood; and perfection, which is the aim of her life, demands a clean city, town, community. The new woman joins an organization that has cleanliness for its object, and she sees to it that those about her obey the written and the unwritten laws of health. She knows that she cannot secure health for her own family unless she works to secure it for those who have not had her training, who have not her standard. The new woman would be ashamed not to know something of the administration of the city, the State, the Nation. She prizes good citizenship for what it gives to her home and maintains for it. She prizes it so highly that she trains her son to value his citizenship as the highest gift of manhood, knowing that if she gives him a true standard he“will render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.” The new woman is impersonal. She sees life at that focus which subordinates the one to the many. She knows well that much of the disturbance of life comes from the confusion that grows out of a misguided conception of one’s value to the great world of affairs. She realizes fully that no one person is as great as the group of which he is but one. He may be a major one if he works with the group, but is sure to be a minor one if he works apart from it. She is calm because she does not exaggerate her own importance or that of her affairs...

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