The New Woman

I had occassion today to re-read Virginia Woolf's famous 1924 essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown , in which Woolf boldly proclaimed to the world that sometime around the month of December 1910 that human character underwent a profound change. Relationships had changed as Woolf saw it, those between "masters and servants, husbands and wives [and] parents and children."

The rigid boundaries defining these relationships had collapsed, but other boundaries were also being compromised, those defining religion, politics and even literature. For Woolf, December 1910 saw human character being transformed and for her the virus of change was Modernism and Modernism's carrier was none other than WOMAN.

This new woman had come to infect and take over the pre-existing feminine form of the day. She was a figure representing multiple races and served as the point at which new ways of being, acting, thinking, living and seeing would emerge. Woolf clearly suggests in other novels such as { To the Lighthouse } that this new woman whom she poses in the form of Lily Briscoe, did not seek knowledge. Rather, she was more interested in unity.

I wondered while reading the essay today if this woman is still in existence today in whole or in part or whether another type of feminine form has completely replaced her. My own answer to the self-posed question is that the woman of 1910, albeit more independent than her former peers has long been pushed to the curb.

Today we see a new kind of woman. I am one of these; one, more endowed with a strong sense of self, more demanding of her rights, more outspoken, more prone to defiance when told to follow the norm in order to follow what works for her, more angry and frustrated perhaps, but one who seeks to forge a life out for herself on her own terms.

This new woman operates in the post-modernist sense. She accepts that differences are a part of life and that to fight it would ruin her. This new woman has toppled the one whom Virginia Woolf saw emerge in 1910. She understands that the shadow of the past still lingers where it concerns race and gender; that which tries to seperate her from her peers and that which keeps on trying to place her in a subordinate position to men Today, this woman is the dominant feminine form for she has learned through a long hard struggle to embrace and I daresay, promote difference.