Beyond Empire: The New Woman at Home and Abroad

Although the phrase "New Woman" was not coined until 1894 in a debate between British novelists Sarah Grand and Ouida in the pages of the North American Review, the major elements of that debate appeared throughout the nineteenth century and well beyond a transatlantic context. Typically defined as white, educated, and middle class, the New Woman appeared as a suffragist, progressive reformer, and woman's club member, and, in the popular press, as the independent consumer or the bloomer-wearing bicyclist. But as three new critical studies on the New Woman demonstrate, the New Woman's genesis had, in fact, more complicated underpinnings and more diverse expressions depending largely on historical, class, and national context. Holly Pyne Connor's edited collection Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of Homer, Chase, and Sargent, Iveta Jusová's The New Woman and the Empire, and Mona L. Russell's Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863–1922 build on a growing body of New Woman critical literature to enrich our understanding of one of feminism's defining eras.

Originally published in conjunction with the Newark Museum exhibition in 2006, Connor's Off the Pedestal offers three essays on a wide range of visual art renderings of the New Woman in fine art, middle-brow engravings, low-brow woodcuts, and professional photographs that belie the much narrower title of the book. In "Not at Home: The Nineteenth Century New Woman," Connor analyzes both fine and popular artists' depictions of New Woman figures that appear, as is literally the case in Winslow Homer's Civil War engraving for Harper's Magazine, holding the reins. Thirty-two years later, John Singer Sargent declares the arrival of the New Woman with Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes in which the assertive, shirtwaist wearing Mrs. Stokes overshadows her diminished husband. The chapter is fascinating, particularly in the way that Connor foregrounds the transgressiveness of images that ostensibly depict women in more traditional roles. What then at first seems merely a serene painting of a woman reading a newspaper becomes, after Connor notes the prior conventional representations of women and text that emphasized their literacy and piety, a significant image of cultural change. Mary Cassatt's Reading "Le Figaro" (ca. 1877–1878) depicts a woman, who, rather than being solely preoccupied with domestic concerns, is intellectually engaged in issues beyond the home. Likewise, in William Merritt Chase's Park Bench (ca. 1890), a woman sits alone in Central Park, pensive, starring into space with a yellow book on her lap. Connor's explanation that the yellow book implies the "romantic and risqué French books of the period" turns a pastoral image into an enigmatic, socially charged one (17).

In "Winslow Homer's Ambiguously New Women," Sarah Burns charts Homer's painting from the late 1860s to the 1870s and maintains that Homer acts as a "visual anthropologist, observing, recording, and interpreting the mores of American girlhood and young womanhood" (54). Burns concludes that Homer is ambivalent about women's changing roles. She reads, for example, Homer's The Country School (1871), where a young woman teacher appears holding a book before a room scattered with children, as both acknowledging women's new role as independent wage earners and questioning it. The woman appears distracted, her gaze afar, one hand open holding a book; the other is clenched in a fist, perhaps a sign of dissatisfaction with her new role.

Later in his career, Homer far more often characterized men and women as inhabiting separate spaces. In the Mountains (1877) features...