Who was the New Woman? Today she is often celebrated as an adventurous precursor to the modern feminist, but she was hardly a welcome figure when she first emerged in the 1890s. She rejected (or undertook with ambivalence) the traditional roles of wife and mother in favor of independence and mobility. Especially in traditional and patriarchal cultures, such choices were met with hostility, as they seemed to signal an imminent breakdown of society. Not surprisingly, the archetypal New Woman was from Europe or the United States. Her ability to travel and practice a profession, sometimes in far-flung countries, brought into sharp relief the disparities in women’s lives around the globe. Indeed, there were some New Women for whom writing and journalism became a platform to promote colonialism and imperialism.1
The recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, The New Woman Behind the Camera, featured the work of...
University of California Press