The New Woman Network: Visualizing the Discursive Development of a Feminist Ideal

Graduate Paper, Digital Humanities Forum 2014: Nodes & Networks in the Humanities. University of Kansas. September 13, 2014: http://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2014/ Hannah Jacobs isat King’s College, London.“‘The woman’s movement of this age is the most momentous event that has ever disturbed the sleep of the conservative,’” The Woman’s Herald quotes of a Mr. Ham speaking at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, “‘Without warning woman suddenly appears on the scene of man’s activities, as a sort of new creation, and demands a share in the struggles, the responsibilities, and the honours of the world.’” (1893, pg. 410) This “New Woman,” as she came to be known first in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), became a hotly debated topic in 1890s periodicals. (Bland, 1995, p. 144, fn. 64) The New Woman’s rise to prominence among the various discussions regarding women at the fin de siècle can be attributed largely to articles such as that in The Woman’s Herald and essays appearing in contemporary magazines. It is in these articles and essays, published throughout the British Empire and across the United States, that definitions of the New Woman are most directly constructed and disputed. Examination and comparison of these writings using digital methods grounded in traditional humanities scholarship reveals not only the term’s multiplicity of meanings but also the discursive network that can be traced through its various interpretations. Influenced by the periodicals in which the writings were published, the locations of those periodicals’ publications and audiences, the dates when the writings were published, and the writers who created them, this network is most manifest in the words used to define the New Woman. Indeed, the words themselves in their frequency or aberrance, their physical syntactical relationship to the term “New Woman”, provide evidence both of the existence of such a network and of the network’s structure as characterized by the term’s change over time, across space, and between publications. This project investigates the New Woman network using text analysis and offers strategies for studying such a discursive network through information visualizations. These conceptualizations facilitate analyses of the various New Woman definitions and their connections to one another by presenting a visual narrative of how this web of ideas formed and functioned. A variety of formats, including maps, timelines, and graphs, allows readers to see both the overall narrative arc and particular episodes that demonstrate the New Woman’s evolution through the words used to describe her and the contexts in which they appear. The underlying question this project examines, “Who is the New Woman?”, is one of historical, sociological, and literary significance that has been studied by a number of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholars. Yet this study sheds new light on the New Woman as debated in journalism by regarding it as a continually changing term whose variations are connected through a network that can be effectively discerned through visualizations. This paper draws on this student’s research being conducted for her 2014 Master of Arts in Digital Humanities dissertation. Bibliography; Anon (1893) Social Standing of the ‘New Woman’. The Woman’s Herald (26) p.410.; Bland, L. (1995) Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885-1914. London: Penguin Books