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The Gilded Age and the Beginning of the New Woman
New York's Latest Fad: The Michaux Cycle Club (Harper's Weekly, 19 Jan. 1895)
One of the biggest changes in late 19th century America and one which would have the most significant impact on women�s lives was the growth of cities. Urban life created new problems as well as new opportunities for both men and women. Women had already been trying to find ways to expand their lives. With urbanization, at the very least the female sphere began to include evenings out with their husbands. For some women, it also included bicycling. But in both cases, as she becomes more visible in the social world, her behavior is more likely to be scrutinized for transgressions. As a result, she has to find some mean between displaying class and status and demonstrating etiquette and propriety. As one newspaper columnist worried, women who were riding bicycles and wearing more relaxed costumes which might even show their ankles were barely a step removed from becoming prostitutes. He may have been worrying a little too much about the relationship between prostitution and bicycling, but given that women's roles and activities were changing along with fashions, he may not have been wrong to be worried--he just had the wrong fear.
Ideologies of the Gilded Age:
modern progress or the failure of modernism: the response to modern developments was ambivalent. Modernism brought advances but it also brought corruption, overcrowding, poor working conditions, and a loss of spirituality in life.Spencer's social Darwinism: society, like organisms, evolved through a process of natural selection. The implication of such a theory was that the government should be laissez-faire because regulatory policies would only aid in the extended life of less fit social mechanisms and groups.Reform Darwinism: In contrast to Spencer and the social Darwinists, this ideology believed that instead of waiting for natural selection to decide what will survive, government should play an active role in helping weaker social organisms.pragmatism (William James) and instrumentalism (John Dewey): ideas are instruments whose truth or practical value can be discovered through experimentation and use; if they promote social reform, they should be used. The best truths reflect specific facts about local life styles but also have greater universal value.Although the implications of these ideologies are not the same, they tend to come together in a search for an antidote to the effects of modernism. For many people, a return to the "primitive" (with primitive referring to society before the effects of modernism) was the antidote, and women who still looked like "true women" was seen as one expression of this primitivism. The natural spontaneity of children was seen as another antidote. The idea of the feminine as a means of reversing the negative conditions of modernism reinforced the belief in separate spheres for men and women and the belief that women were the angels of the domestic paradise they created for men. It is interesting that in the three works below, illustrating the woman as ornament and the woman as an object of meditation, her clothing has changed. Surely, if her fashions have changed, then her life must have changed as well. In other words, holding on to an image of the early 19th century "true woman" as a cure for the problems of modernism may not work for one very important reason: the Gilded Age is the beginning of the New Woman.
"Household Decoration" (Charles Dana Gibson, from book of his latest drawings and cartoons, publ. in 1916)J. S. Sargent: Mrs. Fiske Warren and Daughter, 1903Whistler: Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862
The New Woman
The phrase "New Woman" refers to middle and upper-middle class women in the last quarter of the 19th century. These women were moving from home into the public sphere, and experiencing greater opportunities for education and public involvement, either through work or through campaigns for social changes such as the fight for suffrage, campaigns for better living conditions and child care, and issues related to reproductive rights. A class of working women emerged as well, but as we've already seen, working women and immigrants are unlikely to appear in art and do not really do so until after the turn of the century, when we will find them in movies, paintings, and literature.