The new woman: from eminism to theater

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While being essentially fiction, in many ways the new woman did exist in the 180s and 100s. She is a product of the accelerating woman's movement, a forerunner to the sufragette. The new woman was first named, it is claimed, by the radical novelist, Sarah Grand, in the North American Review in May 184. Thereafter and with great rapidity the new woman was dissected in the pages of other reviews, spawned a genre of novels and was much discussed in ladies' magazines. She was to be found on stage in the plays of among others Sydney Grundy, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Harley Granville Barker and George Bernard Shaw.

Before dealing with the fictional dimension of the new woman in the theater of Shaw particularly in Mrs Warren's Profession a brief history of the movement for the emancipation of women in England until the end of the 1th century is given.

Feminism

Troughout the 18th century, after the industrial revolution in England, the English society had radically transformed and the woman, as usual the weakest part of it, had suffered the consequences of this transformation more than anyone else. Cheap Custom Essays on the new woman: from eminism to theater

As long as there was a mainly agricultural society, in which the woman helped the husband in the fields or in small handicraft activities, she almost enjoyed equality to the man, while in an industrialized society, which causes large masses of farmers move to the town, if the woman stays at home and she is bound to bring up children and care for the family, she ends up depending on her husband's wage, hence being directly subordinated to him.

Gradually women got to realize this new reality; that is why time was ripe for a work like Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was published in 17 and from which we may consider the movement for the emancipation of women to have started.

The author refuses the idea of the woman as symbol of beauty and object of pleasure who, as she ought to be weak and passive, is subject to the man. In contrast with this model which was Rousseau's Wollstonecraft supports a woman who is conscious of herself and her rights in society

Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty

A Vindication aroused much controversy in England, also because it was connected with the radical ideas of the French Revolution, but that didn't prevent the paper to become the manifesto of the feminist movement around the world.

Yet Wollstonecraft's work didn't gain many followers, no feminist association was founded and we have to wait until 185 to find another work which claims for the rights of women and asks for equality to man with the same energy. William Thomson's Appeal of one half of the human race, Women, against the protection of the other half, Men, to retain them in political and thence in civil and domestic slavery; in reply to a paragraph in Mr. Mill's celebrated "Article on Government" is a true appeal for the emancipation of women, which is to be achieved, in the author's opinion, only in a society where the family as a unit apart ceases to exist and the social community takes upon itself the family duties. Like Wollstonecraft's, this essay upset the readers for its radicalism; anyway the image of the good family, in which the woman gladly accepted her role of wife and mother, overcame all attempts at inciting her to revolt. Keeping the middle-class family together was definetely in the political interest of the country

The family was a political unit, a unit of stability and order, a symbol of acquiescence in the hierarchy of authority that rose above it. When the family broke down, as it often did, for instance under the pressures of factory working and extreme poverty, anarchy, a lack of respect towards the institution of the state, and chaos would ensue. [...] It was hoped that the family unit would act as a restraint on working-class discontent. The idea of sanctity encouraged the notion that the family was something private, owned as it were by the members themselves and exclusive of outside forces of course a ludicrously unreal assumption. The idea that the dispossed did in fact have something that was their very own, not their employer's, not the state's, separate from the turmoil on the threatening world outside, appealed to the establishment.

The victorian woman became a model of virtue, she was educated by her mother at home and prepared for the only goal that suited her, i.e. marriage. The man had always been her protector, being her father, brother or husband, and should defend her from the world, from the temptations of the outside, to which she was not and must not be prepared. Evil and sin were outside the family, the woman should realize her ambitions in motherhood, she could not expect anything more, not even love, which seldom was the basis of marriage and would come later, if it ever came! Marriage, as also Shaw puts it, was merely a contract, a financial transaction convenient for both the man and the woman

We all have personal interest in marriage... It is not only the women, who want to get married the men do too, sometimes on sentimental grounds, sometimes on the more sordid calculation that bachelor life is less comfortable and more expensive, since a wife pays for her status with domestic service as well as with the other services expected of her

