Abstract
Is there anything new to say about the New Woman? Perceived during her brief flourish at the fin de siècle in journalism, literature, cartoon and indeed life, to be the most discussed figure of the period, the New Woman was rediscovered in the scholarship of second-wave feminism and has remained a rich source of critical scrutiny ever since. She has been a cultural lens through which to view many of the most urgent issues of the modern period; feminism, masculinity, identity, empire, modernity, sexuality, urbanism, or the body, are just some of the subjects that can complete the title of a scholarly text beginning ‘The New Woman and…’. Being of a protean nature, existing in overlapping dimensions of imaginative, journalistic and life writings, and anticipating many of the gender controversies of our own age, the New Woman has perhaps been more thoroughly mined for cultural ore than any other figure of the fin de siècle.
Lena Wånggren’s study of the New Woman and technology is part of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series, and, as such, aims (laudably) to ‘augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer… revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity’ (p. xi). Citing Olive Schreiner’s vision, in ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, of ‘Mechanical Invention’ cutting the chains of woman’s oppression and freeing her into an emancipated future, Wånggren takes examples of Victorian technological innovation and investigates the ways in which they contributed to a redefinition of women’s roles. The New Woman, of course, came into being during a period of intense technological invention: the telephone, the motor car, film, aviation and electric lighting were all her contemporaries in ‘newness’. This book, though, focuses on four ‘technologies’ – broadly defined – in which, in both fact and fiction, the New Woman had a high participation rate: typewriters, bicycles, detectives and the modern hospital (with its female nurses and doctors). Moving beyond the optimistic simplicity of Schreiner’s vision – is any particular technological invention inherently emancipatory? – Wånggren aims to explore the ways in which technology and gender co-constructed each other.
Typewriters are a particularly interesting case, not least linguistically. Up to around 1910, the word ‘typewriter’ could apply equally to either the machine or to its operator, so that a husband purchasing a ribbon for his typewriter could legitimately be accused by his wife of buying furbelows for his female clerk rather than ink fabric for his machine (p. 43). More seriously, this conflation of machine with human operator potentially dehumanised or unsexed the woman typist, who, according to the Standard of 1892, appeared a ‘purely mechanical typewriter’ (p. 44). Such a pejorative judgment was, of course, resisted by female practitioners, who argued, for example, that a successful typist ‘must be… of good education and general culture’ and have ‘an acquaintance with literature, and a sufficient knowledge of history and geography’ (p. 45). Whatever her qualities, the woman typist rapidly became a significant presence in the late-Victorian and Edwardian workplace (the census of 1881 records around 7,000 female clerks, rising within thirty years to 146,000) and made a more tentative entry into literature in the 1890s. Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle and, perhaps most notably, George Gissing (in The Odd Women) all featured the typewriter as a technology that displayed women’s mastery of a machine that was of significant practical use and an important facilitator of female employment. And Grant Allen, never slow to spot a potentially lucrative trend, leapt aboard the typewriter bandwagon in 1897 with his novel The Type-Writer Girl. Wånggren’s account of what could be read as an essentially light-hearted potboiler is genuinely illuminating on the ambiguities and nuances that the typewriter exposed in women’s new relations with machine, workplace and employer. By bringing women into the formerly male space of the commercial office, the typewriter helped to create new gender relations in the workplace, where women were at once the highly visible object of male scrutiny and simultaneously bound to a machine that desexualised them and denied their independent contribution to the work.
While the typewriter was a discrete technology whose uses by women were observable and quantifiable in fin-de-siècle society as well as in the fiction of the period, what Wånggren calls the ‘technologies of detection’ were altogether more elusive. The female detective, Wånggren claims, first appeared in fiction in 1864, some decades before the advent of the New Woman, and even further in advance of real-life women detectives, who were first admitted to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in the early 1920s. Indeed, there is no inherent reason to link detection in the Victorian period with technology; Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket deploys no instruments of detection beyond his assessment of character and situation, and his attention to talk. So it is perhaps particularly interesting that the New Woman detective, who became a recognisable figure of the 1890s, should be so firmly associated with the technologies of modernity. The heroine of Mathias McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900) displays expertise in an impressive array of technologies – she is a doctor, rides a bicycle, and has worked with the telegraph and telephone – and these skills directly contribute to her crime-solving ability. As detection becomes increasingly evidence-focused, so the female detective becomes a scientist working with modern forensic technologies. And as the genre dictates that the detective generates new knowledge (this being the nature of crime-solving), the fictional New Woman detective provides a role model well in advance of real life for how to combine expertise in modern technologies with reason and thought in the pursuit of justice.
With Wånggren’s remaining examples – the bicycle and medicine – we enter more familiar territory. It is something of a challenge to find new avenues to explore on the subject of women and the bicycle, and her fictional examples – H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899) – offer well-worn critical narratives. Female nurses and doctors have been similarly well examined. Indeed, one of the peculiar features of this study is its heavy reliance on previous scholarship; at times it reads more like a diligent literature survey than the sort of ‘revision’ of received wisdom at which the Critical Studies series aims. For a book on the New Woman, this study is curiously deferential to past authority and conformist in its theoretical framework. And while I take issue with some of the critical insights that Wånggren offers – she is sometimes rather deaf to tone, and ought surely not to claim that a fictional text can ‘prove’, for example, that a New Woman doctor does not have to be unwomanly (p. 155) – I would nevertheless have welcomed more from her and less from Foucault.