Abstract
At a time when even those sympathetic to the women’s movement asserted rigid notions of sexual difference, if only to deflate conservative fears about the sexual anarchy that would follow in the wake of women’s political emancipation, feminists challenged the biological and psychological premise on which the sex/gender equation was based. While in the motto to this chapter women’s claim to citizenship is linked to their inalterable difference from men, New Woman writers, arguing for women’s rights on the grounds of their essential sameness, suggested in their cross-dressing narratives that women could, in fact, become men.
[I]t must never be forgotten that the differences which nature has fixed between the sexes are insuperable … The protectors of ‘true womanhood’ insist on these differences; but the insurgents ought to insist on them too. It is not only useless, it is suicidal to deny them … The perpetual… unassailable differences, organic and functional, biological and psychological, between men and women are just the safeguard which may enable men without scruple and apprehension to make women their political peers. Women may safely be relieved from political disabilities simply because they can never become men.
J. B. Bury, ‘The Insurrection of Women’ (1892)1
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Notes
Estelle C. Jelinek, ‘Disguise Autobiographies: Women Masquerading as Men’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 10 (1987), 53–62
David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 197–200.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, in Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 124.
Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women From Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 109–14.
Eveline Kilian, ‘New Women und modern girls: Weiblichkeitsentwürfe und Geschlechterdiskurs’, in Christoph Bode and Ulrich Broich (eds), Die Zwanziger Jahre in Großbritannien (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), 122–3.
Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 95–7.
Jann Matlock, ‘Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-dressing, Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion, 1882–1935’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 31–61.
Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature’, in Elizabeth Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 206–7.
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 246.
Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990), 119–20.
Martha Vicinus, ‘Turn-of-the-Century Male Impersonation: Rewriting the Romance Plot’, in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), 187.
Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’ (1874), in Katharina Rowold (ed.), Gender & Science: Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 38
Cited in Ellis Ethelmer, ‘Feminism’, Westminster Review, 149 (1898), 54.
Amy Bulley, ‘The Political Evolution of Women’, Westminster Review, 134 (1890), 7.
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1978), 100–3.
George Egerton to Ernst Foerster, 1 July 1906, in Ernst Foerster, Die Frauenfrage in den Romanen Englischer Schriftstellerinnen der Gegenwart (Marburg: N.G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1907), 46–47
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© 2000 Ann Heilmann
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Heilmann, A. (2000). The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality. In: New Woman Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288355_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288355_5
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