To the virtuous victorian woman the despotic man was opposed authoritative, strong, often violent

and predator, he was bound to maintain his wife proportionately to the dowry she had brought but not necessarily to give her love, nor physical pleasure at all; sex was not decorous in a wife, it was disgusting indeed. For that purpose he could turn to someone else, hence the spreading plague of prostitution

There was a reluctance to believe that women, apart from prostitutes, could, or should, experience sexual pleasure. Sex was a marital duty, and the strictest view was that it was a duty only to be performed for the purpose of procreation. Thus it was tacitly assumed that a husband could, and even should, go elsewhere rather than impose his desires on his wife too frequently .

Mothers desperately husband-hunting for their daughters, fathers worrying about giving a considerable dowry to each daughter and young men without scruples dissipating their wives' riches showed how that shining and perfect appearance the family was given by the victorian respectability was actually gilt made of hypocrisy which covered the flaws of a now completely changed reality; of an institution, marriage, in which the woman started to feel uneasy and restless.

With women's refusal of the "guardian angel" image and their will of going out and making their own choices in life, feminism in England gained new vigour and new features.

If marriage ceased to be the unique ideal state of life for the woman, she had to provide for her living, she had to go out and find a job. Working as servant or housemaid couldn't be so attracting for young girls looking for an alternative to marriage. So what else? They could teach, become writers, devote themselves to art or theater, but they need to acquire a different preparation and competence to do that; mothers and governesses could no longer be entrusted for the education of the woman. The state should be charged with such responsibility and that was the field where the feminist expectations gained their first victories. In 1848 socialist Frederick Maurice founded in London the Queen's College for Women, for the training of governesses, in 184 the Bedford College and in 1850 the North London Collegiate School, for the future teachers.

The University of London was the first, in 1878, to admit women to its courses and later on in 11 to assign a professorship to a woman.

The victorian age, more than real feminists, is actually rich in women who stand out thanks to their own skills. This kind of woman who fights to assert herself and find a place in those professions so far open to men only, is the best example of new woman emancipated and able to make her way in spite of the juridical limitations that chained her. The Bront' sisters, Harriet Martineau, Mary Gaskell, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Beatrice Webb are but a few who demonstrated that the woman could make it on her own without the protection of a despotic husband, could refuse marriage or quit if it turned out to be a failure.

In 18 the Infants Custody Act passed ( the Court could entrust children under seven years old to the mother in case of separation from the husband), and the Matrimonial Causes Act followed in 1857 ( the woman could apply for a divorce in case of cruelty, desertion or violence. After other amendments, a law passed in 1 which allowed the woman to apply for a divorce in case of adultery of the husband.

The economical dependence on the husband, even when the woman had properties or personal earnings, was overcome in 1870 with the Married Women's Property Act.

Despite these important achievements, still the woman could not take part directly in the public life as she had no right to vote. In 1860 the Society for the Promotion of Women's Suffrage was founded in Manchester and ten years later a bill for the women's suffrage was proposed; it was repeatedly rejected by Gladstone until only in 118 the Representation of the People Act gave the women over 0 the right to vote, while the complete equality to men was achieved in18.

Here are some excerpts from an interview in which Shaw explained his view on the matter

Women should have a revolution they should shoot, kill, maim, destroy until they are given a vote. [...]

The qualification of being human is enough. I would make the conditions exactly the same as for men; it's no use women claiming more than men. [...]

The suffrage is useless except as a means of getting women into Parliament. That is the whole point of the reform. [...]

The only decent government is a government by a body of men and women; but if only one sex must govern, then I should say, let it be women put the men out! [...]

Birth control was another battle field for the feminist claims there was a wide-spreading idea in the middle-class families that it would be better to limit the number of children; maternity was no longer accepted as a blessing, large families were no longer a model, they went out of fashion, so to say. The woman got gradually to realize that love and sex didn't mean necessary procreation, this helping debunk the myth of marriage and love between husband and wife.

