The New Woman and Changing Social Roles
Writer Henry James popularized the term "New Woman", a figure who was represented in the heroines of his novels, such as Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, and Daisy Miller in the novella Daisy Miller. According to historian Ruth Bordin, the term New Woman was
intended by him to characterize American expatriates living in Europe: women of affluence and sensitivity, who despite or perhaps because of their wealth exhibited an independent spirit and were accustomed to acting on their own. The term New Woman always referred to women who exercised control over their own lives be it personal, social, or economic.Read more about this topic: New Woman
Famous quotes containing the words woman, changing, social and/or roles:
“Take a woman talking,
purging herself with rhymes,
drumming words out like a typewriter,
planting words in you like grass seed.
You’ll move off.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“There is a striking dichotomy between the behavior of many women in their lives at work and in their lives as mothers. Many of the same women who are battling stereotypes on the job, who are up against unspoken assumptions about the roles of men and women, seem to accept—and in their acceptance seem to reinforce—these roles at home with both their sons and their daughters.”
—Ellen Lewis (20th century)