| At the turn of the twentieth century, the "woman question." or the constellation of social and ideological problems surrounding the changing status of American women, was one of the great public issues of its day. This dissertation uses a series of key flashpoints in the debate surrounding the woman question to chart the reconceptualization of sexual difference and emergence of a modern gender order in the early twentieth-century United States. The appearance of the "New Woman" in this era signaled the collapse of older spatial barriers between the sexes, especially the demise of the traditionally male realms of paid labor and politics, and the breakdown of sexed divisions in Americans' public roles and private identities. The implications of this decline were far-reaching. The Victorian doctrine of "separate spheres" was more than the ideological foundation of sexual difference; it also formed a bedrock component of male independent proprietorship, domestic sanctuary, and political agency. The waning of that doctrine thus disrupted not only prevailing ideals of maleness and femaleness, but also the symbolic binaries of home and market, idle and productive, and private and public.; To her admirers, the modern woman was an embodiment of autonomy and independence. To her detractors, she represented the peril of woman "unsexed"---the loss of femininity and its attendant virtues of motherhood, domesticity, and morality. This study explores the debates of social critics, policymakers, journalists, intellectuals, reformers, feminists, and jurists who grappled with the identity and practices of the "New Woman," and, in the process, probed the measure and meaning of the differences between men and women. The project draws equally upon the viewpoints of established thinkers, middlebrow essayists who have since faded in importance, and popular scribes in order to sketch the broad contours of a social problem that was discussed as frequently in university halls and at professional conventions as it was in the pages of newspapers and fashionable monthlies. As they debated transformations in the meaning of work, marriage, and citizenship, these observers reconceptualized gendered social roles and sexual difference apart from the regime of separate spheres. |
