Gender, Technology and the New Woman

ISBN-13: 9781474416269 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 232 str.

Lena Wanggren

Opis

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siecle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the 'crisis in gender' or 'sexual anarchy' of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. The New Woman in Technological Modernity; 2. Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle; 3. The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle; 4. Medical New Women I: Nurses; 5. Medical New Women II: Doctors; 6. Technologies of Detection; Conclusion.