Even female clothes underwent a radical transformation the crinoline gave its place to more practical and simple clothes. If the woman should work, play sports, ride a bike, she needed proper clothes and so she began even to wear trousers

During the movement for the liberal education of women and their admission to the professions... the followers of John Stuart Mill and Henry Fawcett cut their hair short; put on men's stiff collars and cravats; wore waistcoats and shirtfronts and watch-chains; and made themselves mannish above the waist whilst remaining quakerisk below it. There was no sense in this, as women were much more sensibly and pleasantly dressed than men in these parts... Still it was inevitable that the movement should begin women insisting on doing everything that men did.

John Stuart Mill published in 186 what can be considered one of the most fundamental works dealing with the vindication of the civil rights of women, The Subjection of Women. According to him, the so-called civil society is based on a despicable principle, i.e. the dependence of the woman on the man, which derives only from the law of the strongest. The man is keeping the woman in a state of subordination because he is afraid of her potentialities

The generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal [...] were it not for that, I think that almost everyone, in the exisisting state of opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations, and from almost all high functions.

In order to go on mastering the woman, the man moulds her through education, in this being helped by society, so that marriage does look like the only possible state of life. Education is also responsible for the emotional and physical weakness of the woman, but Mill tries to disprove all claims of women's inferiority by resorting to the scientific, physiological and psychological theories of the time. There can be no human improvement, he says, without equality between the two sexes.

In the second half of the 1th century the position of the woman at least of the middle-class woman was slowly, and not without difficulty, changing, despite the victorian bigotry which aimed at suffocatig any attempt of emancipation seen as subversive and dangerous for the familiar and hence political stability.

Shaw and the new women Mrs Warren's Profession

Shaw came to the socialism of the Fabian Society through the reading of Marx and he was getting more and more convinced that the woman should be all the way considered juridically equal to the man; he had the courage to defend women's rights in essays, interviews, public debates, sometimes with vehemence and rigour, sometimes with irony and sarcasm, even pretending to wonder at the existence of feminism and its issues why does it exist since men and women are the same? Why can the same rights be denied to them, since the duties are the same?

Through his theater he embodied his ideas in characters that found the way to reach the audience and the readers. The new woman ( called also unwomanly woman) is protagonist in the unpleasant and pleasant plays written between 1885 and 188 Mrs Warren's Profession belongs to the first group along with Widower's Houses and The Philanderer.

The two protagonists of the play are two female characters, Mrs Warren and his daughter Vivie. They are quite similar authoritarian, firm and decided in their choices and are put on a level by the author.

Vivie had the opportunity to study at the university and so she is to succeed in the profession she has chosen, while Kitty was an adolescent in a completely different age which didn't provide her any means of education and culture. Yet she got to succeed all the same, but in the only profession that society had allowed her a pretty but poor girl to take up.

Bearing in mind Shaw's opinion on prostitution, which he never condemns from a moral point of view, on an individual level, but only as a social evil, Kitty Warren might be considered a new woman because she has refused the compromise of marriage, she has chosen maternity anyway, she has brought up her daughter all by herself, she managed very well her savings and she hasn't become a pimp's slave like most prostitutes. For her the role of prostitute is not so different from the role of wife a wife sells herself too, she is exploited by her husband. She has become independent to the detriment of her honesty, but she is not to blame in the end society could offer her just two alternatives, marriage and prostitution, and she has chosen the latter.

The descriptions of the two women Shaw gives us in the text, underline the generation gap between them, especially in their appearance

Mrs Warren is between 40 and 50, showily dressed in a brilliant hat and a gay blouse fitting tightly over her bust and flacked by fashionable sleeves. Rather spoilt and domineering, and decidedly vulgar, but, on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old backguard of a woman.

[Vivie] is an attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman. Age . Prompt, strong, confident, self-possessed. Plain business-like dress, but no downy. She wears a chatelaine at her belt, with a fountain pen and a proper knife among its pendants.

