Jack London's New Woman: A Little Lady With a Big Stick
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Notes
. My thanks to Donald McQuade and Arthur Riss for their insightful and generous comments on previous versions of this essay, and to Leonard Cassuto for the opportunity to present an initial version on his panel at the 1993 ALA. I am also indebted to Earle Labor and Jeanne C. Reesman for many enlightening conversations about London and gender, and to Sara S. Hodson of the Huntington Library and the late Russ Kingman of the Jack London Research Center for their help with archival materials.
1. Anonymous, "An Elemental Maid," The Literary Digest, 26 (1903), 60.
2. See, for example, Clarke, Sex in Education (1873), and Beard, American Nervousness (1881). See also James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 150-53.
3. Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), p. 88. See also Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1990), and Banta, p. 90. Marks notes that while American popular opinion became more tolerant of the New Woman as time passed, anxieties about her mannish tendencies persisted as she continued to push for "all the advantages of her brothers . . . [including] education and careers" (Marks, p. 2). Depictions of the athletic New Woman also appear in such imperialist novels as Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune (1897), whose heroine, Hope Langham, is an able horsewoman possessed of ample physical courage. For a discussion of New Woman athleticism in popular 1890s novels set in a romantic past or romanticized present, see Amy Kaplan, "Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s," ALH, 2 (1990), 671-75. Kaplan notes that such novels "elicit the desire for liberation from domestic constraints through adventure and physical activity" (p. 675).
4. See Whorton, p. 153, and Kaplan, p. 674. Donald Mrozek has noted that "the absence of self control which led to sexual depravity was too easily confused with that sensual expressiveness which had its outlet in sport ... the manner of [women's] sport and athletic practice ... assumed a moral intonation." Mrozek, "The 'Amazon' and the American 'Lady': Sexual Fears of Women as Athletes," in J. A. Mangan and Roberta J. Park, eds., From "Fair Sex" to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Era (London: Frank Cass, 1987), p. 286.
5. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "a new social and political drama" had opened, centered on the highly educated, single and economically independent New Woman, who constituted a "revolutionary demographic and political phenomenon." Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985; repr. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 266, 245. The second generation of New Women, educated in the 1890s, combined a subversion of gender conventions with a rejection of "bourgeois sexual norms," and desired to be "as successful, as political, as sexual as men" (p. 177).
6. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct, trans. F. J. Rebman (1st German ed., 1886; Brooklyn: Physicians & Surgeons Book Co., 1908), pp. 334-35.
7. Stockham (1833-1912) was a Chicago physician and author of numerous books on women's health. See Stockham, Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (1886; rev. ed., Chicago: Sanitary Publishing Co., 1887), and Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (1896; rev. ed., New York: R. F. Fenno, 1903). See also Mrozek, p. 285.
8. Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," Alienist and Neurologist, 16 (1895), 153. See also William Lee Howard, "Effeminate Men and Masculine Women," New York Medical Journal, 71 (1900), 687, and Whorton, p. 153. Howard classes as "degenerates" the "female sexual pervert" and the "female possessed of masculine ideas of independence."
9. Sam S. Baskett, "Sea Change in The Sea-Wolf," ALR, 24 (1992), 5-6. See also Charles N. Watson, The Novels of Jack London: A Critical Reappraisal (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983), who discusses London's attempts to represent a...
