In Search of the New Woman

Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914

Gillian Sutherland

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781107092792
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316237281
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Ttitle page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘a sort of Bogey whom no-one has ever seen’? The nature of the search
• 2 ‘all that she sees before her hellip 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 hellip 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
• Index