Vivie perfectly embodies the stereotype of the new woman, whose features were being standardized at the end of the 1th century young, middle-class and single on principle, the new woman rejected the fripperies of fashion in favour of more masculine dress and severe coiffure. She had been educated to a standard unknown to previous generations of women and she was given to reading "advanced" books. She was financially independent of father or husband, often through earning her own living in one of the careers opening up to women at the time, like journalism and teaching. She affected emancipated habits, like smoking, riding a bicycle, using a bold language and taking the omnibus or train unescorted. She was prepared to overturn all conventions and all accepted notions of femininity.

At first Vivie rebels and morally refuses her mother's past and present, but then her common sense prevails and she ends up admitting that, if she had been in the same circumstances, she would have done like her aunt Lizzie did, thus actually justifying her mother. What she rejects is the substantial conventionality, the apparent respectability with wich Kitty has covered the life she really lived.

Mother and daughter part at the end of the play, not because Vivie hates her, but because she has to walk her own way, just like Kitty likely had done when she had left her family to have her own life.

Vivie is rigid and detached, she lacks sensibility and gentleness. She is proud of living her own life with no compromise, yet it was the compromise in which her mother had always lived that provided her such favourable conditions, so different from her mother's. But Vivie never admits it.

Kitty is more humane, she has doubts, uncertainties, she believes she can do wrong and ackowledges her mistakes. Kitty is not a character that walks out of the stage defeated after her daughter's abandon she gets back with dignity to the loneliness of any other prostitute who is tolerated but banned by society, who is exploited but never taken into account, because society prefers to keep her in a state of total dependence on man.

We are nevertheless asked to sympathise equally with both character Shaw's admiration for Vivie rings out clearly throughout the play, even though it sometimes turns into caricature

I like working and getting paid for it. When I'm tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a little whisky, and a novel with a good detective story in it.

says Vivie to Frank Gardner, whose comment on her smoking habit underlines the humourous picture of Vivie

Nasty womanly habit. Nice men dont do it any longer.

Vivie is the young person who is disillusioned and educated in the economic ways of the world. Mrs Warren's revelation of her past life represents the first stage of this education, at which Vivie at last gives her mother all her admiration and respect. But knowing that the "business" is still going on is a different matter. Crofts' revelation leaves her morally beggared and actually makes her flee to "Honoria Fraser's chambers, 67 Chancery Lane, for the rest of my life".

The Vivie we see at the end of the play can still not bring herself to name her mother's trade. What is for Praed the romantic suggestiveness of Europe "the gaiety, the vivacity, the happy air of Brussels" can only be a horrific reminder to Vivie of what she wants to forget. But Shaw refuses to see Vivie's deliberate refusal of any attachment being that friend, lover or mother in negative terms. A life-time actuarial accountancy is not to be viewed as self-denying, but what a modern woman actually wants, as pointed out in the first act. Therefore in the final act Vivie is merely going about her business. We are supposed once again to admire her lack of conventional womanliness and her dedication to purposeful activity.

Bibliografia

Calder, Jenni, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, London, Thames and Hudson, 176.

Churton, Brady Maud, "G.B. Shaw and a Suffragist" in The Tribune, Monday, March 1, 106.

Corrado, Adriana, Il femminismo nelle prime commedie di George Bernard Shaw, Liguori Editore, 178.

Grene, Nicholas, Bernard Shaw A critical view, London, Macmillan, 184.

Morgan, Margery M., The Shavian Playground, London, Methuen, 17.

Shaw, G.B., "Preface" to Getting Married in The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw, London, Paul Hamlyn, 165.

Shaw, G.B., "Women since 1860" in Time and Tide, I (October 8, 10)

Stuart, Mill John, "The Subjection of Women" in Three Essays, London, O.U.P.,175.

The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, edited by Christopher Innes, Cambridge University Press, 18.

Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London, Penguin, 175.

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