The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935

ISBN-13: 9780252026270 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 224 str.

Laura L. Behling

Opis

The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 examines how the suffrage movement's efforts to secure social and political independence for women were translated by a fearful society into a movement of unnatural masculinized women and dangerous female sexual inverts. Scrutinizing depictions of the masculine woman in literature and the popular press, Laura L. Behling explicates the literary, artistic, and rhetorical strategies used to eliminate the sexually inverted woman: punishing her by imprisonment or death; rescuing her into heterosexuality; subverting her through parody; or removing her from society to some remote or mystical place. Behling also shows how fictional same-sex relationships in the writings of Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Stein, and others conformed to and ultimately reaffirmed heterosexual models. The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 demonstrates that the women's suffrage movement did not so much suggest alternatives to women's gender and sexual behavior as it offered men and women afraid of perceived changes a tangible movement on which to blame their fears. the media, this study shows how, though legally enfranchised, the new woman was systematically disfranchised socially through scientific theory, popular press illustrations, and fictional predictions of impending socio-biological disaster.