In Search of the New Woman
Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914

A study of the 'New Woman' phenomenon, examining whether British women really achieved the economic independence to challenge social conventions.

Gillian Sutherland (Author)

9781107467347, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 November 2018

199 pages, 11 b/w illus. 2 tables
23 x 15.3 x 1 cm, 0.41 kg

'Sutherland's innovative approach to middle- and lower-middle-class women's expanding professional prospects and shifting social and political outlooks offers a number of intriguing lines of inquiry. She explores records from technical schools, tracing the educational infrastructure that helped sustain socially aspiring women's mass entrance into clerical employment. Sutherland also devotes substantial attention to the complex expansion of state education and the generally positive opportunities this afforded female teachers.' Katie Hindmarch-Watson, Journal of Modern History

The 'New Women' of late nineteenth-century Britain were seen as defying society's conventions. Studying this phenomenon from its origins in the 1870s to the outbreak of the Great War, Gillian Sutherland examines whether women really had the economic freedom to challenge norms relating to work, political action, love and marriage, and surveys literary and pictorial representations of the New Woman. She considers the proportion of middle-class women who were in employment and the work they did, and compares the different experiences of women who went to Oxbridge and those who went to other universities. Juxtaposing them against the period's rapidly expanding but seldom studied groups of women white-collar workers, the book pays particular attention to clerks and teachers, and their political engagement. It also explores the dividing lines between ladies and women, the significance of respectability and the interactions of class, status and gender lying behind such distinctions.

1. 'A sort of bogey whom no-one has ever seen'? The nature of the search
2. 'All that she sees before her … is teaching': formal schooling and its opportunities
3. 'The exercise of what may be termed her maternal faculties': public service and 'caring' occupations
4. 'Impossible for a lady to remain a lady': art, literature and the theatre
5. 'The real social divide existed between those who … dirtied hands and face and those who did not': women white collar workers (I)
6. 'A beggarly makeshift, but for me it was wealth beyond price': women white collar workers (II)
7. Ladies and women
8. Some conclusions: degrees of freedom
Sources and select bibliography.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literature & literary studies [D]