The Social Sex by Yalom Marilyn & Brown Theresa Donovan

Author:Yalom, Marilyn & Brown, Theresa Donovan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

COLLEGE GIRLS, CITY GIRLS, AND THE NEW WOMAN

“The Hull-House Woman’s Club was one of Jane Addams’s favorite endeavors. It brought together women from all over the world. Once a week the women could leave their dreary homes and commune with other women and enjoy the hospitality of a cup of tea and a piece of cake.”

—HILDA SATT POLACHECK, I CAME A STRANGER: THE STORY OF A HULL-HOUSE GIRL (EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY)

“Neither of us had ever known any pleasure quite equal to the joy of coming home at the end of the day after a series of separate varied experiences, and each recounting those incidents to the other over late biscuits and tea.”

—VERA BRITTAIN, TESTAMENT OF FRIENDSHIP, 1940

GODEY’S LADY’S BOOK—THE FOREMOST AMERICAN journal for women during much of the nineteenth century—ceased publishing in 1878, and attempts to resuscitate it by steadfast supporters were unsuccessful. Its prescriptions for feminine purity, self-sacrifice, modesty, and dependence were no longer attractive to the “New Woman,” who had been shaped by higher education, employment, city living, and relative freedom. Although most women still looked to marriage and motherhood for their chief occupations in life, a new breed of restless women was bent on enlarging the scope of their pursuits, and consequently changed their friendship patterns. Whereas girls and women had once looked to their sisters, cousins, and immediate neighbors for their closest friends, the New Woman would find hers among schoolmates and college chums, in women’s clubs, at the workplace, and in urban environments often far from their hometowns.

The New Woman was both a European and an American phenomenon. She was to be found in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and Moscow as well as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. She was characteristically young, well educated, high spirited, dynamic, competent, and daring. As pictured in the many images drawn by Charles Dana Gibson for Life magazine during the 1890s, she was likely to be attired in a high-collared white shirtwaist tucked into a dark, comfortable skirt that stopped at the ankles. Advertisements, magazines, and posters promoted the image of the New Woman, just as other forms of mass media would later exhibit images of the flapper, the housewife, the wartime worker, and the androgynous feminist. The bicycle was the symbol of the New Woman’s freedom outside the home, as she raced off with her friends—men or women—down city streets and into the countryside. However limited in actual numbers, the image of the New Woman set the tone for and affected the lives of countless American women.

There is no doubt that increased opportunities for education contributed to the formation of the New Woman. She and her college friends were among the first and second generations of American women to reap the benefits of changes that had taken place during the nineteenth century, when colleges and universities, originally restricted to male students, began to admit women—Oberlin as early as 1837. While traditional colleges in the East remained exclusively for men, many new colleges and universities in the Midwest and West began as coeducational institutions or eventually became coed.

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