Abstract
Many scholars argue that the New Woman was ‘manufactured’ through changes in property laws and economic practice and through reading and educational reform. This essay complicates this equation by arguing that the rise of physical fitness in the nineteenth-century school curriculum for women and the resulting engagement in physical exercise and athletics also transformed women’s personalities.1 The New Woman was not ‘manufactured’ in the library or at the suffrage meeting; her beginnings were in the gym. This proposition may seem revolutionary or even contradictory to a traditional understanding of the New Woman, yet many women novelists of the fin de siècle knew better.
“I am going to inspect one of the places where they manufacture new women, and I can take you too, if you like.”
“Is it a Women’s Suffrage Meeting, or what?” “No, it’s a field-day at a girls’ gymnasium.”
George Paston [Emily Morse Symonds], The Career of Candida (1897, 91)
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Works cited
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© 2012 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Collins, T.J.R. (2012). Athletic Bodies Narrated: New Women in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction. In: Gavin, A.E., de la L. Oulton, C.W. (eds) Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354265_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354265_16
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