Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945

Ann L. Ardis, Leslie W. Lewis

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780801877605
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, literary scholars working with a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies move feminine phenomena from the margins of the study of modernity to its center. Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth century.

During this period, "women's experience" was a rallying cry for feminists, a unifying cause that allowed women to work together to effect social change and make claims for women's rights in terms of their access to the public world—as voters, paid laborers, political activists, and artists commenting on life in the modern world. Women's experience, however, also proved to be a source of great divisiveness among women, for claims about its universality quickly unraveled to reveal the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of various feminist activities and organizations.

Complementing recent attempts to historicize literary modernism by providing more thorough analyses of its material production, the essays in this volume examine both literary and non-literary writings of Jane Addams, Djuna Barnes, Toru Dutt, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Pauline Hopkins, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Bram Stoker, Ida B. Wells, Rebecca West, and others as discursive events that shape our conception of the historical real. Instead of focusing exclusively or even centrally on modernism and literature, these essays address a broad array of textual materials, from political pamphlets to gynecology textbooks, as they investigate women's responses to the rise of commodity capitalism, middle-class women's entrance into the labor force, the welfare state's invasion of the working-class home, and the intensified eroticization of racial and class differences.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• Part I Negotiating the Literary Marketplace
• Writing a Public Self: Alice Meynell’s “Unstable Equilibrium”
• Towards a New “Colored” Consciousness: Biracial Identity in Pauline Hopkins’s Fiction
• The Authority of Experience: Jane Addams and Hull-House
• “This Other Eden”: Homoeroticism and the Great War in the Early Poetry of H.D. and Radclyffe Hall
• The Heir Unapparent: Opal Whiteley and the Female as Child in America
• Part II Outside the Metropolis
• In-Between Modernity: Toru Dutt (1856–1877) from a Postcolonial Perspective
• New Negro Modernity: Worldliness and Interiority in the Novels of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins
• Olive Schreiner, South Africa, and the Costs of Modernity
• “Tropical Ovaries”: Gynecological Degeneration and Lady Arabella’s “Female Diffculties” in Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm
• Two Talks with Khun Fa
• Part III The Shifting Terrain of Public Life
• “Stage Business” as Citizenship: Ida B. Wells at the World’s Columbian Exposition
• Phenomena in Flux: The Aesthetics and Politics of Traveling in Modernity
• The New Woman’s Appetite for “Riotous Living”: Rebecca West, Modernist Feminism, and the Everyday
• Djuna Barnes Makes a Specialty of Crime: Violence and the Visual in Her Early Journalism
• In Pursuit of an Erogamic Life: Marie Stopes and the Culture of Married Love
• Shift Work: Observing Women Observing, 1937–1945
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index