Wednesday, March 26

Discussed in class on Wednesday, March 28 was the New Woman.  The new woman was an idea or social construct that society used to describe the emerging new women.  Education was very important to distinguishing the new woman.  As we know in the past woman, men of color, and people depending on their religious affiliation did not always receive the best education.  By the turn of the twentieth century women in large numbers were earning the right to go to college, although lets be clear women of affluent means were able to attend and study in universities.  Even some were able earn degrees in medicine, law, and education though these numbers were small and were limited to women only working with women.
The new women also strove for greater understanding in the private sphere, namely understanding their role as wife and mother.  Many questioned whether it was right to get married so young and thrown into bed that first night at the mercy of a licentious, sex-starved husband whom you hoped would be gentle.  Many women wanted to discuss the female anatomy in greater depth.  It was discussed in a later reader that a girl when she got her period thought that she was dying because no one had told her of the changes that occur in her body. 
 Divorce law also changed during the late nineteenth, early twentieth century and gave rise to a new woman who could survive a divorce with her economic independence intact, and an increasing number of divorced women were also allowed to remarry without incurring the discrimination that might have previously been attached to the women in question and they could maintain social respectability while exercising legal rights, some of the time but not always.
Does this term, the new women suddenly mean that women as a whole were free of the restraints that men had worked hard place on them?  By all means no, the new women was biased in that it really only applied to women of means with liberal minded ideals.  And as there was not a really good defined middle class at this time I would argue that women of the lower classes were wholly ignorant of the growing ideals of this new idea of women-hood.  Mostly because they didn't have time, money, or energy to confront the bias of the male dominated colleges, to demand that their mother's explain more to them in terms of the expectations of marriage and mother-hood, or to go against the very husband's that support them financially because they lack the skills to support themselves.