Realism and the New Woman

Even prior to the public circulation of the term New Woman in the early 1890s,
American literary realism both reflected and shaped cultural conversations
about women who did not fit the mold of traditional expectations for their gender.
For example, a sub-category of important realist works in the 1870s and
1880s, including William Dean Howells’s second novel A Chance Acquaintance
(1873) and Henry James’s first popular success, “Daisy Miller” (1878), as well
as his masterpiece of three years later, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), treated the
post-Civil War phenomenon of the so-called new “American girl.” The term
referred to middle- and upper-class white female adolescents reputed to be
bolder, more iconoclastic, and more resistant to overly rigid restrictions than
girls of the antebellum period had been, albeit just as scrupulously chaste in
mind and body. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 5, female local-color writers
such as Rose Terry Cook and Mary Wilkins Freeman featured rural women,
often unmarried and often middle-aged or older, struggling to carve out at
least relatively independent lives, typically in the face of opposition or scorn
by male authority figures. From the 1880s onward, realist works also depicted
middle-class women choosing professional careers over traditional domesticity.
For example, regionalist writer Sarah Orne Jewett’s character Nan Prince
in her 1884 novel A Country Doctor eschews marriage in order to continue her
father’s work as a physician in a rural neighborhood, while the ambitious illustrator
Alma Leighton of Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) announces
to her disconcerted mother that she will probably choose not to marry: “I’m
wedded to my Art, and I’m not going to commit bigamy, whatever I do” (211).
Alma later adds that if she ever does get married she will “pick and choose, as
a man does” and not “merely be picked and chosen” (477).
The prospect of a woman picking and choosing a mate raises the possibility€–
or specter€– of female sexual autonomy. In doing so, it hints at an area of
life that Howells saw as too dangerous for American novelists, even realist writers,
to explore in any but the most delicate, indirect fashion.