Drawing on the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman, this book examines women writers who struggled with conservative, patriarchal ideologies of motherhood in novels, periodicals and life writings of the long modernist period. It shows how these writers challenged, resisted, adapted and negotiated traditional ideas with their own versions of new motherhood, with needs for identities and experiences beyond maternity. Tracing the period from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth, this study explores how some of the numerous elements and forces we identify with modernism are manifested in equally diverse and often competing representations of mothers, mothering and motherhood. It investigates how historical personages and fictional protagonists used and were constructed within textual spaces where they engaged critically with the maternal as institution, identity and practice, from perspectives informed by gender, sexuality, nationhood, race and class. The matrifocal literatures examined in this book exemplify how feminist motherhoods feature as a prominent thematic of the long modernist era and how rebellious New Woman mothers provocatively wrote maternity into text and history.
Author(s): Elizabeth Podnieks
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 336
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: The “Persistent Rebels” of Maternal Modernism
Introduction: Framing Modernist Motherhood
The New Woman and New Modernism
Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2: The New Woman, New Modernisms, and New Motherhoods
Introduction: Modernist and Maternal Scholarship
The True Woman, Republican Mother, and Race Mother
The New Woman: Names and Narratives
The Woman Movement, Feminism, and Maternalism
Birth Control, Eugenics, and Imperial Motherhood
Chapter 3: Mothers in New Woman Fiction: Mapping “the Terra Incognita of Herself”
Introduction: Epochs of the Vanguard
New Modernism and “New” Realism
Mother-Problem Novels
Wild Women
The Daughters of Danaus
Gallia
The Awakening
The Mother’s Recompense
The Home-Maker
Quicksand
Conclusion: Bad Mothers of Modernism
Chapter 4: “The ‘Momentousness’ of Motherhood”: Maternal Discourses and Debates in The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review and The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review
Introduction: Bondwomen Versus Freewomen
Maternal Manifestoes
New Women, New Periodical Studies, and New Modernism
Talking the Talk: Modernist Salons
Public and Counter-public Spheres, Discourses, and Intimacies
The Freewoman: Feminism and the Endowment of Motherhood
Endowment: Attacks and Counter-attacks
Maternal Collaboration and Co-operatives
Individualism and Motherhood
Marriage, Motherhood, and Reproductive Agency
Conclusion
Chapter 5: “The Title Role of ‘Mother’”: Silent-Film Stardom and Celebrity Maternity in Photoplay Magazine
Introduction: “The World’s Greatest Motion Picture Publication”
The New Woman and New Journalism
Popular Modernisms
Between the High and the Low
Fandom and Feminism
Marketing Women’s Lives
Role Mothers
Alice Joyce
Billie Burke
Mae Marsh
Florence Vidor
Alice Brady and Catherine Calvert
Belle Bennett
Barbara La Marr
Gloria Swanson
Conclusion
Chapter 6: “Freedom and Childbearing”: Prams, Politics, and Literary Life in New Woman Autobiographies of the Interwar Era
Introduction: Mothers on the National Arena
Auto/biographies of Relational Motherhood
The Personal, the Political, and the Collective
Women’s Autobiographical Traditions
Interwar Work, Motherhood, and Modernism
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Ida B. Wells
Storm Jameson
Naomi Mitchison
Vera Brittain
Conclusion
Chapter 7: “A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives
Introduction: A Hybrid Trilogy
Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Periodization
Modernism and the Social Sciences
Black Feminism and the Institution of Black Motherhood
Traditions of African Women’s Writing
The New Woman Künstlerroman
Second Class Citizen
In the Ditch
Head Above Water: An Autobiography
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Coda: New Womanism in the Twenty-First Century
Opposing Camps
Leaning Out and Opting In
Media, Myths, and Fantasies
New Matrifocal Genres
Childfree by Choice and Maternal Regret
Continuing Crusades
Bibliography
Index
